Faith, Work & Rest - Learning to work and rest as God does

Here are two questions for you:

Firstly – does God care about what you do from Monday to Saturday, or is he only interested in what you do on Sundays?

And if he does care, what does it mean for us to involve him in ordinary everyday life? What does it mean to allow the Bible story to shape our everyday stories? What does it mean to ‘apply the gospel’ to our work – whether our work is voluntary or paid, highly skilled or repetitive; whether we are working in an office crunching numbers, on the road trying to make sales, in a field with cows, at home with children or at university/school learning different subjects.

Secondly – does God care about your rest and how you unwind, refresh and recharge?

And if he does, what does it mean to ‘obey the Sabbath’ as new covenant believers? What does it mean to ‘switch off’ – not just from our work, but from our devices and relentless activity and pull of the world. And deeper still – to learn how to switch off from the relentless busyness in our hearts and minds too. Are there ‘resources in the gospel’ to help us with this?

Thank God it’s Monday

Over 25 years ago Mark Greene in his book Thank God it’s Monday wrote something that I still think is largely true:

The impact of Christians effectively robbing their work of spiritual and ministry value is to produce a sense of guilt. The working Christian comes home at the end of a fifty-hour week and thinks “I haven’t done any evangelism. I haven’t done any ministry. I’m not serving God. I must make time outside of work to do all these things.” The result can simply be exhaustion and discouragement. Exhaustion because too much is being attempted, discouragement because there is a sneaking suspicion that the thing we spend thirty, forty, fifty hours a week doing is of no intrinsic value to God.

For many his words ring true. We spend a large proportion of our time working and yet few of us have a vision for how our work is part of our calling as Christians (as humans in fact!) – a way to worship God, serve our neighbour and find deep personal joy.

What has certainly changed since Greene wrote those words is the increase in burnout and our culture’s inability to rest in a (now) ever-connected and digitally saturated world where the lines between work and rest are more blurred than ever before. Many people don’t know how to rest and therefore feel they are always running on empty. What would it mean to rest well, so we can work well?

The sacred-secular divide

One of the greatest failures of the church is to create a divide between the sacred and secular; that is to mark off church activities as sacred (prayer, Bible reading, Sunday attendance etc) and certain activities as secular (work, sport, music, sex, money etc). This then creates a second and equally devastating failure that also plagues the church, which is that those who lead the sacred activities (priests, pastors) are seen to be more spiritual and noble than those who lead the secular activities (bankers, politicians, CEOs and entertainers).

The Biblical view stands in utter contrast to these two failures. The Biblical writers saw all of life as lived in relationship with God and that all of life is part of our worship and offering to God. Everything is spiritual (Colossians 1:24). Everything is an act of worship (Romans 12:1). Therefore there is no hierarchy within the church in terms of who is doing ‘the important jobs’ – we’re all priests serving God (1 Peter 2:9).

Seven week sermon series

To help us think through how our work connects with God’s work, and to understand how the story of the whole Bible can connect with our everyday story, we’re going to spend seven weeks looking at the topic of faith, work & rest.

25th May: Creation part 1 – The goodness of work (Genesis 1:26-27 and 2:1-3, 15)
We’ll explore God’s original intention in our work – that we are to image God who himself is a worker; and how this gives work dignity and purpose.

1st June: Creation part 2 – The goodness of rest (Genesis 2:1-3 and Exodus 20:8-11)
We’ll explore the importance of establishing patterns of resting from our work and how we are to ‘work from a position of rest’, rather than work until we need to rest.

8th June: The Fall – The brokenness of work (Genesis 3:16-19, Ecclesiastes 2:17, Genesis 11:2-4 and Exodus 20:3-4, 17)
We’ll explore how our sin and the curse God put on our world means that work is so often fruitless, pointless, selfish and gruelling, and how to respond to this.

15th June: Redemption part 1 – The gospel and our work (Colossians 3:16-17 and 4:22-42)
We’ll explore how the gospel gives us a new identity, a new concept and new moral compass for our work.

22nd June: Redemption part 2 – The gospel and our rest (Hebrews 4:1-13, Matthew 11:28-30)
We’ll explore how Jesus brings true rest to our souls as we rest from the exhausting work of self-justification.

29th June: Redemption part 3 – Evangelism in our workplaces (Matthew 5:13-16, 1 Peter 2:9-12, 3:15 and Titus 2:9-10)
We’ll explore how we are to make “the teaching about God our Saviour attractive” (Titus 2:10) in our work.

6th July: Consummation – Hope for our work and rest (Romans 8:18-25, Revelation 21:1-5)
We’ll explore how our future hope for a just and fruitful world of work, and the final resting place for our souls, gives us the motivation and perspective we need in our work and rest now.

Extra Resources

The source material for the sermon series will be Every Good Endeavour by Tim Keller – we encourage you to buy a copy and read it alongside the sermon series and city group discussions. Here are a few others: