My background in becoming an aerospace engineer coupled with my early involvement in a solid Bible-believing church right out of college created a tension I spent several decades trying to reconcile. What does having Christ as the Lord of all of my life, as I learned in church, have to do with the daily grind of building complex aerospace products?
In your case, you might be keeping an office organized, accounts efficiently managed, juggling day jobs with night jobs to make ends meet, laboring as a stay-at-home parent, or closing a large deal as a managing partner in a private equity firm.
I knew that, as a believer, part of the answer needed to include loving my non-Christian co-workers or those I encountered during the day. However, that’s not what, as an aerospace engineer, I was being paid to do or able to do the vast majority of my days. Was I only there as some subversive exercise on God’s part to evangelize and care for the people I had contact with or was aerospace engineering itself somehow also following God?
Whatever we think about our work, the fact remains that it will continue to take up half or more of the waking hours of our adult lives. Annie Dillard once poignantly said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Because our life’s work is such a big part of our lives, many of us fear our lives will one day become something empty or disconnected from what’s important in life. We often think that following Christ faithfully is more of an extra-curricular activity we’re trying to squeeze in on weekends, small groups, Bible studies, serving at church, doing daily devotions, volunteering at some charitable work in our city, getting the chance to share our faith with a co-worker, or even going on a missions trip.
“What is it that relates what we are doing with our work lives directly to living in and for the Kingdom of God as Jesus commanded? Just how does God respond to our deepest questions about work?”
Please understand that all the things I just listed are good, biblical, and essential for the church's work and for us personally; they all deserve our support and involvement. But what about the rest of our lives?
In fact, the place where we see our faith regularly interacting with the actual work we do usually boils down to only our ethical conduct. It’s common for me to hear fellow believers say, “it only matters how you do your work and not what kind of work you do.” If this were true, the very essence of our life’s “work” might be largely unaddressed throughout our lives with God.
What is it that relates what we are doing with our work lives directly to living in and for the Kingdom of God as Jesus commanded? Just how does God respond to our deepest questions about work?
First - God Presents Himself as a Worker (and he gives us a template for the nature of our work)
Read Gen. 1:26-2:3
[26] Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” [27] So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. [28] And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” … [31] And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. [2:1] Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. [2] And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. [3] So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.
Think about the nature of God’s “work” during his week of creation:
God Creates – God makes stuff; he created something new and unique every day with mankind as the capstone of his creation story created in his very image
God Provides – he is life-giving through providing the light to see by and to warm the earth, air to breathe, food to eat, water for fish
God Relates – he made Adam and Eve to partner with him and each other in his work
God Rules – exercise authority over; sets boundaries, places the birds in skies, fish in oceans, establishes days of rest
God Declares the “Good,” the “Very Good,” and the “Not Good”
Mankind, being created in “God’s image,” should be expected to, in some ways, look and act like him. We should naturally, in some sense, be creators in that we “make stuff” too and we also give something unique to this world through our gifts and personalities. We are providers in how we provide and care for each other and God’s creation. We are relational in the collaboration of our work with God and others to help us fulfill God’s design in our communities. We are rulers as we exercise God-given authority and dominion over the earth’s resources to harness them for God’s purposes and priorities.
We declare the “good” and the “very good” (we seek to make our work “good” and improve it as we go, trying to make better and more complete versions of whatever we do. And we set boundaries on what is “not good” on those things outside of and harmful to God’s design. It’s a great exercise to consider our work with a list like this describing God’s work and discover the ways we similarly do work as a reflection of how God works.
“Giving expression to each of these aspects fulfills our living out God’s image as it is uniquely expressed in us.”
Giving expression to each of these aspects fulfills our living out God’s image as it is uniquely expressed in us.
Where I worked in the aerospace industry, engineers created productive things like satellite TV, GPS, which enables Google Maps and a million other things we depend on, and weather satellites. My experience as a manager also included many opportunities for creative work such as providing professional guidance, serving on technical review panels and doing organizational development. We can all work in ways that reflect how God works, bringing creativity, provision, relationships, levels of rule and influence, fruitful labor directed towards good ends, and boundaries set on the wrongs we find.
So if God is a worker, and he is, then our work must inherently matter to him.
Steve is the Executive Director here at the Center for Faith + Work Los Angeles and leads the vision and overall ministry. Prior to this position, Steve was as an aerospace executive at The Boeing Company after 36 years of service.