Work is a significant part of our lives. If you have a full time job, you probably spend the majority of your waking hours during the week working. You may spend more time with your co-workers than your family or friends during the week. Work can be an incredible blessing or it can be a source of great frustration and heartache.
I’ve experienced the ups and downs of work first-hand having spent the last two decades working for large tech companies in Silicon Valley. I’ve had good jobs and bad jobs. Great bosses and awful bosses. Teammates I loved and cross-functional partners I could barely stand.
I’ve had a lot of time to think about work and, specifically, what the Bible says about work. I’ve been married for 15 of the last twenty years and I’ve had kids 14 of those years. In light of that, I’ve really spent a lot of time thinking about how to balance work and family in a way that pleases God. Doing that in Silicon Valley is particularly hard.
Workism
I recently discovered the concept of “workism”and it perfectly describes Silicon Valley. This is a concept coined by the journalist Derek Thompson to describe what he’s seeing in corporate America. He’s not a Christian, so the fact that he’s come to these conclusions about work is particularly striking. Listen to what he describes as Workism:
The belief that work is not only necessary to economic production but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose.
He sees this as a prevalent attitude in younger generations of American workers. Your job doesn’t have to just provide for you—it becomes your identity and the primary source of meaning for your life. Here’s what he attributes this to:
The decline of traditional faith in America has coincided with an explosion of new atheisms…Some people worship beauty, some worship political identities, and others worship their children. But everybody worships something. And workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants.
Derek Thompson, On Work: Meaning, Money, Identity.
From my perspective, workism is rampant in the workplace. This form of idolatry is something we all have to contend with as we seek to balance work and family.
Sometimes the pull of workism is explicit. My friend shared a story about how he was interviewing with a large tech company known for having an intense culture about ten years ago. They extended an offer to him, but before he accepted it, the hiring manager wanted to chat with him. The hiring manager wanted my friend to have a conversation with his wife to let her know that, if he worked for this company, work would always have to come first and she needed to be ok with that. Needless to say, he didn’t accept the offer.
Most of the time the pull of workism it’s more subtle. It starts to impact your thinking, your desires, and emotions invisibly. It reminds me of playing with my kids in the ocean. The tide slowly starts pulling you down the beach without you realizing. All of a sudden, you look up and realize your blanket and all your stuff are way down the beach and you’ve drifted a long way away. If we’re not careful, we can be slowly swept away by the tide of workism.
What is at Stake?
The stakes for us are incredibly high. Look at some of the most successful people in the world: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, and Bill Gates. They’ve amassed great riches and achieved worldly success, but at what cost? They’ve sacrificed their families at the altar of work. While they’re some of the richest men in the world, they’ve left a trail of broken marriages and families in their wake. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, but forfeit his family?
As Christians, it’s imperative for us to have a correct Biblical perspective about work. Right living starts with right thinking. When we understand what the Bible teaches, we can then start applying it to our lives and pursuing wisdom. The Bible teaches that work is a God-given blessing, but due to the corruption of sin, it must be approached with diligence, intentionality, and wisdom to protect your family.
Seeking wisdom and guarding our hearts from sin will keep us from either overworking or underworking. (Laziness or avoidance of work are also not honoring to God and can destroy your family in different ways. However, for the sake of this series, I will be focusing primarily on overworking, as that is endemic to where I live in Silicon Valley.) That’s our only hope for both serving our families and working in a way that is honoring God. That’s the north star—honoring God in the home and at work. If we do one well and not the other, we have failed. We must do both. The good news is that God hasn’t left us alone to navigate this. We can glean truth about God’s perspective on work all throughout scripture. These truths are timeless and give us everything we need to live a life that honors God.
His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness.
2 Peter 1:3
Whether you’re a newly-wed trying to figure out how to work now that you’re married or you’re a parent with multiple kids trying to balance work with parental duties; whether you’re a software engineer or a doctor; whether you’re a stay at home mom or manager in tech; the Bible has principles to guide you and your family to a healthy work-life balance.
God’s Design for Work: Work is Good
To see God’s initial design for work, we need to go back to the beginning. We need to go back to Genesis 1 to see God at work in creation.
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.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 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.”… And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
Gen 1:26-28, 31
In this passage, we see several interesting things related to work.
God Made Man in His Image
Speaking within the Trinity, God decides to make man in the image of God. What does that mean that man is made in the image of God? Does that mean man is divine? No—it means we are made in the likeness of God in many areas. We share some of His attributes—called “communicable attributes.” (There are many attributes we don’t share, such as omniscience or omnipresence.) Some of the attributes that we share with God are the fact that we are beings who can create, organize, be productive, and have dominion.
God Created Man to Work
God placed man in paradise, but it’s interesting that he didn’t tell him to just enjoy the garden and relax. In addition to multiplying through having children, God commands man to work. He commands man to subdue the earth and have dominion over it. That speaks to ruling over the earth. Cultivating the land. Ruling over the animals. Organizing and bringing order to everything on the earth. The call to be productive working extends to every part of our lives—from a formal job in the office to tasks done in service to the home
Adam Worked Before the Fall
We have a tendency to view work as a necessary evil. Some Christians might even say that work is a byproduct of the fall. However, if you look at the text, you see that God commanded Adam to work and placed him in the garden to subdue and have dominion over it before the fall. In Genesis 2:15, we see that God placed Adam in the garden to “work it and keep it.” After God had created the man and the woman and commanded them to have dominion over the earth, he assessed his creative activity and said it was “very good” (Gen 1:31). The fall doesn’t occur until Genesis 3. Work, therefore, is good.
In light of that, we see that God created work as a means to provide for ourselves and others, to allow us to use our gifts or skills, and to have dominion over nature. God created work to be a blessing.
You might be saying, “That’s great that God created work to be a blessing, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. It feels more like a curse to me.” In our next article, we’ll look at why you may feel that way.
