Our work belongs to God

For most of us, Labor Day is an opportunity for a day off from our work, a time to celebrate and relax with friends and family. But we should also view it as a reminder of the deep significance of our work, and an occasion to recommit ourselves to faithful obedience to God’s will for our lives achieved through work.

“The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein” (Psalm 24:1). God’s sovereignty is rooted in His identity as creator of all things. The world belongs to God. That includes everything, from the stars and the seas to the seagulls and the squirrels. But this means that we belong to God as well.

Indeed, as we read in 1 Corinthians 6, “You are not your own.” This is especially true for Christians, who “were bought with a price.” But it is also true of all things that exist merely by nature of their existence. Everything that there is belongs to God, including ourselves, body and soul.

That also means that whatever we do belongs to God. Later in the same letter to the church in Corinth, Paul writes, “whatever you do, do all for the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). Paul is speaking within the context of disputes about worship and faithfulness in that church’s context, but his insights about God’s ownership of all things and the consequences for human activity resonate across all areas of life.

If all things belong to God, including our ourselves, then our work certainly belongs to God as well. And we are thus called to work as ones in service of God, whatever our vocation. This sense of divine vocation in all areas of life is often associated especially with Protestantism, and rightly so. Martin Luther and John Calvin championed the doctrine of vocation in a way that affirmed the dignity of all work and in a way that would have important consequences for the economic progress in following centuries down to our present day.

But properly understood this view of work is biblical and shared by all orthodox Christian traditions. Luther’s younger contemporary, Theresa of Avila, encouraged the sisters in her order in words that would echo the sentiments of the greatest Protestant reformers, telling the sisters “if your task is in the kitchen, the Lord walks among the pots and pans, helping you in all things spiritual and temporal.” Centuries after the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church has increasingly celebrated and explored the deeper significance of work, in works like John Paul II’s encyclical letter on human work, Laborem Exercens, to the Vatican’s document, “Vocation of the Business Leader.”

Work is a fundamental aspect of God’s will in the created order. He placed Adam and Eve in the Garden with a stewardship responsibility, and even in a world marked by sin and marred by evil, God promises us that “you shall eat bread.” We all know all too well the reality of a world in which work has become toil and in which labor has become troublesome. It is a world in which the daily bread we eat is only enjoyed after work undertaken “in pain” and “by the sweat of your brow” (Genesis 3:17-19).

But no matter how disheartened or discouraged we may be by the very real evils of work in our world today, we must always take hope in the knowledge that our world, and especially our work, belong to God. He has blessed our work in His act of creation and in the grace of giving human beings what Pascal called “the dignity of causality,” which we exercise to a great extent through our work. So, this Labor Day let us all remember and celebrate this deep truth about our work and thank God for all His blessings, especially the blessing of work.