It’s 6:30 AM and the alarm is screaming at you. Another voice inside your head screams that you need sleep. And there’s one more—it’s the voice of your boss asking why you didn’t come in to work. That’s the one that finally gets you out of bed.

At those moments, who hasn’t wished once or twice that they were independently wealthy. “If I had all the money I needed for the rest of my life,” you might be tempted to think, “I’d get up at 9:00, spend the day doing ————, and go to bed whenever I want.”

But if you’ve ever been unemployed or too sick to work, you viewed it differently. Under those circumstances you might have even caught yourself wishing you could work again or slightly jealous of the people who could. That’s because of something built deeply into every one of us. We’re made for work. Watch your children and you’ll discover that their play isn’t really different from what we call work. Toddlers endlessly dump things back and forth between containers; kindergarteners build towers and knock them down; middle schoolers build small structures in the back yard or care for imaginary children; teens write small epistles on 12 button keyboards. They’re all just performing variations of the same tasks they’ll do for the rest of their lives. It’s human instinct.

Here’s a wild idea. Believe it or not, work is not just about money. Granted, one really good reason to get out of bed on time is that your family needs to eat. You wouldn’t keep going in if your boss stopped paying, and no one can blame you. But at it’s core, there’s a deeper and greater reward from work than the numbers that change in your bank account at the end of the month. It’s the reward of fulfilling your divinely created purpose.

Think back to the people who don’t work. Ironically, the independently wealthy end up doing something with their time anyway, and it often looks just like work. They don’t need the money but they’re often extraordinarily busy with any number of projects. Steve Jobs’ salary at Apple was $1 for the 14 years he worked there (and some stock options here and there.) They’re living out their God-given instinct in spite of themselves. Or on the negative, look at people who get some kind of financial aid because they don’t want to work. There’s hardly anything that destroys human dignity faster than getting paid without having done anything to earn it. Humans need to work.

And here’s where our cultural thinking goes wrong. The general assumption is I work so that I can play. Work is the bad stuff; play is the good that you’re trying to get to. So if you can figure out how to get to play without having to work, all the better.

And here’s how Scripture views it. Work, play, in fact all of life, are part of God’s good gift.

“There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God” (Eccl. 2:24). 

Sure, we all enjoy some tasks more than others. But without the work that comes before, the rest loses all of its meaning. And seen through a biblical lens, it is possible to see the God-given joy of living both in the tasks we naturally like and in those we aren’t excited about. Work isn’t just the purgatory you endure until break time; it’s part of the good gift called life. Here are a few practical suggestions to get you started.

  1. Don’t resent your work. Don’t buy into the Monday grumbling around the water cooler. Choose to love what you do and then work at making it that way. A few Eeyore’s and the “standard office complaining”  shouldn’t control your response. Christians view work differently. So embody that.
  2. Attack procrastinating. About those tasks that none of us enjoy… A good way to increase your misery is to drag them and make them last as long as possible. Don’t. Knock out the tasks you most dread and you’ll feel much better about the whole thing. Call it “eating the frog.”
  3. Do things well. There’s a fascinating body of research demonstrating that work is just as much about the joy of learning, growing and achieving as the money we get out of it. In other words, doing a shoddy job makes you feel shoddy. Determine that you’re going to grow, excel, and show your Christianity in your work. Or to say it another way, “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might” (Eccl. 9:10).
  4. Make good work part of your Christianity. I think we understand what we mean by “full-time Christian worker.” But looking at it another way, we’re all full-time Christians and we all work. There’s real and significant value in working hard with your own hands as a testimony to your transformative faith. “Aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you” (1 Thess. 4:11).

We spend easily the majority of our waking hours working. It would be immensely wasteful not to conform our thinking about work to a biblical perspective. Instead of accepting the cultural presets on such a critical aspect of life, make work a joy. Nothing could be more counter-cultural, transformative, or truly satisfying.