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God at Work
Live Each Day With Purpose
By Ken Costa Thomas Nelson
Copyright © 2016 Ken Costa
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7180-8767-8
CHAPTER 1
WORK MATTERS
IS GOD INTERESTED IN OUR WORK? MANY PEOPLE DO NOT SEE GOD as a 24/7 God, but as a withdrawn actor confined to a Sunday show with a declining audience. I have lost count of the number of times that I have heard people speak in such a way as to betray their belief that there is a divide between what is sacred and what is secular. Often, people portray church workers as being involved in sacred work, while I, as a banker, am seen to be involved in secular work. Nothing could be further from the truth: in God's eyes there is no such divide. It was Hudson Taylor who often declared, "Jesus Christ is either Lord of all, or he is not Lord at all." Jesus is Lord over work in the financial world and in other sectors just as much as he is in the church world.
In the forty years I have lived in London, nothing has struck me so starkly as the false division of the sacred and the secular featured in the Millennium Dome (now known as the O2 Arena) when it was built to commemorate the millennium. In this giant dome, a yearlong exhibition on life in the United Kingdom attempted to divide life into various spheres of activity, including a faith zone, a money zone, and a work zone. The clear message was that the faith zone was distinct from any other part of our lives. This distinction is a disastrous message. One cannot say that church is a "God zone" while the workplace is a "God-free zone." Christianity, in fact, involves our whole lives.
A key executive in a London trading firm once told me that his life at work had been completely transformed when he began to understand that God loved him as much in the frenzied atmosphere of the dealing room as he did at home or at church. Similarly, in the Christian Herald, artist Mark Cazalet said, "When I commit myself and my work into God's hands it means there is no split between the sacred and the secular, so everything I do becomes interconnected and part of my dialogue with God." Operating with this integrated and interconnected worldview means that we need to live according to our Christian values in every area of our lives. I find it hugely challenging to ask myself each day at work how my own values have been influenced by the world and the degree to which they have shifted away from God toward myself.
So the world of work belongs not in the slipstream of twenty-first-century Christian spirituality, but in its mainstream. That's how God meant it to be. Yet, we will take our faith to work only if we know that our work is valuable to God.
GOD AT WORK
Mark Greene of the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity said, "Work is the primary activity God created us to pursue — in communion with him, and in partnership with others." Right in the opening chapters of the Bible, we see three reasons why this is so, and why work matters so much to God.
As God was involved in the work of creation, he declared, "Let us make ..." (Genesis 1:26, emphasis added), acknowledging that, in his very essence, he is relational. The Trinity is a perfect relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, working together in unity. God wants to share on earth what he sees working to perfection in the heavenly community of the Trinity. God has created for us the same attributes of sharing, service, partnership, collaboration, and interdependence that are the very essence of his character, and we see these attributes in work today.
The God of the Bible is not a passive, detached spiritual being but a dynamic, active, and entrepreneurial being. We see how God worked with extraordinary energy in creation to make the world, the animals, and, supremely, human life. He worked at full tilt to a timeline. In Genesis 1, we read of his creative activities in making the heavens and the earth. After each day's work he had the supreme reward of reviewing each stage of his work and seeing that it was good (v. 4). Moreover, life was not created as a one-off specification. He blessed the living creatures and commanded them to grow and to supply the earth and waters with increased production (v. 22). Although he felt good at each stage of the job, he did not stop until the task was completed to perfection (Genesis 2). Then he took time out and "rested from all the work of creating that he had done" (Genesis 2:3). He had worked with a purpose to establish creation. Thus, work was God's idea in the first place. Work matters to him.
In fact, God's work did not stop with the work of creation. All through the Bible, God is seen as a worker. He is described as a gardener (John 15:1), an artist (Genesis 1:1), a potter (Isaiah 64:8), a shepherd (John 10:11), a king (Psalm 145:1), a homemaker and a builder (Hebrews 3:4). Supremely, Jesus said, "My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working" (John 5:17).
Just as Jesus' work on the earth reflected his Father, so each one of us is made in the image of God: "God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:27). Therefore, just as God works, so each of us is made in order to work too. As God labored in creation, so we are to do the same.
Of course, Jesus is the perfect image of God, untainted by sin. Paul wrote that Jesus "is the image of the invisible God. ... He is before all things, and in him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:15-17), and Jesus, this perfect image, worked. As a young man, Jesus, like many of his contemporaries, would have worked in the family business with his earthly father, Joseph, learning skills both in manufacturing and in dealing with people. We can easily imagine Jesus purchasing wood and nails, making a window or door, negotiating a price, and selling his work. In these hidden years, Jesus must have come into contact with a crosssection of the community in Nazareth. This is reflected in his teaching, which includes references to workers in the vineyard, meetings with tax collectors, dealings with agents, and discussions about money, livestock, and property. He did not come to give us a new form of spiritual life disconnected from the world. He came to continue and restore the patterns of work and service initiated by his Father. We need to look to do the same. The importance of work does not just come indirectly from the fact that God works and we are made in his image. It also comes directly. God, in fact, commands us to work.
God has given us a creation mandate to be stewards of the created order (Genesis 1:28). Eugene Peterson's The Message translation of the Bible includes terms such as "prosper," "take charge," and "be responsible" in this passage. God wants us to establish a community on earth based on mutual service. Just as God serves, so he commands us to serve through our work: "the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it" (Genesis 2:15). Furthermore, Adam and Eve experienced fulfillment as human beings as they served God in their work, which was as closely allied to God's purposes as it was possible to be. Work was in the original God-breathed prospectus.
However, Adam and Eve were drawn away from God as they disobeyed his command not to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. After the fall they had to make the harsh adjustment to encumbered work. Futility, despair, recrimination, broken relationships, and, ultimately, death entered the world and the workplace as a result. Work became difficult "toil" (Genesis 3:17-19); the whole created order broke away from its cooperation with God, which meant that the ground was cursed and work became "painful" — a living had to be earned by the sweat of our brows. Almost everything was different from that point on, yet God's mandate to work remained the same: "So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken" (Genesis 3:23).
But everything within the Creator wanted to restore work to its original specification. A new initiative was needed to enable the broken model to work again. And so it was that Jesus was sent with a mandate to repair the fractured working relationship between us and God. He came to pay off the debt that bound work to futility.
WORK — FULFILLMENT OR FUTILITY?
A new trainee once told me, as we were discussing our work: "Let's face it. We work to make money, to live, and to enjoy ourselves. It makes life bearable even if work sucks. What's so wrong with that?" The truth is that work now exists in a tension between fulfillment and futility. On the one hand we know the presence of God at work, creating, innovating, and filling us with energy. We see signs of his activity in the many ways in which we flourish at work and feel good about our achievements. On the other hand we know the futility of work, the lack of direction, the struggle to get things done, and the frustration of difficult colleagues, stressful situations, and plans not working out as we had hoped.
No one who was working in London in October 2008 will forget that crucial Friday when it appeared that RBS (the Royal Bank of Scotland), one of the world's largest banks, would collapse. Alistair Darling, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was rumored to have asked Tom McKillop, the then Chairman of RBS, "How long can you hold out?" The reply was chilling: "Two or three hours." I remember sitting at my desk in the West End of London with a number of senior colleagues. We all knew the consequences of RBS failing: every ATM would seize up; there would be no cash in the system; and money in transit would not be honored. Someone buying a house would not have the deposit cleared — the purchaser would be in default. The situation was horrendous. I remember the icy nature of fear and the futility felt by all; there was very little that could be done.
We immediately set to work to gather our thoughts and try to provide advice to some of the major banks and clients we were advising at the time. However, the sense of powerlessness in the face of a failing banking system was pervasive. Nonetheless I realized that out of this crisis there were a number of opportunities: to think clearly and to provide good advice, even though the future (as is always the case) was unclear and particularly uncertain.
I knew that the future belonged to God alone and, for whatever reason, he had allowed a massive shake-up of the financial system in the world. Our task was, therefore, to read the signs and as best possible to be prepared to deal with future uncertainty. This became the most intellectually stimulating, but deeply frustrating and challenging part of my career thus far. This is often the case when we look at the workplace — we see apparent futility when we can't see the overall purpose. Fulfillment comes from finding meaning and purpose in our actual day-today work, without necessarily knowing that the whole system or individual transaction is going to be a success. Futility and frustration are twins.
But, we live with hope for the future. Because work was part of God's original plan for humanity, we know that he will maintain the best of the original creation when he calls into being the new heaven and the new earth (Revelation 21:24, 26). Eternity will involve perfect work — the work of serving the Lord Jesus Christ (Revelation 22:3).
It is work that utterly fulfills and which is in no way futile. As was God's original purpose, it is perfect service rather than imperfect servitude. But to make the most of our lives on earth we need to have a clear view of God's intentions for us in the workplace: to serve him and our community and to enjoy a measure of success, to grow in our humanity, and to influence the world for good as we wait for Jesus to return. This is not merely a case of chalking up air miles while we are alive to be spent in heaven after death. Eternal life starts here as we live well for God, reflecting his original intentions by participating in turning around the broken image of work.
Work will never be perfected until the return of Jesus but, until then, it is possible, as I have found in my over-forty-year career, through the power of his Spirit, to live and work together with purpose, direction, and enjoyment.
HOLY JOBS — BISHOPS AND BANKERS
In A Parable of the Wicked Mammon (1528), William Tyndale, the translator of the Bible into English, said:
There is no work better than another to please God; to pour water, to wash dishes, to be a souter [cobbler], or an apostle, all is one; to wash dishes and to preach is all one, as touching the deed, to please God.
We need not only to recover this understanding, but also to rid ourselves of the view that there is a religious pecking order in God's sight where bishops rank ahead of bankers and ordained clergy ahead of computer programmers. Throughout the centuries this division has, unfortunately, still continued. The distinction is deep rooted, going back to the medieval exaltation of the clergy and continuing to the time when the links between God and ordinary daily life were severed in the name of progress and reason. Clericalism had let the educated clerical class be the sole exponents of Christianity, disenfranchising everyone else. But the New Testament writer Paul drew no distinction between hard spiritual work and hard work in the workplace. He used the same words to discuss manual labor as he did apostolic service.
The reality is that all jobs are equal. Throughout Scripture we find God's people involved in a vast array of different jobs: Abraham was a cattle trader; Joseph was prime minister and later dabbled in wheat futures; Luke was a doctor; the first Ethiopian convert was a central banker; Dorcas was in fashion; Simon the tanner was the Louis Vuitton of his day; and Jesus was, of course, a carpenter. For me, this realization transformed the way in which I viewed the workplace. God was interested in every aspect of my life. At church on Sunday, we may pray for the leaders of the church and society, but how often do we pray for Sarah the accountant and Mark the salesman in the third row?
Christians have, at times, adopted the great fallacy that an emigration from the world of work would produce a spirituality of a higher order that would, therefore, be more pleasing to God. The monastic tradition, often blamed for this withdrawal from the world, has, on the contrary, a high view of work. We cannot, and were never intended by God to, take exit visas from the world to escape its pressures. Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Letters and Papers from Prison, spoke of the calling of Christians to be "this worldly," living amongst the harsh realities of life and demonstrating our faith by the day-to-day choices we make. Before Jesus was arrested, he prayed for his disciples: "My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one" (John 17:15). We have been created by God to work in this world.
MY WORK STATION IS MY WORSHIP STATION
I've never been able to see how this computer has anything to do with the kingdom of God.
— Jim Banks, computer programmer
So, why do we work? Is it really a necessary evil? There are many reasons for working:
• Professional — to fulfill career objectives
• Achievement — to reach a life goal
• Economic — to create wealth
• Financial — to support oneself and a family
• Personal — to experience fulfillment and significance
• Social — to avoid being a burden on others
• Relational — to support other people through collaborative effort
Yet, perhaps the ultimate overarching purpose for work is to worship God in and through our work. Famously, the first question in the Westminster Catechism written in the 1640s is "What is the chief and highest end of man?" and the answer given is that "Man's chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy him forever." We can glorify God and enjoy him in and through our work. Our work is a form of worship to God.
So, when I am asked about worship, I reply firmly, "My work station is my worship station." Worship is the total submission of our whole person to the glory of God as we recognize our dependence on him. My desk should therefore be a place of worship. Indeed, there is a Hebrew word — avad — that can mean either to work or to worship. God is our real employer. In his letter to the Colossians, Paul urges us, "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters" (Colossians 3:23). I remember a personal assistant telling me that, when she passed the reception desk on her way into work each morning, she reminded herself, "It is the Lord Christ I serve." This avoids the danger of settling for satisfactory underperformance. I try to pray every morning as I start work because I want to remind myself that I am not dependent on myself or on any economic system, but on God. Work is a ministry, empowered by God, for the benefit of ourselves and others and, ultimately, for his glory.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from God at Work by Ken Costa. Copyright © 2016 Ken Costa. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
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