Here is the One Key to Making Your Work a Gift instead of a Burden, Fulfilling instead of Frustrating

It’s amazing really.  Do you realize how much it changed everything?  Without it, Florida wouldn’t have happened.   The computer revolution would have stopped dead in its tracks. 

Do you know what I’m talking about?  You’re probably feeling it right now or will in a few minutes.    Do you get how much air conditioning changed things?   First, it improved worker productivity more than anything else in the 20^th century.   Don’t take my work for it.  That’s what businesses said.   By 1957, 90% of businesses reported that nothing impacted worker productivity more than air conditioning.

And heck, it didn’t just change the workplace, it changed the nation.   Do you think you’d have the Sunbelt without air conditioning? Do you think millions would have moved to South Florida without it?   And those computers that have changed everything, well they don’t work so well without AC.  

One invention changed kind of everything, how we work, where we live.  It even brought in the computer age.   And the story you’re about to hear brought just such a world changing revolution.   It changed people’s perceptions about the one thing that people spend most of their lives doing.  It changed people’s ideas about work.  But the story does more than that.  It shows you how your work can bring the life-giving fulfillment God intended work for.   Sadly a lot of people never really get that part of the story.  But when you do, it changes not only how you work.  It changes how you do everything, how you live even.   How do you find the way to this change?  In this story, God shows you the way.   Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

Genesis 1:26-2:2, 2:7-9, 15

In this story, God shows you.   God didn’t give work as a burden.  God gave work as a gift.   But for it to be the gift that God intended it to be, you need to see the work that God did for you, the work that gives you rest even as you work. 

You can miss it here.   After all, we largely take this way of thinking for granted.   We live in a world that values work; that wants work that is life-giving and fulfilling.  Heck, if anything we value it too much, with all our e-mailing and multi-tasking. But before this story, no one saw work as anything good, much less something God did.

In the big creation story of that day, called the Enuma Elish, the head god Marduk makes the world.  But the other gods aren’t happy.  They’re like, who is going to take care of all this stuff.   We don’t wanna work.   And Marduk said.  No worries.  That’s why I created these creatures called humans, they’ll do all the work for you so you don’t have to.   

And later in the Greek myths, work didn’t have a great reputation there either.  In those myths, when this thing called Pandora’s Box opens and unleashes all the bad stuff on the earth, do you know what gets included in all that bad stuff?  Work gets included. 

But in this story, something revolutionary occurs.  God becomes a worker. The story talks about how God finished his work.   And God was not only working. God was enjoying it.    And God wasn’t just doing high level executive work, telling the angels what to do.   No, God was getting his hands dirty, shaping human beings out of the earth. 

And then when God made these human beings, and put them in this beautiful garden, in paradise really, what did he give them?   Well, God certainly gave them incredible food, astounding beauty, physical intimacy. But do you see what else God gave them?  God gave them jobs.    God made work part of paradise.

But why?   Why was work part of paradise? 

Recently, I heard a story about when John F. Kennedy was running for President.   In 1960, in one of his first races, he went down to meet with coal miners in West Virginia, who were working in slave-like conditions in those days.     Outside a coalmine in Slab For one of those miners asked him, “Is this true Senator Kennedy that you’ve never worked a day in your life?” Kennedy laughed and replied “Well I guess there’s some truth to that.”  Do you know what that miner said?   He said, “Well you haven’t missed a goddamn thing.

And that miner had a point.   Work can be demeaning, exhausting, even life destroying.  So why does God make it part of paradise?

Because God created human beings in God’s image.   And God works.   But let’s think about it. What sort of work does God do? 

God creates, and God made you with that same impulse.  God created you to create, to bring order and beauty and life into the world.    And when work is what God created work to be, that’s what it does, it creates.  And creating isn’t something that just artists do.  Everyone can do that. 

For example, that miner might have been overworked and treat unfairly in his job, but in that hard and brutal work, he was creating something.  He was bringing a mineral out of the ground that got transformed into energy that would light a city.  And that’s creative.    And John F. Kennedy might not have been digging in a mine, but he was creating too, working to make the world a better place for that miner and others like him. 

When teachers shape young lives, they are creating.  When police officers and firefighters bring safety and security, they are creating something.   When a person in a store, finds you the shirt or dress you exactly need, that is creative work.    And when parents do the hard work of parenting that is some of the most creative work there is.  The list could go on and on.   Every job has creative potential.   And God created you for that.   Whether you realize it or not, you need it.

Growing up, I had a friend, Matthew, whose father made a fortune in the poultry business.  But Matthew never found his niche.    When I visit my parents, I ask about him.  What’s up with Matthew?   They tell me that he lives in a big house in a subdivision near where he grew up.  And most of the day, he spends watching television.   He doesn’t even go outside much.  And when I hear about it, I feel so sad.    Matthew may have millions, but he has no real work.  And that is tragic. 

You need work.  You need to create.  But let’s be clear.   God made you not simply to create, but to create good in the world, to bring life, to bring order and beauty.   The owners who ran those mines back in 1960 were creating too, but what they were creating wasn’t bringing life.   No, their exploitation of those miners was creating misery and despair, even death.  

In whatever work you do, you need to ask, is this work bringing good to the world, not just to me.   God didn’t just create you to create.   God created you to work good for the world, to bring more value and life and good to others. 

But in the work, God created you for, you can’t simply work for yourself; or even for others, you have got to have a higher purpose than even that.   You have got to sense that in your work, you are working ultimately for God, that you are living out of a divine purpose.  

I love the story of Eric Liddell, the Scottish sprinter, who won the gold in the 400 meters in the 1924 Olympics.   Liddell, a devout Christian, didn’t run for fame or wealth.  In fact, he almost didn’t run at all in that Olympics because he was scheduled to race on Sunday, and doing that would violate his faith.   In the end, he did run, but in a completely different event where he won his gold medal.  And afterwards, he spend the rest of his life in China as a missionary.   So why did Liddell run at all?  In a conversation with his sister, he put it this way, “Yes, God made me for a purpose, to go to China, but he also made me fast.  And when I run I feel his pleasure.”    Liddell ran passionately, intensely, with world class excellence.  But ultimately he didn’t run for himself, for others, not even for his country.  He ran for God.     

John Coltrane found that same freedom.   Do you know that name?   In the last hundred years, likely no greater saxophonist has lived than John Coltrane.  Yet even as Coltrane created some of the greatest Jazz in history, he was addicted to heroin.  Only a profound experience of God’s grace enabled him to break that addiction.   And out of that experience, he composed an amazing album, A Love Supreme.  But more than that, he found a new purpose.  In the liner notes of that album, he put it this way.   "I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music."        

And Coltrane went on to do just that.  Still when it came to the music from A Love Supreme, he only performed it live once.   And after that legendary performance, as Coltrane sat down, people heard him say just this, Nunc Dimittis.   Those Latin words simply mean, Now Dismiss.  What was Coltrane says,  He was quoting from the Song of Simeon, the prayer of a man who waited his whole life for Jesus.  And when Simeon finally saw him, he prayed this.   “Now dismiss your servant in peace, for my own eyes have seen your salvation.”   In quoting that prayer, Coltrane was basically saying that I no longer work for fame or wealth or anything.  I work simply to honor God.  Saying those words simply said that, that night he came closer to living that purpose than ever before.    John Coltrane was working that night, working harder than ever, but not for himself, not even for others.  He was working for God.   And that purpose freed him to work with a greater fulfillment than ever before.

How does that happen?   How do you find that fulfillment in your work, that joy?  You realize what stands in the way of receiving it, the work that lies underneath your work.         

What makes people miserable in their jobs?  It’s because underneath their work, lies a deeper work, one that drives them whether they realize it or not.  What do I mean?   Well, if you’re honest what drives your work?  Is it the approval of others?  Is it some deep seated insecurity?  Is it a fear of not having enough?  Is it a hunger for stuff you don’t need or some idea of success?   I could go on.  What is your work under the work?    Whatever work you do, another work likely lies beneath it that truly drives you.  And the more power that work under the work has, the more it drains the fulfillment and joy God created your work to have.  

What was different in the work of an Eric Liddell or a John Coltrane?  Beneath their work, laid a rest, a Sabbath so to speak.   There was rest under their work.  And that rest didn’t slow their work down.  That rest, that resting in God, freed their work to be greater than ever. 

But how does that rest come?  How do you find rest beneath your work?  You see the great work that God did for you.    God did more than just create you.   When you fell away, when you lost touch with God, God worked to reach you.   God worked so intensely to reach you that he became one of you.    In Jesus, God worked for you.  He brought healing, and wisdom, and acceptance and above all love.   And then Jesus did the greatest work of all.  He laid down everything, his life, his very being, to bring you home.   Why did God in Jesus do that?  Because God never ever stopped loving you.    And nothing would stop that love from rescuing you, from working until you who had been lost were found. 

And the more you grasp that work of love Jesus has done for you, the more it frees you from your work beneath the work.   You realize.  There is no ultimate meaning, no ultimate security that your work can give you that you don’t already have.   So even as you work, you can be at rest, because you know whose you are, and what he did to bring you home.    And in that rest, you will work, maybe even more intensely than before.  But your work will not be driven by a lack you are trying to fill.  No it will flow out of an abundance that has filled you.  And in that abundance, your work will bring you and the world more joy, more fulfillment, more peace even, than you could ever have imagined.