The reality of work
Just imagine—it’s the end of a morning or afternoon or evening of hard work, and you’re very, very tired. But you look around your house, and the floors are swept and clean, the dishes are done, the laundry folded and put away, and even the bathroom fixtures are sparkling; and for those of you who have kids, you can even imagine that the scattered mess of toys that normally covers the floor in every room and hallway has disappeared. Everything is in its place. You feel this enormous sense of accomplishment and relief. You put on some tea or coffee and light music, and slip slowly into that cozy chair with a good book, the one you’ve been waiting to read, or maybe you pick up the newspaper or turn on your favourite TV show. Whatever you do, you can now relax and enjoy the result of your labour: a clean and tidy home. Ah, the satisfaction of work!
Isn’t that a great image? But how long does this last? Isn’t this a cycle that we all repeat several times a week? We all know what it’s like to get all our work done only to have more work waiting for us. While the saying goes that the two most certain things are death and taxes, we will always have work to do: housework, yard work, homework, church work, volunteer work, office-work, busywork. Work, work, work.
We even see our experience of work reflected in popular music. There have even been lots of songs over the years that have complained about the drudgery and toil of work: The Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night,” where they complain to have been “working like a dog.” Dolly Parton’s “Working 9 to 5”, and what a way to make a living that is! There’s also Huey Lewis’s “Workin’ for a Livin’,” and “Couple Days Off,” not to mention a Canadian favourite, Loverboy’s “Working for the Weekend.” And no doubt we’ve all shared the sentiments expressed in these songs on more than a few occasions—even if we like our work! Having worked in a few secular workplaces I know that lots of people are literally ‘working for the weekend’ and for those ‘couple days off.’ Most people work in order to make enough of a living to enjoy the days that they don’t have to work. Vacation, days off, and leisure time are all an escape from work—sadly, some escape in even more pathetic ways, through drugs, alcohol, and addictive gambling. But is work supposed to be like this? Is this what work is meant to be like? You see, even our attitude toward work is a part of our relationship with God, because however we approach our work says something about what we believe about God.
Our work is given to us by God
It seems fitting that Psalm 127 is about work—about how we should see our work and labour in this life—since work never goes away. But before we get to this Psalm I want to look at Genesis, where we find the beginning of work. In Genesis 2: 2 we read these words: “And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done.” So here we see that God works. God is the ultimate worker—and note that God also rested. And God also made work a part of His creation. Look at what it says in Genesis 2: 15: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” This is before the fall when things went wrong with creation. Work is a part of God’s purpose and intention for us. He created us for work, and like everything else God made, when He made it, “it was good.” Work was not meant to be punishment, but vocation—what we are called to do. So what happened?
Well, to make a long story short, we happened. We believed a lie. We believed what Satan told us. If you look at Genesis you see that we decided that we could be like God and get our work, our salvation, our lives done on our own strength—rather than center our work, our lives, in God’s work and in God’s hands, we put ourselves at the center. We wanted to be like gods. Psalm 127: 1 says “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain” and we decided not to believe this warning and, just like our psalm says, we’ve been “eating the bread of anxious toil” ever since. When human beings fell into sin and disobedience, God cursed work.
Genesis 3: 17 – 19 puts the curse this way: “Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Human labour would now be more tedious and difficult.
Mark Buchanan, in his wonderful book, The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath, says simply that, “Work doesn’t work. It’s broken . . . You can’t help but not like your job some days. God made it that way.” Another quote I read says: “Most people live somewhere between a grudging acceptance of their job and an active dislike of it.” I even think of when we say things like, “Boy, that looks like a lot of work,” as if we’re saying, “Boy, I don’t know that I want to start something if it’s going to take that much effort.” So how, then, do we deal with work?
Our Work is Vain Apart from God
There’s a great Dilbert cartoon where he offers this advice: “Eat one live toad the first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” You’d have to have a pretty rotten job if you feel compelled to do that! But when it really comes to coping with the reality of work, there are two basic human tendencies that Scripture wants us to avoid. The first is the anxiety or stress of the person who thinks it all depends on them. Whether or not their family has food on the table and clothes on their backs depends entirely on them. This person thinks they are the one who build the house and guard the city.
A young girl in first grade was curious because her dad brought home a briefcase full of papers every evening. Her mother explained, “Daddy has so much to do that he can’t finish it all at the office. That’s why he has to bring work home at night.” So the little girl asked, “Why don’t they put him in a slower group?”
This is the person about whom it is said in verse 2, “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest.” This person is the workaholic, the person who puts in long hours to make extra money, or to get that promotion or that raise in salary. This is the person who thinks that they’re doing the world and their family a favour by constantly working overtime—and this can happen whether you’re working in the home or away from home. Things have to get done. If I don’t do it, no one will. Think of people you know who work excessively—is it always because they need the income? Now obviously sometimes it is. But sometimes I wonder if it’s because they feel they have to strive and work excessively to have what they need. Is it because they believe that all the ordinary necessities of life depend on human effort? Certainly if that’s what’s feeding their idea of work, then this shows that is practice they’re not trusting God. What’s the result of this approach to work? According to our passage, they eat “the bread of anxious toil.” They worry that they can never work enough to gain what they want—their work habits fuel the kind of anxiety that Jesus talks about in Matthew 6 when he says “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink . . . You of little faith . . . Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.”
The second tendency is to misread our psalm and think, “Oh well, God does all the work that needs to be done. God builds the house—and if I try and build it my efforts are in vain. What is there for me to do? I guess I can just sit back and wait for the Lord to return. I’ll let the Lord build the house and when He’s done I’ll move in.” This is what we call idleness, or maybe laziness. While the first group of people overestimates the value of their efforts, this group underestimates the importance and value of work. Shamefully, there are people who don’t even put in an honest effort at work. There are people who would rather abuse the system to avoid work as much as possible.
And there’s actually an example of this in Scripture. In 2 Thessalonians 3 Paul addresses some Christians who are not working—they have become idle and it looks like they have become freeloaders of some kind. Paul makes clear that they should follow his example. Paul, even though he was an apostle and evangelist, did not rely on other Christians to supply his basic needs. Paul worked as a tentmaker all throughout his ministry, and he goes so far as to say, “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” As another saying puts it, “God gives the birds their food, but He doesn’t throw it into their nests.” In other words, God does provide for our needs, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work at all. But we are called to recognize that we depend on God for the necessities of life.
So when we say that our work is vain apart from God, this isn’t to say that apart from God we’ll be unsuccessful in our work: we can still make lots of money, stockpile lots of possessions, and prosper, but all of this will ultimately be unfulfilling. Money and possessions don’t buy us happiness. God didn’t make us to be satisfied with such things—these things are not the purpose of work and God has another purpose for us, even in our work.
Our work has the potential to be worship
The only way our work will become worship is understanding work as something that God gives us to do and that the results of our work—whatever we gain from it—all depend on Him. Psalm 90: 17 says: “Prosper the work of our hands.” This is the prayer of someone who realizes that only God’s blessing will make work fulfilling. We need to ask God to be in our work, to help us approach our work with the right attitude. Rather than strive for the “bread of anxious toil,” we should instead pray each day, “Give us this day our daily bread,” just as Jesus taught us.
It’s also important to realize that any kind of work—whatever we do that is work—can become an act of worship. Martin Luther put it this way: “The maid who sweeps her kitchen is doing the will of God just as much as the monk who prays—not because she may sing a Christian hymn as she sweeps but because God loves clean floors. The Christian shoemaker does his Christian duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship.” “Virtually any job, no matter how grueling or tedious, can be a gift from God, through God, and to God. The work of our hands, by the alchemy of our devotion, becomes the worship of our hearts,” says Mark Buchanan. Think of when Jesus washed the disciples’ feet—he took a common and menial task and turned it into an act of love and worship. When we approach our tasks in a similar way—say, by blessing our family when we cook a meal or fold the laundry—our work has the potential and power to reveal Christ himself.
In the second half of the psalm, we see the writer talking about the reward of work—family. Eugene Peterson comments that it doesn’t matter how much money we have, how prosperous our work is, because “what does make a difference is the personal relationships that we create and develop.” In other words, the people we work with are more important than the work we do. Only when we entrust the work to the Lord do we reap such rewards—“Sons are indeed a heritage from the Lord,” it says in verse 3.
We can expand this verse, Peterson suggests, to include more than just the fruit of biological children but also the creation of relationships and friendships that bear witness, through our attitude to work we do, to the care and love of God. How do I show the love of God to my employer, employees, to my co-workers, or to my family when I prepare a meal or clean the bathroom? Because unless I approach my work in a way that seeks to reveal God’s love and care—in a spirit of worship and devotion—then I end up more than likely hurting rather creating relationships.
This also applies to the church—the Lord is the one who builds this house and unless we realize this and live out this truth we can hardly expect the Lord to bless us with more brothers and sisters to populate this house. But, as the psalm says, “Happy is the man who has a quiver full of them.” This can be equally true of the church as well as the home.
The question is: how do we approach all those undesirable, normally thankless jobs that have to be done? Do we so begrudgingly and resentfully? Do we give into the fact that it is tedious or are we able to turn it around and be thankful and turn it into an opportunity for love and worship? If we are called to wash someone’s feet, will we do it in the spirit of devotion and service? There’s no easier way for work to become vain then to let it become something we hate doing and something we feel miserable about. Remember, there are always worse jobs!
Conclusion
There’s a great line in this Psalm. In verse 2 it says “for he gives sleep to his beloved.” God provides rest from work—He provides sleep. You don’t always have to be working. We can rely on God to take care of things even when we’re not working. The world won’t fall apart without us. There’s actually another way of translating this verse—“for he provides for his beloved during sleep.” He provides for his beloved during sleep. Even while we sleep God provides for us—in other words, your well-being doesn’t depend on you. “Provision for human life is a result . . . of the grace of God,” not our effort and work.
Ultimately, “Psalm 127 functions as an invitation to entrust our lives to God and so not be anxious about our lives, but to pursue God’s claim upon us and strive to embody God’s will.” Or as Jesus puts it in Matthew 6: “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” When we realize that we depend on the Lord—whether for our family life or our church, our livelihood or our ministry—we realize that we have neither cause to be idle or anxious, because rather than “eating the bread of anxious toil,” we have Jesus Christ, who is the bread of life, and receiving this bread is the most important thing we can do—and we can do it no matter what our work is, as long when we work we always bear mind that it is always the Lord who builds the house.
