Truth #175 - Work is a place to worship God - Ephesians 4-6

Ephesians 6:5-8
Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bondservant or is free.

Truth:  Work is a place to please God and receive His blessings.

In the Theology of work we need to come to grips what work is for and why we are called to do work.  Notice when God created man what He did with man:

Genesis 2:15
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

We were created to work!!   God put man in the Garden to "keep" it .. to work it!!   It wasn't until the sin in that same garden that mad sin a burden to us.  Now we resist work and sin causes us to hate work.  The redeemed man has to come to a new belief about work to make sure he/she is doing work to the glory of God.  Our restoration in Christ is to restore us back to the image God originally designed.  In the above passage Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus he tells the believers there that the work they do is to be done to the glory of God and not for the praise of man.  He changes their belief about the purpose of work and challenges what they value about work.  Notice he tells them, "... knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord ...".   In using the phrase "whatever" good we have to remember he is talking about the market place here.  He is not talking about the work we do in the Church setting.   Paul has already told them that we have been created for good works (Ephesians 2:10).  He has changed their belief about their purpose in life.  But, to make sure that new belief and value is not thought by them to be restricted to only the church, Paul expands this concept of dong good works and introduces it to the market place.   He even states that someone who lives and works in this manner will, "receive back from the Lord."    This is why Paul also tells the Corinthian church that whatever they do, in word or in deed, do it to the glory of God:  1 Corinthians 10:31.   We need to have a good belief about why we work and to what extent God has intended this for us.   We work because in the original design we were tooled and skilled to work.  Now we do so for the same reason ... to glorify God with the skills and tolls He has equipped us to use in that work.   We are not to work for wealth, position or pride.   That is the earthly belief and philosophy that creeps into our value structures that needs to be replaced.   When we believe the way the world does we can look at work as a burden, since we, as believers, are not their to accumulate wealth or status.  Yet, when we realize we were created to work and that this is just another location we can worship, we will have a new philosophy of belief and therefore a new value for it.  We value our occupations because they are an alter on which we worship our Savior.