WORK IS THE GREATEST OPPORTUNITY many of us have for fulfilling the calling of Christ and his command to love our neighbors as ourselves. Reflect on that statement. What if every Christ-follower really believed that? Building sewage systems, creating businesses, teaching graduate students, caring for the elderly, establishing order through the legal system, picking up toys on the living room floor—this is neighborly love and a key component of God’s mission to redeem and restore all things.
It is at work where we often see our greatest opportunities to use our talents and skills to love and serve others. It is at work where we can make the richness of God’s wisdom known to all. Therefore, we must allow God’s Word to shape our minds, hearts, and motivations for our work, and his Spirit will produce much fruit.
Created in God’s Image
To understand work in God’s plan, we need to go back to the beginning once again, back to the basics of what it means to be a human being. We are created to bear God’s image, often referred to using the Latin words imago Dei.
Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our
image, to be like us.” . . .
So God created human beings in his own image.
In the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
(Genesis 1:26-27 NLT)
But what does it really mean to be made in God’s image?
It means human beings have been created by God with the unique ability to reason and communicate in complex languages, the capacity to exercise free will and a moral sense, and the ability to relate to one another. We were also given instructions to work alongside God in the care and cultivation of the earth. Our work is to help creation flourish by cultivating (developing resources) and caring for it as we read in Genesis 2:15: “Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and tend it” (NASB).
Created for Good Work
Each of us today has been given the gift of specific work to do that is intended to align with the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:28, as Paul tells us in Ephesians 2:10: “We are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago” (NLT).
As creations especially precious to God, we have the privilege to be co-laborers with God in his great plan to reconcile the world to himself in Christ. Paid and unpaid work allows us to participate in God’s redemption and restoration of all things, and that is where God has placed us to shape our small corners of the world. It doesn’t matter if you work for pay or volunteer. Work is where you get the opportunity to form and to cultivate human civilization in all its God-given specificity and beauty.
As Christians today, we have an amazing mission to engage with the culture during our normal, ordinary days at work as an act of worship. The heart of our faith is meant to be lived out during the day-to-day work in every aspect of our economy and society. This is what it means to be a person made in the image of God, created to do the good works he has prepared for us to do long ago.
Taken from Faithful Work by Ross Chapman and Ryan Tafilowski. ©2024 by Denver Institute for Faith & Work. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
Ross Chapman is the CEO of Denver Institute for Faith and Work. He previously founded and served as president and executive director of For Evansville in Evansville, Indiana. He holds a doctorate of ministry in faith, work, economics, and vocation from Fuller Theological Seminary.
Ryan Tafilowski is assistant professor of theology at Denver Seminary and lead pastor of Foothills Fellowship Church in Denver. He holds a PhD in systematic theology from the University of Edinburgh and has served as theologian-in-residence for Denver Institute for Faith and Work. He is the author of Virtue and Vice at Work.
