Work can be hard, it can be boring, it can seem pointless. However, when it is seen as a calling, work has purpose, and God’s power and grace saturate our lives as we do it.

The Problem with Our Work

If work is so good, as it’s defined by God in Genesis 2, why is it so hard? Well, the subsequent chapter reveals the problem. In Genesis 3:17–19 (ESV), in light of the Fall resulting from Adam’s sin, God unveils the consequences:

And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain 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, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Since the Fall, people have lived according to their own designs, not God’s. Consequently, instead of us working the creation, the creation is working us. Instead of us subduing and having dominion over the serpent, the serpent and the beasts of the field contend for dominion over us. Instead of shaping the world, the world is shaping us.

It is interesting that in the previous verse, Genesis 3:16 (ESV), God says that for the woman, the result of the curse would be the labor and pain of childbearing. Do you know that the Hebrew word for “pain” used in verse 16 is the same word for “pain” used in verse 17? God is telling us that our work in creation is like giving birth. The toil of childbearing is akin to the toil of working the ground.

In other words, creation is fighting against us. Because of sin, we have turned the goodness of creation and the goodness of work into idols. Instead of worshipping the Creator, we worship the creation. Instead of worshipping the one who has given us good work to do, we worship the work itself.

In other words, doing things our way has transformed us into idol-making factories. Instead of our identity being in the God who created us, we toil to find identity in our work. That’s why it exhausts us so: we have taken something that God gave us for good and turned it into something that we worship. We attempt to find our identity in what we do, not in the goodness of God. Thus, we work too hard, for the wrong reasons and for the wrong motives. We don’t find our worth and value in God; instead, we find our worth and value in what we do.

If we were honest, most of us would realize we hit the ground running every single day in an attempt to justify our own existence. We use our work—something that is good and sacred—to compensate for our shame and insecurities. We are so out of balance that sometimes we can’t even rest well! Have you ever felt, after a week away from the job, that you needed a vacation after the vacation? At times we don’t even know how to relax physically.

The restlessness of our souls sees us running a hundred miles an hour—justifying ourselves, proving our worth, and seeking our own validation and the approval of the world. We can be magnificent idolaters, converting good and sacred things into idols to manufacture our self-worth.

The Hope for Our Work

Is there any hope of taking what our sin has broken and restoring it to God’s original design? The short answer is yes! The hope for our work is found, very simply, in the work of Jesus Christ. God gives us a glimpse of a promise amid the Fall: while doling out the consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin, he curses the serpent, saying:

“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15 ESV).

From the seed of the woman will come one who will crush the head of the serpent. That is, a priest is coming, a royal seed from a royal line. Through Jesus Christ—and on the basis of his work on our behalf—we can find our identity in him alone.

Through his finished work on the cross, Jesus Christ—a great priest who will exercise dominion and subdue the serpent once and for all—has the right to declare that his work is already complete. In him, we may live in the good news that we do not have to prove ourselves by our work. Why? Because Jesus has proven himself through his work for us on the cross.

Instead of being slaves to our work or using work to attempt to justify our existence, we can look to the finished work of Jesus Christ to be spiritually justified and personally validated. We can have worth and value based not on what we do but on the sacrifice of our royal Priest, Jesus Christ. We find our identity in Christ and Christ alone.

The Surrender of Our Work

Elisabeth Elliot found her identity in the supremacy of Christ. Her husband, Jim, was one of five young missionaries killed by the Huaorani tribe in Ecuador in 1956. After Jim’s death, Elliot and Rachel Saint (also widowed by the attack) returned to the tribe that murdered their husbands. They dived into the arduous task of reducing the tribal language to writing so that the people could learn to read and eventually have the Bible in their native tongue.

Although Elliot and Saint eventually finished their work, they waited decades, throughout which the reduction of the written language came to nothing. Their linguistic work was boxed up and stored away: the specialists that were needed to translate God’s Word into the written language of the Huaoranis were nowhere to be found. The work of these missionary widows seemed a waste of time. But Elliot did not count their work as wasted. Her identity was not in her work but in the God who called her to do the work.

More than sixty years later, Elliot received a copy of the New Testament in the Huaorani language—and reflected on the work done so long ago. She wrote about giving her life to her work as a missionary and later as a writer:

The first thing was to settle once and for all the supremacy of Christ in my life. . . . I put myself utterly and forever at His disposal, which means turning over all the rights: to myself, my body, my self-image, my notions of how I am to serve my Master.

And of her language work that lay untouched for half a century, she wrote:

Whom had I set out to serve? May He not do as He wills, then, with His servant and with that servant’s work? Is anything offered to Christ ever wasted? I thought about the sacrifices of Old Testament times. When a man brought a lamb, the priest laid it on the altar, slit its throat, and burned it. The offering, then, was accepted.

Elliot discovered the secret: the idols we associate with our work must be crushed. Her obedience to show up and do her job every day was a recurring act of worship.

So, if this is true—that Jesus has come as the priest who “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant . . . [and] humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6–8 ESV)—it becomes good news for idolatrous people like us.

It tells us that we too can be free to work with attitudes of humility and obedience. We can see our work and service not for our glory but for God’s. We can be liberated from self-justification and self-validation. We can serve the King of kings and Lord of lords with a spirit of endless joy!

Editor’s note: This article has been adapted from the author’s book, True, Good, & Beautiful, which can be purchased here.