WORK IS PERMEATED with purpose; it is intended to serve God, benefit humankind, and make nature subservient to the moral program of creation.... Therefore we apply our whole being—heart and mind, as well as hand—to the daily job. As God’s fellow workers, we reflect God’s creative activity on Monday no less than on Sunday…. To consider work a channel of divine creation, by which the creature serves God and humanity, carries certain consequences for one’s attitude toward labor. The Christian becomes morally obligated to withhold producing, and even purchasing (since money is simply the conversion of his work into tender) culturally worthless, let alone harmful, items.
— Carl Henry, Aspects of Christian Social Ethics
Source
Lon Solomon: The Exclusivity of Christ for Salvation
You good? Okay? I saw that you were traveling and wondered.
ReplyDeleteHi and thanks for checking in. At the risk of being a monumental bore, am still recovering from a two-month sinus infection----just got off antibiotics which make me feel wretched---as well as a flu bug I caught from my children in New York kast week complete wt loss of voice and wicked cough. Think I'm finally on the mend though weak, but it's safe to say I'm at about as low a point---physically, emotionally and spiritually---right now as I can go. Starting to walk a little and get my strength back...
ReplyDeleteHave had no zeal to blog or even comment during this ordeal---just wanted to rest and be quiet---but hope to get some fire back soon. This happens to me about once every 10 years....
Thanks for asking, mRed, and for your friendship.
This post brought to mind some quotes from Dorothy Sayers:
ReplyDelete"It is the business of the Church to recognize that the secular vocation, as such, is sacred. Christian people, and particularly Christian clergy, must get it firmly into their heads that when a man or woman is called to a particular job of secular work, that is as true vocation as though he or she were called to specifically religious work…In nothing has the Church lost Her hold on reality as in Her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and is astounded to find that, as a result, the secular work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends… "
"Work should be looked upon—not as a drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God…Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God."
"The Church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables. Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly—but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever came out of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth."
I'm so sorry to hear you've not been well and will pray for your continued recovery.
This quote by Sayers and insight is so relevant to all us Christians, Fraydna. Heard Tim Keller at Redeemer weekend-before-last on this very subject and agree we've failed to link the secular job to the sacred task of doing God's glory.
ReplyDeleteThank you for this, and also for your prayers. I am so eager to know of your progress soon.
As you get well, know we are thinking, supporting and praying for you.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much, mRed. Most kindly appreciated!
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