Imago Dei Series: Work as Worship

Well, good evening.

I want to paint a picture for you this evening as we start.

And you don't have to answer me directly, but just sort of answering your heart whether or not this is true.

Sunday morning, the church family is gathering and you welcome each other in the name of the Lord.

The fellowship is sweet, it's meaningful, it's encouraging.

The singing begins and it's heartfelt.

And if you're sitting in the front of the church, you can hear it waft over you.

That's an encouragement to those of you that sit in the back to move closer to the front.

The sermon helps you to understand God in new ways and gives you new perspectives on how to live your daily life.

And we all sense that God is in this place in a special way, that somehow the distance between earth and heaven has just collapsed a bit.

That what's happening in this room is important.

It's vital.

It matters.

And then there's Monday morning at 6 a.m.

and the alarm goes off.

And you get yourself out of bed, you grab yourself a cup of coffee, you sit on the LIE, inching along as you try to make your way to work.

You open up your laptop, or you drop off your kids at school, or you clock in somewhere.

And somewhere between the transition of Sunday and Monday morning, something's happened.

Something's faded.

Something's shifted.

You feel like the sacred sense of God's presence has drifted away.

That the sanctuary here is emptied out and you went out with it.

And you went back to the classroom, you went back to the cubicle, you went back to the kitchen, you went back to the construction site, back to regular life.

And you feel like you left all that holy stuff back somewhere else.

That the sacred place is in some different building than you're in on Monday morning, and with different people than you're with on Monday afternoon.

That's a question we often find ourselves wrestling with.

And it's a question about worship.

And the question I want to bring to us this evening is what if everything you believe about worship is too small?

What if we've built, even without realizing it, a wall of separation between what we call worship on a Sunday and what we do Monday through Saturday?

What if that wall of separation was never supposed to be there?

Because one thing that I've noticed as I've served churches and the gospel and believers is that what causes people to feel exhausted is not the fact that there's a lot to do in their life, but there's a sense that what they do in much of their days lacks any meaning or significance.

That they work hard, they provide, they show up, but they can't shake that nagging feeling of it really doesn't matter.

That I'm just filling hours.

Yes, it's taking care of my family, but there's no sense of the transcendent or the meaningful in what I'm doing.

That it's real life.

I want to challenge that thought because I want us to think differently about worship, not by thinking differently about the worship that we have here among God's people, but the worship that goes from Monday to Saturday in everything that we do.

And I want to do so by reintroducing two words, which perhaps when we started this series might have seemed like the kind of words you would leave in a theological discussion or sitting on some shelf in a seminary library, Amago Day.

Those are two words which are in seminary discussions and theological discourse, but they simply mean the image of God.

And so here's what I want to do this evening.

I want to take those two words off of any seminary shelf that you've put them on and bring them into your hands like a set of keys.

Because understanding the image of God changes everything, even your work, perhaps even especially your work.

Because the Mongo Day is not a theological curiosity that's just left for the nerds in the room who want to discuss theology late into the evening without really giving a care or thought to their own their own lives or those around them.

We were made in the image of God.

And one of the primary ways that we can display that is through what we do on earth in our everyday labor.

And here's the big idea for what we're going to be looking at tonight.

Work is not what we do in between our worship.

Work is our worship.

Work is worship when we do it as redeemed image-bearers, doing it for the glory of God and for the good of the world that God loves.

And so tonight we're going to look at four movements.

We're going to look, first of all, at the image of God, what it means, and why it changes our Mondays as much as it changes our Sundays.

We're going to see that work is good before it ever was hard.

We're going to let Paul tell us how to work differently by looking at a couple passages.

And then we're going to zoom out and see the big picture that our work is actually participating in God's redemptive activity in this world itself.

So let's go to Genesis chapter one and let's start where we've started with many of these by seeing what God has to say in this first chapter of Scripture.

Verse 26.

God said, Let us make man in our image according to our likeness.

They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.

So God created man in his image.

He created them in the image of God.

He created them male and female.

And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.

Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.

These words, penned first by Moses, were spoken into the ancient Near East culture and world.

And when we say that, we talk about Egypt, we're talking about Mesopotamia and all the big world powers that were in force in those places.

And in the ancient Near East, they did something that the people who first read the book of Genesis would have understood a lot better than we do.

That kings, when they wanted to assert their authority, did something very specific in distant territories.

When they conquered a land that they couldn't physically go to quickly, they did something to show that that was their place where they ruled and where their will and desires were carried out.

And so they would set up a statue.

They would set up an image of themselves that was carved in stone or carved and cast in some metal, and they would put it in those distant provinces.

And what that would mean to everyone who saw it is that they would understand that where they are is under the domain of this king who has extended his rule to this place.

His authority is present in this place.

He is actually represented as physically there by the statue itself, even though he's not in flesh and blood physically present.

And it's into that world that these words drop, where God speaks and says he will make humanity in his image.

So God is doing something similar to what the ancient Near East culture would have understood, but he's also doing something radically different than what the ancient Near East kings would have done.

Because God doesn't set up a statue on earth to represent him, he makes a people to represent him.

And not just the royalty, and not just the priests, and not just the scholars, not just the successful, everybody.

Everybody.

Every single human being, every single person is a breathing image of the king of the universe.

And we live here to show that this is God's world.

And we are meant to be representatives of his rule, his will, his authority.

Now we've discussed what the image of God means throughout this series, and one of the things that we've said is that the image of God has more to do with who we are than what we do.

We talk about it with terms like it is more ontological rather than functional.

What it means is this that we are stamped as God's representatives no matter what we do.

However, that image can be functionally displayed in several different ways.

It can be displayed by relationships, because God is a relating God.

It can be seen by righteousness because God is a righteous God.

It can be seen in rationality because our God is a God of order and rationality.

But it's also seen in rule.

And if you take a look at this passage, you'll see that very, very clearly.

God repeats Himself three times in talking about us being made in the image of God, but there's something else he repeats twice here.

And that is this rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.

That's mentioned two times in these three verses.

But he also says about what we're to do on this earth.

And he says that we are to be fruitful and to multiply and to subdue this earth.

And so, of all the functions that come with us being image bearers, this idea of representative rule, responsible rule, is one of those things that comes out most clearly here.

Think of it as a vice regent or a viceroy, that we are here appointed by God to govern and care for his territory on his behalf.

That's a pretty significant role, isn't it?

We're not here as autonomous rulers to do what we wish with what's before us.

We're not here as independent ages deciding whatever's best according to our way of thinking, but rather we're representatives of God.

That we're here to extend his rule, his care, and to develop creative order in a way that honors him.

Now that's not a small thing.

And as we'll see, this can be seen even today in different ways.

A nurse managing a floor at 2 a.m.

A teacher shaping the imagination of a 10-year-old, an engineer solving a problem that'll make 10,000 people safer.

A parent managing the daily chaos of a household.

An accountant who does work with meticulous care and accuracy, because integrity counts.

None of those jobs are sacred in the way that we think of sacred.

Nobody's preaching, nobody's leading worship, but all of it is worship because all of it is acting in a way as an image bearer.

And all of this is carrying out something to do with that ruling mandate that we were given in Genesis chapter one: a call to take what God has made, to order it, and develop it for his glory.

And so here's something I want you to sort of put deep into your heart.

We're not daily workers who go to worship.

We are image bearers who worship wherever we go.

And that is a key difference in how we see ourselves and how we see what we do every day.

It's a different way of walking into your office on Monday.

It's a different way of stepping into the job site.

It's a different way of managing the household cares and responsibilities.

All of that doesn't lose the weight of its difficulty, but it certainly changes the significance of it.

Because what we're doing is not just fulfilling a job description.

We are living as image bearers in God's world who have been given a responsibility of taking what He's created, ordering it, developing it, and caring for it in a way that honors Him.

Now let's move to the second point.

Second point is this: that work was made before the fall.

It's not part of the curse.

And I think we need to say that, even though when we read the scriptures, we understand that, but there's something deep within us that somehow thinks that work, well, that's what happened to Adam and Eve after they sinned.

And sometimes it feels like it.

It feels like work is punishment.

But it isn't.

We assume, even against our own scripture reading and theological understanding, that somehow Adam and Eve were tasked with labor.

No, everything in Eden wasn't easy and free-floating before the fall.

But it was meaningful and productive.

There's something that happened, and we'll get to that in a moment, but I want you, I want us to see what God has to say about what happened in Eden before the fall.

So let's look at chapter 2 and verse 15.

And in Genesis chapter 2 and verse 15, the Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to work it and to watch over it.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

There's that word work before Genesis 3.

To work it and to watch over it.

Before the fall, before the snake, before the fruit, before the blame shifting.

Work it.

God places Adam and Eve, his image bearers, into the garden with this task.

Work it and watch over it.

We could use other words like tend it and guard it, but I want to bring something out here that's easily missed.

God uses two words to describe what's happening here.

To work it and to watch over it.

So let's take these two words and see what these actually signify here.

Now note, the work is not a punishment.

But notice what he says.

First of all, work it.

That Hebrew word abad means to work, to serve, to till.

And it's the same word that the Old Testament uses for worship, to serve God, to minister before God.

It's the word that Israel that's used when Israel worships God in the tabernacle.

And it's the same word that's used here about Adam in the garden.

And that's not a coincidence.

That is God telling us something here, right in the vocabulary.

That work is worship.

And worship is work.

That they were never meant to be separated, that they flow together.

And that gets even stronger when we look at the second word, not only to work it, but to watch over it.

And that is the Hebrew word shamar, which means to guard or to keep or to protect, to preserve.

Now these two words, Abad and Shamar, they only appear, appear as a pair, if I can say that without getting my tongue twisted, appear as a pair in a couple places.

They appear as a pair in Numbers 3 and Numbers 18.

And there they describe the duties of the Levitical priest as they're dealing with the service of the tabernacle.

Did you catch that?

These two words, paired up as they are, are in the direct context of Levitical, priestly worship and service.

The same two words.

So here we have Adam in a garden, and then we have priest in a tabernacle.

It's not a coincidence.

This is God's way of giving us context because Genesis Leviticus numbers, Genesis, Exodus Leviticus numbers in Deuteronomy.

How could I do that?

Those are one story.

We read them as five separate books.

We kind of think of them as sort of got their boundaries.

That's one unit.

And here he is writing in a way that these people who understood this book of the law, the five books we call them, as a unit.

And those two words appearing as a pair here and in Leviticus are telling us that Eden is presented as a temple in which the priestly king Adam is to service and render worship to God, just as the Levitical priests are inside the tabernacle, which is the visible place of God's presence among his people, and they too serve God by working and watching over the place.

Now think about that and what it means for the rest of the story.

Adam fails in the garden.

And it's not just a moral failure, it's a worshiping failure.

It's a priestly failure because he was not only to work the garden, he was to watch over it.

And when the tempter came into the garden, he did not keep his priestly duty to guard the garden.

He let the serpent in.

That the priestly activity of worship and work is something that's built into human creation itself.

Which means that whatever the image bearers do, if they do it to the glory of God as redeemed image bearers, and they do it for the purposes of carrying out his will, and they do it in care and guardianship of his world, they're worshiping.

They're carrying out their priestly function of worship, which is exactly why in Exodus 19, God calls the people of Israel a kingdom of priests.

And that's why in 1 Peter chapter 2, the church is called a royal priesthood.

1 Peter 2 · chapter mention

Because it's a priesthood that is more than just offering up God within the context of a public worship service.

It is a priesthood that gives worship to God in all the things that we do to glory.

To the glory of God.

And so that means the garden was a temple.

The tabernacle and the temple were places of God's presence where worship happened.

But so is the office, and so is the classroom, and so is the construction site, and so is the patient's room, and so is the kitchen.

That those are sacred places when the image bearers show up to do God's work.

Now, what the foal introduced was not that work, it was the corruption of that work.

We don't need to go into detail about that tonight, but Genesis 3:17 to 19 talks about us finding futility as we work, that it will be difficult and hard and wearying, that things will oppose us as we work.

Genesis 3:17–19

Thistles will grow and thorns will grow, and we'll eat bread by the sweat of our brow until we work return to the ground.

What Genesis 3 introduced was not work, it was the corruption of work.

Those meetings that go nowhere, those projects that fail, those co-workers that steal your ideas, the job that only pays enough for you to barely get by.

That feeling of futility is part of the fall, not part of the created order.

In Ecclesiastes, the preacher there describes that sort of futility and difficulty.

Vanity, vanity, emptiness, all is vanity.

But you shouldn't stop reading Ecclesiastes with the first words.

Because in Ecclesiastes, he also talks about the gift of God.

Here is the gift that a man works and eats his bread and enjoys his wife all the days of his feudal life.

That in the midst of this, there's a way of understanding worship, even in a fallen world.

And he hints at it, but the New Testament expands on that.

And we can worship when we've been given eyes to see the glory of God in the ordinary.

And I think that's what Ecclesiastes is striving at.

To see that fixing the pipe or grading the papers or staying in a little bit extra late for the patient, or balancing the books, or staying staying in the middle of those deep mathematical problems to try to figure out that engineering puzzle can all be holy activities, ordinary as they are.

We need to remember also that Jesus, the Son of God, for the bulk of his life, was happy to carry out his days being a carpenter.

That he was happy to build things with his hands, happy to show up at the job site, if we could put it that way, happy to deal with customers and well, their ideas of how things should have been built rather than the way he did.

It's not incidental.

And God came here and he worked for the bulk of his days.

And when he rose from the garden, where did he appear?

To Mary Magdalene.

Where did she see him?

In a garden.

That's not a coincidence either.

And it's not a coincidence that it was in a garden that before the cross that Jesus said, Not my will, but your will be done.

Because in a garden, the first Adam said, Not your will, but mine be done.

And in this garden, Jesus is saying, Not my will, but your will be done.

This second Adam reappears in a garden.

And he shows us that there is a redemption that comes through him.

And that those who are in him are placed back into a garden called this world.

And we are to carry out his responsibilities, just like our Savior did.

And that leads us to a third point that work can be worship.

And so let's go to Colossians chapter 3 for just a moment here.

Colossians 3 · chapter mention

Paul is writing this letter to the church at Colossae.

And on the back half of the letter, where he talks about the implications of all the theology that's been built into the front half, one of the things that he lands on is found in verses 23 and 24.

Whatever you do, do it from the heart, as something done for the Lord and not for people, knowing that you'll receive the reward of the inheritance from the Lord.

You serve the Lord Christ.

Now, one of the things to keep in mind here is when we think about this, is who he's talking to.

Just move your eyes up just a little bit into verse 22.

Slaves.

It's to slaves that primarily he said these things.

Whatever you do, do it from the heart.

Something done for the Lord and not for people.

Knowing you'll receive a reward from an inheritance from the Lord, for you serve the Lord Christ.

Slaves.

Probably in their day the most invisible, thankless, dignity-stripping job you could get.

These are not people with career goals, quarterly reviews, the freedom to quit if the work culture is bad.

These are people who have no choice about where they work, how they're treated, and whether anybody at all honors the labor they've done.

And it's Paul in the middle of this, not naive about their situation at all, who looks at them and says, Well, you're doing is for the Lord.

Now, follow the logic of that.

If the most disempowered, invisible, overlooked workers in the world of the day can do their labor to the Lord and receive the glory inheritance of what that means, not only for the time, but for eternity.

There's not a single one of us who are doing something that can't also be brought into the realm of this, right?

That no matter what we're doing, none of it's beneath the calling of doing it as to the Lord.

No position too low, no task too small, no role too hidden.

Because all of us can enter into it.

Now notice how he says we should act.

Do it from the heart, from the very depths of who we are.

Not grudgingly, not performing when somebody's watching us, not watching the clock to check out as soon as we can, not doing the minimum required to be technically fulfilling our job description, but from the deep place of the heart.

What would Monday look like if you brought that attitude in?

What would that next meeting look like if you thought of it as an act of worship?

What would that email that you have to answer look like if you were doing it for the Lord and not the boss who wanted you to carry out that responsibility?

What if it changed the way you treat the person that shows up at the counter, who's demanding, and you in a service industry have to deal with the front face of the public?

But you realized we're actually receiving a person made in the image of God, and me as a redeemed image bearer are going to treat that person with dignity and respect, even if I don't receive it.

Because this is what Paul's saying.

He's saying that the real worship that happens is not just what you do here, it's what you do everywhere because you are serving the Lord Christ.

There's that work and watch responsibility echoing out of the book of Genesis here.

So the nurse who's on hour 11 of a 12-hour shift and bends down to help a patient in need, that can be worship.

The stay-at-home parent who reads the same board book 40 times that day because your two-year-old wants to hear it again.

And I got a taste of that just a week ago.

Didn't get to finish half of those 42 readings.

We moved to book 3, 4, 5, 20 before we got back to finishing the first one.

But doing that can be worship.

Or what about that owner who stays up late making sure that all the employees get paid, even if the profit margins are thinning out this quarter?

Or what about the retiree who volunteers to watch the grandchildren?

Or who steps into the place of the food pantry?

Or the student who takes an assignment and does it honestly and doesn't cut corners.

Those can all be places of worship.

Because worship isn't just what happens here.

Worship is what happens as image bearers when we work and watch over what God has put in front of us to do.

And the last point I want us to look at is this that our work participates in God's redemption in this world.

And for that, I want to go to Titus chapter 2.

Titus 2 · chapter mention

And this might be a bit of a repeat of what Micah gave us just a little while ago when we looked at this passage.

But let's zoom all the way out here and see the biggest picture.

That God is at work in this world right now.

And God is moving throughout human history, even today, and He's drawing all of creation toward a particular place, one in which there will be on display absolute and continual wholeness and healing and restoration.

That the arc of the biblical story will go from the garden to the garden city, that it will go from the creation to the new creation, that it will go from a place where God met his people to a place where he and his people will never be separated, right?

The biggest picture.

And right in the middle of this huge picture of what God is doing is today and Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday.

And he's invited us to be partners in the work of redemption that he's doing.

And so he writes to Titus and helps this church through Titus to see the responsibilities of their work.

And in verses 9 and 10, he returns back to those group of people who are doing the most invisible, most thankless, most dignity-stripped work imaginable, the slaves.

And here's what he says in verses 9 and 10 of Titus 2.

Slaves are to submit to their masters in everything, and to be well pleasing, not talking back or stealing, but demonstrating utter faithfulness so that they may adorn the teaching of God, our Savior, in everything.

And he uses that word adorn, which in the Greek is cosmos, the world, the ordered, arranged universe.

And we use the word for cosmetics, don't we?

That's the same word.

To dress something up in a way that draws the eye to something else, right?

That's what cosmetics do.

We cover over blemishes and we draw people's eye to the things that we want them to see.

But here it is to something that's worth seeing in an eternal expression, the teaching about God our Savior.

And what Paul is saying here is staggering.

He's saying the quality of our work, the faithfulness with which we do it, the integrity in which we carry it out, the way we show up, the way we treat people that we work with or that we face with, and we deal with them in honesty and care, all of that makes the gospel beautiful.

All of that is showing something about God who is a savior to this world who's watching.

That means our work, if I can put it this way, is our gospel wardrobe.

It is the clothes, the adornment, the beautification of this teaching about God.

And he's saying this again to people who are not able to choose their job, who are not able to update their resume, who are not able to move on if the work culture is bad.

These are slaves.

And he's saying to them, in the middle of this oppressive situation, that how they conduct themselves in the middle of that can show the beauty of the gospel.

It's a glorious statement.

And that is, if even the most constrained, the most uncelebrated, the most invisible people in the culture can actually be the ones who put the gospel on display, then so can we and what we're doing.

Now, in point three, we talked about these slaves, and we talked about serving the Lord Christ from the heart, and that's the inward orientation.

Titus chapter two is the outward orientation.

It is what the work that we do says to the rest of the room.

And it tells them something about our God.

Because they watch our life, they want to know how we're going to handle that mistake.

They're going to watch to see if we're telling the truth rather than the lie that's easier to say.

They're watching to see if we treat the person at the bottom of the organizational chart the same way we treat everybody else.

They want to see what shapes us.

And if what shapes us is different than how they would normally act, they're going to go, why?

What is that?

What makes that different?

And there's an opportunity to talk about the hope that lies within us.

Now, I don't say this to condemn any of us, but to understand this awesome responsibility and privilege that it is for our work to be a display of the teaching of God before we even get a chance to speak the gospel itself.

Think about it from the other side.

A person who claims to follow Jesus and yet cuts corners, takes credit for work that's not their own, who gossips in the break room, who eases back when the boss isn't watching, that treats people beneath them with contempt, they're also saying something about God.

What they're saying is that they're making the gospel ugly rather than beautiful.

They're using Paul's words in reverse and obscuring rather than adorning God's teaching.

But if we do the work even when no one is able to see beyond the wall in which we're working, when the nurse stays two minutes past the end of her shift because the patient needs those few minutes, when the manager goes to bat for the team when the pressure is on him to let people go in order to increase the profit margin, when the student turns in the honest work and the work they actually did, the work that they can stand behind, and when the business owner absorbs the loss so the employees don't have to, those can say a lot of things about the teaching of God, our Savior.

Every act of faithfulness, every moment of integrity, every instance of treating a human person with care and dignity can be a moment in which we are saying to this world, God saves and God changes, He delivers because He loves, He cares, He redeems.

That's work.

As work as it's meant to be.

To work and to tend the garden, to work it and to watch over it.

So wherever you go, remember this: you're going deeper into the temple, this world, and you are worshiping while you work.

Let's pray together, Father.

We do pray that you'd help us to orient ourselves in the way that your word calls us to, to be able to say, Lord, this is for you.

Or Lord, use me today to display you and to show the beauty of the gospel in what I'm doing.

Father, I pray that each of us in that way would turn the ordinary into an offering and make Monday a day of worship as much as we look forward to Sunday and gathering.

And we pray this in the name of Jesus Christ.

Amen.