Faith and Work

Holy Trinity Church, Huddersfield, Sunday 3rd November 2019

I got to church good and early today, on a bright but cool autumnal morning in a good mood despite the cold and damp penetrating the arthritis of my right foot. Once inside the building the warmth and dryness caused the pain to recede to minimal levels. I was playing percussion today and so arrived at the end of the first service just in case anything needed setting up again. It didn’t, everything was how it had been left after the practice on Friday. The worship band was complemented after the service and I got personal compliments.

The sermon, the third in a series Going for God, was about Faith and Work, which I have also used as a heading for this blog, despite not liking titles made up of two abstract nouns. Abstract nouns can mean different things to different people, I just find that titles made up of two of them are not being clear. It is, unfortunately, common practice to use this form in churches, not just in my church, but generally: Come on churches, you are supposed to be communicating the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the world, you should be communicating better than this. Rant over.

The sermon did explain what the title was about. It was about being a Christian and having a job.

People spend 90,000 hours in work on average, plus an extra 14,000 hours commuting. On top of that people can be expected to do extra work in their own time, writing reports of reading and replying to emails. The boundaries between work and rest are blurred. Work can be a source of stress.

But God created us to work. Not as a hard taskmaster but he gave Adam tasks. We are designed to work. We are hardwired with a desire to work. But so much of the world is corrupted by sin. Because of the fall, the beautiful thing of work was corrupted.
In Christ, none of our work is in vain.

There is a tendency in Christians to compartmentalise our lives, to see the world of God and of the church as two separate worlds that do not overlap. This would be wrong, God is involved in all of our lives. We are all in full time Christian ministry. Our whole lives are working for God. When lives are lived like that work becomes worship.