The average person will spend approximately 150,000 hours or 40% of waking hours doing some sort of work in his/her lifetime. Is God interested in our work? Many people only think about God on Sunday and don’t consider his concern or presence in our working world. Work, however, is an important part in God’s economy. It is part of what we were created to do and will be part of what we will do in heaven.


Work is one of the ways in which we imitate God. As God labored in creation, so are we to do the same. Before the Fall, God gave man the command to work. “And the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” (Gen. 2:15). In I Chronicles 15 we read of the work that King David did to prepare a place for the ark of God. He also directed the Levites to transport the ark as noted in v.15, “And the children of the Levites bare the ark of God upon their shoulders with the staves thereon, as Moses commanded according to the word of the Lord.” There was much involved in preparing a place for the ark and in delivering it to Asaph and his brethren who would be responsible for the daily work of ministering before the ark. 


The completion of the work was followed by David leading the people in worship of praise and thanksgiving unto the Lord. Likewise, there are plenty of appropriate times to worship the Lord during our work week and not just at church on Sunday. Whether we are a businessperson, stay-at-home parent, retired person, or student, we would all benefit greatly from taking a “praise pause” during the workday as an act of worship to God. 


We see right from the start of the Bible that God is a worker. He was at work in creation, ‘And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made’(Gen. 2:2). We need to be thankful that work is not only a blessing but can also be an act of worship. And remember, the word “retire’ is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. We should count it a privilege to do the Lord’s work and worship him right up until our final breath.