Six Days

We often hear about how God made the Sabbath, a day of rest, and how important it is to take time off, take it easy, relax and reflect on your creator. I don’t want to diminish this, we time to rest and time to slow down. But I also want to point out that we are only supposed to rest one-seventh of the time. God made one day for rest, and six for work.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard people complain about work. It’s hard, it’s not fun, and we have to do it. No one really likes it, yet it is good for us. We need work. More importantly, we were made to work. Work is necessary to a healthy, balanced, Christian life. Jesus was one of the hardest working people on the planet, and we need to follow in his footsteps.

Work does many good things for us, besides earning money for food and water and other important things. I’m not just talking about a job, either. Work means being productive, doing something to contribute to this thing we call the world.

We connect to each other through work. How many of your friends are people you know from work or school (which is also work, you just don’t get paid)? We build relationships by doing things with other people. We learn to give and to cooperate through work, and we learn the joy of doing something for someone else.

Life without work would be like that spaceship on Wall-E, the Pixar movie where humans left Earth and lived for generations on a perpetual cruise. No one knew how to do anything productive, and since they didn’t work, they lost the ability even to walk or help themselves when trouble came. Work makes us strong, and keeps us healthy.

Work teaches us humility. People who don’t work don’t understand how much effort goes into sustaining life. They think they can do anything, and have anything, because they put out no effort to get it. Work teaches us to value what we have, and to understand that everything comes at a price.

There is a Reliant K song that sums it up well. “We have to face the cycle of the double-edged sword of being lazy and being bored, because it’s completely up to us to maintain consciousness.”

We are responsible for getting ourselves up off our rear-ends, getting out into the world, and DOING something. God doesn’t want us to sit back and just enjoy life. He wants us to have joy, yes, but life should never be a vacation. Life is work, whether you’re getting paid for what you do or not. Do something, do it well, and do it for the Lord. It’s the reason you were made.

Spend six days being productive. You only get one to relax. And that’s the way it should be. Because work is good.