Avodah: Work and Worship

Avodah

Work and Worship

We are very familiar with the word ‘work’.  We go to work.  We work out in the yard.  We have to do work in order to earn a pay check.  Work is often viewed as a necessary evil.  Thus, the extreme, concentrated effort toward preparing for retirement.  That time when we don’t have to work any more.  But we are less accustomed to the word ‘worship’.  If we were to do a word association game I wonder what you would come up with.  My guess is church, hymn singing, hands raised, angels….and if you are biblically-minded at all you might remember people in the Bible falling on their faces before angels, fire on the mountain or even the people in the New Testament who recognized Jesus as God.  

Can you imagine any two words that seem so different?  And yet they have their origins in the same Hebrew word, Avodah.  We are so far removed from the Hebrew culture that this concept is hardly recognizable.  We are more likely to relate to the Greek culture, a little more closely connected in time and space with regards to our Western mindset.  A worldview that would say work is secular and worship is sacred.  But what if the two were more closely aligned in our minds?  Would this cause confusion or perhaps, as I would like to suggest, more certainty in discovering our purpose?

A lot of personality tests will distinguish between two polar opposites: the task-oriented person vs. the people-oriented person.  I have always known myself as the task type.  I like lists.  I like to check the box.  I like to be able to start a job, have a deadline and finish it.  Ironic that God called me into the ministry where I work primarily with people.  Throughout my career I have had to be entirely dependent upon God to help me be effective and not view people as tasks.  I recognize my weakness in this area and it seems that God likes it this way.

My point is that, as a task-oriented person, I have never connected work and worship.  Even though I have been a paid religious professional, my distortion and misunderstanding of the interrelatedness of work and worship has hindered my effectiveness in living out my call and from convincingly preaching that the two are one.  A friend and I looked at Exodus 35(Hebrew culture) the other day and noted how the work that they were commanded to do directly related to the worship of God:

• Clear distinction between six days of work and one day of Sabbath.  Not that one was secular and the other sacred but all was to be done for the glory of God and for our good.
• Our skills and talents are given by God and we are to use them for his glory.
• Our charitable giving is a response to God’s goodness.  

This combats the notion that religious work is more ‘holy’ than secular work.  If we read Scripture with the lens that work and worship are interrelated then we will clearly see that nothing is wholly sacred nor wholly secular but all is holy.  The biblical worldview is that all that is good comes from God.  Exodus 35 teaches that our creativity and ingenuity are what make us human.  When used to the glory of God the most mundane of all tasks can be seen with ultimate purpose.  A job, a career, an occupation…whatever you want to call it…is not just something we do until we don’t have to do anything anymore(retirement), but it’s the human way of being our true selves six days a week.  Then on the seventh we rest.  But all seven days we worship through our work.  

One of my heroes is a man named Dois Rosser, founder of International Cooperating Ministries.  Up until age 65 he built a financial kingdom through car dealerships and smart investments.  Upon ‘retirement’ he knew that God was calling him to do something that would connect his work and worship.  He teamed up with his pastor and together that created a ministry that has built more than 9,000 churches around the world.  He recently passed from this world and bucked the trend that working life ends at 65 by continuing to do what became his lifework for another 33 years.  

Imagine what we can do if we will adopt the worldview that our Avodah is one.  What will we find ourselves doing by discovering our true purpose.

Application:

1. Do you consider your work a grind or can you imagine submitting all you do to a greater purpose?
2. Do you consider yourself to be more task-oriented or people-oriented?  What are the advantages/disadvantages of each?
3. Do regularly practice a Sabbath enabling you to be refreshed for another six days of work?
4. What’s your view of retirement?  What if, like Dois Rosser, we were prepared to really discover our lifework in our fifties and sixties?
5. We hear a lot of talk about doing what you love?  If we grow to understand Avodah wouldn’t it be possible to love whatever we find ourselves doing rather than reaching for something for which we are ill-equipped?

He has filled them with skill to do all kinds of work as engravers, designers, embroiderers in blue, purple and scarlet yarn and fine linen, and weavers—all of them skilled workers and designers.

Exodus 35:35

Another resource:

*http://darrowmillerandfriends.com/2018/07/23/work-worship-go-together/