13 Work
Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him!
PSALM 33:8
John is never at home. Jenny, his wife, has gotten used to having dinner alone with the kids and making excuses for John’s absence at all the evening activities she attends by herself.
To say that Frank is driven and aggressive would be the understatement of the century. He has left a trail of bodies behind him as he has climbed the corporate ladder.
Gina has been in a significant depression since her firm downsized and permanently furloughed her. She can barely get out of bed in the morning and says she feels like her life is over.
Bill can’t believe that he makes as much as he makes. He never imagined he would experience such affluence, yet he is still deeply in debt.
Sharon says that she has never been satisfied with any job she has ever had because she is always able to spot one that appears more exciting and challenging.
Both Sam and Freda work sixty hours a week. They have little free time to enjoy their beautiful home, and they have always had to hire help to care for their children.
Peter keeps saying that when he reaches a certain level of success, he will cut back and get more involved with the ministries of his church, but even as his success exceeds his goals, church involvement never happens.
Tim had a dream of owning his own business, a dream he finally achieved. That business demands his attention 24/7, and his wife and children feel his absence daily.
Sean hasn’t taken a vacation in years. He says he wants to, but he just can’t seem to break free from his duties to do it.
Sally lost her job, and when she did, she lost her desire to ever have a job again. She feels guilty that she is not working but not guilty enough to do something about it.
Jose learned to value hard work at the feet of his father, but even though he works constantly, he has little to show for it.
Mike is the boss but not the kind that employees love. He is known for being endlessly demanding and seldom encouraging, and his business has suffered from a constant turnover of employees.
Kim told Tom, her pastor-husband, that he should just put a bed in his office because he’s never at home.
Can I be so bold as to ask, what’s going on with your world of work? Is your life of work balanced appropriately? Do spiritual and relational commitments suffer because of your job? Could it be that you’re asking work to do for you what it cannot do? How often do you feel torn between the demands of work and the responsibilities of family?
Work and the Limits of Time
People often propose that workaholics have a “priorities” problem, and while I understand that, I don’t find that critique specific or deep enough. Often people are counseled to list their priorities from top to bottom, and making such a list may be helpful for gaining insight, but it simply doesn’t lead to a solution. Let me suggest two reasons why.
First, none of us lives “listologically.” By that I mean that you don’t list your priorities and then get up every day and start at the top of the list again. Everything on the list is important in some way, and nothing on the list can be responsibly ignored. Your life is simply not a list of priorities but rather the coming together of three inescapable dimensions of calling. You are called to relationships, you are called to work, and you are called to God. Each of these is a significant expression of how God calls every one of us to live. In a way, none of them is more important than the other since each exists because of divine calling. So rather than a list, you have three intersecting, overlapping domains of godly living: the social domain, the labor domain, and the spiritual domain (although everything is spiritual). Think of these as a triad of overlapping circles, where each circle connects with the other two.
Yet you have a limited amount of time to devote to these domains—24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 30 days in a month, and 365 days in a year. So if one activity expands over a longer span of time, it can only expand because you have contracted the duration of another activity. Almost no one says, “Work is a greater priority to me than family, so I am going to put family lower on my list.” Rather, the demands of work gradually begin to gobble up more and more of my time, and as they do, because I don’t have limitless time, I am left with less time for my family. Few believers would say that work is more important than their relationships with God and his people, but their life of work expands to the point where they have little time left to do anything but casually attend the church to which they once committed themselves. It is impossible for one area of my calling to expand without it causing other areas of equally important calling to contract. So it’s important to ask not what your priorities are but if your world of work has expanded to the point that it has caused a harmful contraction of your time with your family and your pursuit of God? This seems to me to be a much more helpful way of thinking about the schedule tensions that so many of us experience when it comes to work, family, and church.
Second, listing your priorities doesn’t get at causality. The question we need to ask and answer is, why are so many of us closet workaholics? Why are so many of us so driven when it comes to our careers? Why are so many of us working to the detriment of family and church? Why do so many successful Christians carry around with them marital and parental guilt? Why is it so hard for us to keep work in its proper, God-designed place?
Work and Identity
I want to say what I have said again and again in this book, but in a different way. I don’t think that the workaholics among us have first a priorities or a schedule problem; I think that they have an awe problem, which results in a relationally and spiritually detrimental schedule problem. Only awe of God is capable of keeping work in its rightful place. Let me explain.
I want to repeat something I said earlier in this book because it is central to what we are talking about right now. In this book, we have focused on a theology of awe, and here’s how that theology relates to you. Good theology doesn’t just define who God is; it also defines who we are as his children. It’s not just that God is in every way awesome in glory, but that he is all that he is for you by grace! God’s awesome glory has been showered down on you and me by grace. He is awesome in power for us. He is awesome in sovereignty for us. He is awesome in mercy for us. He is awesome in wisdom for us. He is awesome in love for us. He is awesome in holiness for us. He is awesome in patience for us. He is awesome in faithfulness for us. He is awesome in grace for us. What he is, he is for us!
So the grace that has connected me to him has also freed me from looking for identity anywhere else. I am what I am because of who he is for me by grace. In his awesome glory, I really do find everything I need. I do not have to look elsewhere for the spiritual resources I need for living. I do not have to hunt elsewhere for meaning and purpose for my life. I do not have to look elsewhere to define who I am. I do not have to look elsewhere to measure my potential. I do not have to look elsewhere to find that inner sense of peace and well-being. Why? Because I have found all those things in him. Awe of him liberates me from a life-distorting bondage to awe of anything else. Remember, you and I tend to be in awe of what we are convinced will give us life (identity, meaning, purpose, pleasure, etc.).
So awe amnesia will leave you with an identity vacuum that you will fill with something in your life. If you forget who God is (i.e., you misdirect your awe), you will not know who you are as his child (i.e., you will lose your identity), and you will look horizontally for what you have already been given vertically. Now here’s the application to the topic of this chapter: because work is such a huge and significant dimension of our lives, it becomes very tempting for us to look for our identity there. And when you look to work for your identity, you will find it very hard to resist its challenges, demands, and promises of reward.
The Horizontal Identities of Work
1. Identity in achievement/success. “I am what I have accomplished” is a very tempting place to look for identity. Success makes you feel able and competent. A trail of achievement seems to make a statement about who you are and what you are able to do. We generally celebrate successful people as our personal and cultural heroes. We tend to see success as always a good thing. But when success becomes your personal savior—that is, the place where you are looking for life—it becomes very hard to harness your drive for it. If you look to achievement to feel good about your life, to feel secure, or to have a life of meaning and purpose, then you will be dissatisfied with today’s success. The buzz of today’s success will fade, and you’ll need the next success to keep you going and another success to follow it. You will be looking incessantly for the next mountain to conquer. Without realizing it, success will have morphed from something you enjoyed to something you cannot live without. Your heart that once desired success will now become ruled by it. Because of this, you will tend to go where success leads you, willing to invest whatever time, energy, and relationships you need to invest to get it.
Here’s where it all gets dangerous. Here’s where you begin to steal time away from your family, spiritual, and church commitments to get another step closer to the success that now rules your heart. I have spent lots of time with guilt-ridden absentee mothers and fathers who were driven by success and are now looking back with a huge burden of regret. I have talked with many men who sacrificed their marriages on the altar of success. I have talked with many people who still call themselves Christians but have an occasional Sunday-morning relationship with their faith because they worshiped every day at the throne of another god called achievement. Only when awe of God has redefined you as his child and given you a lasting and secure identity will you be able to keep something like a natural hunger for success in its proper place.
2. Identity in power/control. “I am in control; therefore, I am” is a seductive place to look for identity. In a world where most of us have so little control and where our lives often seem out of control, control is a very powerful thing. In a world where most of us have a variety of people who tell us what to do every day, it is intoxicating to be the person in power, the one doing the commanding. In a world where you rarely know what is coming around the corner, it is tempting to see the “good life” as predictable and controlled. So how do you assure yourself that you will have the good life? The answer is easy: by working yourself into a position of power over people and things.
But identity in self-sovereignty is a dangerous thing. A wife finds no comfort in being ruled by a power-hungry, controlling husband. What she really wants is a husband who loves her. She will be comfortable in his leadership if it is an expression of servant love. Children aren’t drawn to a dad who gives more rules than affection. They don’t find comfort in a father who is demanding, critical, or always needing to be right because he always needs to be in control. The children of this kind of dad don’t feel loved; they feel used. They feel that what their father does is done for him, not for their good. Workers never develop an appreciative loyalty toward a power-hungry boss. They will resent his constant, success-driven demands. They will hate the fact that no achievement is ever enough. No pastor is ever thankful to have a power-hungry, controlling, success-driven person as a member of his leadership team. That person will always end up creating needless conflict and division.
People who have attached their identity to success always leave a trail of personal and spiritual carnage behind them. On the contrary, awe of God teaches me that my life is under perfect control and that One of inestimable power rules all the things that I would otherwise want to rule in order to feel secure. Power and control are miserable places to find identity, yet since my life of work is a place to establish power and control, it is very hard not to work more than I should just to get them.
3. Identity in affluence/possessions. “I am the size of the pile of stuff I have accumulated” is a dangerous place to look for identity. What are the cultural markers of success and, therefore, the markers of identity? When we picture the successful person, don’t we think of the big, beautiful house (lavishly furnished, of course), the luxury cars (you’ve got to have more than one), the expensive wardrobe, and the fine watches and jewelry? These are the images of success that the media puts before us every day. And because we are physical people living in a physical world, and because God has given us the capacity to recognize and enjoy beauty, it is tempting to identify the “good life” as a life filled with beautiful things. Now again, the desire for beautiful things is not evil in itself. In fact, when I appreciate beauty, I mirror the Creator, whose artistic hand is the source of everything beautiful. I am designed to appreciate beautiful things, but I must not attach my identity to how many of those things I possess, and I must not let my heart be ruled by them.
If you’ve attached your identity to material possessions and physical affluence, you will spend the bulk of your waking hours seeking to gain them, maintain them, use them, enjoy them, and keep them. And because you are constantly working to increase and maintain your pile of stuff, other areas of your life will suffer. You may have a beautiful house, but you will never have time to enjoy it, and your family will generally dwell there without you. You may have an amazing car, but that car will seldom transport you to your church to participate in its many ministries, because you just won’t have the time. You will tend to live in debt, because your desire for the next thing will always exceed the size of your paycheck. Looking to physical possessions to give you identity is potentially destructive. Only when you are living in awe of the One who created and owns everything will you be able to rest as his child in the knowledge that he will faithfully provide every good thing that you need. And only when your heart is satisfied in him can you be freed from looking for spiritual satisfaction in the fleeting pleasures of the physical world. When you’re satisfied in him, you will be liberated from working constantly in order to possess more of what you hope will give you identity.
Universal Temptations
It’s important to humbly admit that all these things tempt us. I know they tempt me. I tend to be driven and tend to take too much personal credit for my achievements. I forget that every achievement points to God’s awesome glory. I could not achieve anything without the body that he has given me, the gifts he has bestowed upon me, the control he has over me and my world, and the grace that daily rescues me from me. My successes should depend on my awe of him rather than tempting me to be in awe of me.
I wish I could say that I don’t like power or don’t enjoy being in control. I wish I could say that I don’t need to be right or have the last word. I wish I could say that I am okay when my life is chaotic, when unexpected things enter my door, or when control over a situation is ripped out of my hands. I wish I could say that I never wonder what God is doing and always trust him when life makes no sense. I wish I could say that I find more joy in being a servant than in being the decision maker. I wish self-sacrificing love was always a greater treasure to me than ruling the day and having my say. I wish I could say all these things, but I can’t. As I near the end of this book, I am deeply aware that all the battles of awe described in it rage on in my heart. I become an awe amnesiac, and when I do, I tend to work way too hard at trying to get from the people, situations, and things around me what I can only get from the God of awesome glory, who is my Savior.
I would like to think that I have set the world of physical things in its proper place, but that is not always the case. There are still times when I eat too much, spend too much, covet what someone else has, or wish that I made more so I could spend more on what my eyes are able to see and my heart is tempted to crave. Yes, I am a lot better at saying no to myself than I once was. And I know that it never works to look for spiritual heart satisfaction in physical things. But the temptation remains, and my heart is still susceptible to it.
As I have stated before, my problem is not that I live in a world awash in physical beauty. My problem is not that I have been wired to recognize and delight in that beauty. No, my problem is that when my heart is not taking in and being satisfied by the awesome beauty of my Lord, I will look for beauty elsewhere to satisfy me. Remember, every beautiful physical thing has been designed by God to point you to the incomparable beauty found in him. You see, when I don’t let awe of God give my heart rest and define me as his child, I will seek identity in things like success and achievement, power and control, and possessions and affluence, and I will work like crazy to get them, leaving a trail of relational and spiritual destruction behind me.
Workaholism is not a need problem. It’s not a schedule problem, a gift problem, or an opportunity problem. It happens when the awe of God is replaced by the awe of something else. When I forget that God in all his awesome glory is all that he is for me by grace, I will look for life somewhere other than in him.
What the Awe of God Teaches You about Your Work
When you require yourself to gaze upon and consider God’s awesome glory, it will teach you things that will help you put your work in its proper place.
1. The gifts that you employ in your work come from and belong to God. Work is not about applying your abilities to achieve the life you have always dreamed of. Such an approach to work is scarily self-focused. Awe of God teaches you that work is the regular place where God calls you to be a good steward of the gifts, opportunities, and abilities he has given you. Since God has given you these gifts, you need to exercise them in submission to his will and for the sake of his glory. So how can you use these gifts in your work in a way that recognizes God as the giver and submits to the commands, values, and principles of his Word?
2. The time that you invest in work belongs to the Lord. I must recognize that God, in his awesome glory, is the only being in the universe who exists in timelessness. He has created me to live in and for a certain time and place. I must do all he has called me to do within the limits of the time he has given me. Since my time belongs to him, I have to live with the awareness that if my world of work expands, it will expand into the space already occupied by other things to which God has called me. I must then be careful to invest my time in a way that recognizes him and submits to all he has called me to do.
3. You are called to live for something bigger than yourself. Awe of God teaches me that my life is enormously bigger than merely my life. By grace, God has connected me to things that are huge and eternal. I am not at the center of things. What I want should not be the principal motivator of what I do and how I spend my time. The choices and investment I make in my world of work must always submit to the reality that I have been called to the building of a kingdom that is not my own. Success is not about how well I’ve been able to build my own little kingdom but about the degree to which I’ve done all I’ve done in the service of a greater King.
4. Success is not about accruing power but about resting in God’s power. The most successful person is the person who knows his place. The most successful person is the person who humbly submits all that she has and all that she does to the power of One greater than her. Success is not about using my world of work to create personal power and control. Success is about recognizing God’s control and using my gifts for his purpose, accepting the power that comes my way as a stewardship from him. Success also means recognizing that whatever power I have is not independent power to use however I wish to use it. All human power is representative power. God grants me this power and calls me to use it in a way that is consistent with values that he makes clear in his Word.
5. God is too wise and loving ever to call you to one area of responsibility that will necessitate you being irresponsible in another. Awe teaches me that I can never blame God for the consequences of my bad choices. God will never call me to a work life that makes biblical commitments to my family and my church impossible. If it seems impossible for me to balance my life of work with doing what God calls me to do in my family and church life, I am in the situation not because God’s calls are unmanageable but because I am seeking to get things out of work that I should not. And when I do that, I will work too much and too long, and other places in my life will suffer.
6. By grace, God welcomes you to rest in the knowledge that you will find everything you need in him. Awe of God teaches me that, by grace, my life of work can now be an expression of rest and not worry. Rather than your life of work being driven by “I’ve got to have _________,” it can now be shaped by “Look at the amazing things I have been given.” Rather than work being driven by anxious need, it can now be shaped by worshipful gratitude. Yes, you are committed to work because God calls you to labor, but as you work, you can rest in his covenantal commitment to meet every one of your needs.
Many of our work lives are out of whack, so it is important for us to remember that this is not a priorities problem but an awe problem. Celebrate that you are not in this battle by yourself. In fact, God continues to battle for us even when we don’t have the sense to battle for ourselves. His grace is just that awesome.