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Ep 120: Faith and work (Ecc 2:18-26).
Pray
Read: Ecc 2:18-26.
Meditation
One very important question every Christian should ask is this: What are you supposed to do once you have become a Christian? What should or will change in our lives? Is it only our Sunday mornings that change, or does being a Christian shape our life during the week as well?
Some imagine that it means becoming hyper spiritual. Perhaps it involves becoming disconnected from the things of this world, going to Bible studies every day instead of working, using every possible spare moment to read the Bible with as much fasting as possible, or even withdrawing from everything and joining a monastery.
Others imagine that being a Christian simply means adding certain things to an otherwise ordinary life. We still do mostly the same things as before. We have families, we go to work, we buy a house, yet we also include a fair amount of Christian activity. We go to church, we join a Bible study, and we try to have a daily devotional time. Christianity becomes a kind of “segment” of our lives from this perspective.
But what does it actually mean in real, everyday life to become a Christian?
I want to make a little bit of sense of this question in this meditation, and here is where I want to start. I want to begin by asking you to consider what it is that actually changes when you become a Christian. I have one word for you. Listen carefully: everything. Absolutely everything about your life should change in some way. Let me explain what I mean by that.
In 2 Corinthians 5:17 we read, Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away; behold, the new has come. When we come to Christ, repent of our sins, put our faith in him, when his blood covers us and God forgives us, and we submit our lives to him as Lord, what happens is that we are, as Jesus says in John 3, reborn. Something basic and fundamental in our very being changes, our very spirit receives life. This spiritual rebirth, which occurs when someone comes to Christ, can, should, and will change everything.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Becoming a new creation in Christ does not mean that we cease to be human. We still eat dinner, have a job, raise kids. In short, we still live in God’s world. But the way we view these things, the way we live in all these areas of life, undergoes a paradigm shift. You could say we gain a Christian worldview, we begin operating from new assumptions about life and the world. We view everything from the perspective of faith in Christ, and this change should flow out into everything we do. In Romans 12:2 the Bible calls this renewing your mind.
Raising children, for example, should look very different for Christians than it does for those who live without God. Living as a Christian single should look very different from living as a godless single. The books we read, the movies we watch or choose not to watch, will be informed, shaped, and defined by our faith in Christ. Everything we do will, in this sense, be different, changed, and redeemed.
We cannot address all of the connections to this issue in this meditation, we’ll follow up with a closer look in the next few. Overall, however, we see in this passage that there is one particular area of life that Solomon focuses on. It is a big area, one where we spend a huge portion of our time. It touches on a fundamental aspect of human identity. It goes back to one of the main things we were created to do in Genesis 1. In modern terms, we simply call it: “work.”
In some form or another, many of us go to work each day, or have spent or will spend most of our lives doing it. There are office workers, labourers, garbage collectors, missionaries, and home makers, which is a vocation too by the way.
So how should we as Christians think about and do our work? What does it mean to honour Christ our Saviour in the workplace, as we pursue a vocation? Have you given much thought to the relationship between your work and your faith? If not, well it is high time to start. Ecclesiastes, not to mention plenty of other passages in scripture, give plenty of attention to work. If you have thought about this before, then let’s open the scriptures, and the wise will become wiser still. We’re going to be giving this topic some prayerful consideration across the course of the next few meditations and see what wisdom Solomon will bring us. SDG.
Prayer of Confession & Consecration
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By Reformed devotions from all of scripture.Pray
Read: Ecc 2:18-26.
Meditation
One very important question every Christian should ask is this: What are you supposed to do once you have become a Christian? What should or will change in our lives? Is it only our Sunday mornings that change, or does being a Christian shape our life during the week as well?
Some imagine that it means becoming hyper spiritual. Perhaps it involves becoming disconnected from the things of this world, going to Bible studies every day instead of working, using every possible spare moment to read the Bible with as much fasting as possible, or even withdrawing from everything and joining a monastery.
Others imagine that being a Christian simply means adding certain things to an otherwise ordinary life. We still do mostly the same things as before. We have families, we go to work, we buy a house, yet we also include a fair amount of Christian activity. We go to church, we join a Bible study, and we try to have a daily devotional time. Christianity becomes a kind of “segment” of our lives from this perspective.
But what does it actually mean in real, everyday life to become a Christian?
I want to make a little bit of sense of this question in this meditation, and here is where I want to start. I want to begin by asking you to consider what it is that actually changes when you become a Christian. I have one word for you. Listen carefully: everything. Absolutely everything about your life should change in some way. Let me explain what I mean by that.
In 2 Corinthians 5:17 we read, Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away; behold, the new has come. When we come to Christ, repent of our sins, put our faith in him, when his blood covers us and God forgives us, and we submit our lives to him as Lord, what happens is that we are, as Jesus says in John 3, reborn. Something basic and fundamental in our very being changes, our very spirit receives life. This spiritual rebirth, which occurs when someone comes to Christ, can, should, and will change everything.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Becoming a new creation in Christ does not mean that we cease to be human. We still eat dinner, have a job, raise kids. In short, we still live in God’s world. But the way we view these things, the way we live in all these areas of life, undergoes a paradigm shift. You could say we gain a Christian worldview, we begin operating from new assumptions about life and the world. We view everything from the perspective of faith in Christ, and this change should flow out into everything we do. In Romans 12:2 the Bible calls this renewing your mind.
Raising children, for example, should look very different for Christians than it does for those who live without God. Living as a Christian single should look very different from living as a godless single. The books we read, the movies we watch or choose not to watch, will be informed, shaped, and defined by our faith in Christ. Everything we do will, in this sense, be different, changed, and redeemed.
We cannot address all of the connections to this issue in this meditation, we’ll follow up with a closer look in the next few. Overall, however, we see in this passage that there is one particular area of life that Solomon focuses on. It is a big area, one where we spend a huge portion of our time. It touches on a fundamental aspect of human identity. It goes back to one of the main things we were created to do in Genesis 1. In modern terms, we simply call it: “work.”
In some form or another, many of us go to work each day, or have spent or will spend most of our lives doing it. There are office workers, labourers, garbage collectors, missionaries, and home makers, which is a vocation too by the way.
So how should we as Christians think about and do our work? What does it mean to honour Christ our Saviour in the workplace, as we pursue a vocation? Have you given much thought to the relationship between your work and your faith? If not, well it is high time to start. Ecclesiastes, not to mention plenty of other passages in scripture, give plenty of attention to work. If you have thought about this before, then let’s open the scriptures, and the wise will become wiser still. We’re going to be giving this topic some prayerful consideration across the course of the next few meditations and see what wisdom Solomon will bring us. SDG.
Prayer of Confession & Consecration
Get full access to Old things New. at rcbhpastor.substack.com/subscribe