A home is a place where we want to be. A prison is a place you want to escape but cannot. God created the world to be our home. Yet the way in which we work can turn this home into a prison. That should never happen!

To God, this is a very serious matter. He even made provisions on the very first pages of the Bible to prevent this from happening. God ordered the world so that our labour would contribute something significant to creation. Adam and Eve were to have dominion over the earth. They and all their children would never be done with it. For “the whole earth is full of his glory,” we read in Isaiah. The human race has the delightful task of discovering and developing God’s world through their labour.

So Adam and Eve got to work right away. But what a job! To dig a hole, they had to devise a shovel. To make a rope, they had braid strands of grass together. The challenges that they faced were daunting.

And danger loomed immediately: Adam and Eve might simply live to labour because they had projects to accomplish and chores to finish. How easily they could slip into the pattern of rising early in the morning and labouring late into the night, only to throw themselves into bed, dog-tired, plagued by dreams about the countless tasks that still faced them. It is not hard to imagine them feeling trapped by their work, becoming weary and feeling somewhat hopeless.

Of course, Adam and Eve did not become slaves to their labour in the Garden of Eden. Paradise was their home, not their prison. They laboured for God, rested in the power of his love, and lived deliberately for his glory.

But when sin came, things changed. For then they didn’t just need a shovel to dig the soil, but a hoe to chop the weeds. And because creation had become less cooperative, they needed a sweat band too. When sin came, people would not just live to work, they would work themselves to death! In connection with man’s heavy labour, God said,

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.Genesis 3:19

That is not how we should work: God did not create us only to labour. That is, work should not be our master. We were created in God’s image and through our labour we are still called to bring glory to God.

To prevent us from living only to labour and to encourage us instead to live for God’s glory, God set a pattern in the very first week of creation. God spent six days creating the universe and on the seventh day, He rested. God could work hard. But He could stop working too! He didn’t work because He had to. He wasn’t driven by some compelling force to work. Moses says in Exodus 31:17 that God abstained from work on the seventh day “and was refreshed” (RSV). He was refreshed by enjoying the fruit of his labour.

This is not just an idle fact, but a pattern that God set for us, for He sanctified the seventh day and made it holy. He set apart one day in seven so that like God we might be refreshed. Above all, God wants us to be refreshed by resting for worship, by setting our work aside so that we might discover again that we live not to labour, but we live to worship God. We regain our bearings in the presence of God. When we worship God in church, we rediscover each week that we are precious to God. We are not his slaves, but his children! God’s love for us should be even more powerfully pressed on our hearts when we call upon Him through his Son Jesus Christ, who delivered us from slavery. We may rest in the providential care of a loving Father and in the eternal salvation of a loving Saviour.

Examine your life to be sure that your work is not your master. Do your work diligently, but know that your Father in heaven will take care of you. Go to church to be refreshed in his mighty love and to discover the blessing of resting in God.