Wisdom
Jason Cherry
Jun 23, 2025
Human work doesn’t begin with God’s curse upon it but with God’s creative energy. Work is not a punishment for sin, but a noble calling.¹
Since work is God’s assignment given to people, work is part of man’s calling, function, and way of life; a participation in God's providential care for creation.
Work is not only about making money; it’s also about doing good (Mt. 22:36-40).
If a man can only make it through a day of work because he promises himself a stiff drink when he gets home, then the brewed elixir has become that man’s final end that gives tolerable meaning to his work.²
Work is inescapable. Humans must be clothed, fed, and sheltered. This doesn’t happen apart from someone’s labor.
A man skillful in his work will stand before kings rather than obscure men (Proverbs 22:29), which means that the quality of a person’s work determines their place in the hierarchy of society.³
Work is most fulfilling when pursued as an end in itself, not merely as a means of gain; for while labor done solely for money often rings hollow, work directed toward the good of others engages the soul and ennobles the worker.⁴
A workaholic is someone blind to leisure. They make their work into a cult, a religion, as if work included the whole field of human existence, activity, and life. This changes the nature of human existence because it makes “worker” the whole conception of man.⁵
The workplace is one of the clearest arenas in which common grace operates, where Christians and non-Christians each can contribute to the flourishing of society.⁶
Work is performed as part of a complicated and bifurcated reality. God is the source and norm of labor, yet labor in the fallen creation is polluted with sin.⁷
God is glorified when the doctor tries to be the best in the world, the engineer the best in the world, and the plumber the best in the world.
God redeems people to do good things (Ps. 125:4; Eph. 2:10). Work is a gift, a blessing, and a duty. God made man to perform, which means men who don’t find joy in productive activity should ask if they are rebelling against their nature.⁸
Vocation is not about self-fulfillment, spiritual hierarchy, or merit before God. Rather, it is the means through which God loves your neighbor, in which God feeds, heals, governs, repairs, and nurtures the world through ordinary people doing ordinary labor in a way that turns out to be extraordinarily fulfilling.
Work is not a mere social function, as if a person’s identity is equivalent to his role in the economy, his value is judged by his usefulness, or his existence is interpreted in terms of what he does for society.
A feast day, or celebration, or festival that merely stops work for the sake of work serves no higher purpose than work.⁹
Work and worship belong to different orders of reality. Worship is faith in the mysterious gratitude of existence, grounded not in terms of what we do for God but in what we receive from God. Work can be done in a spirit of worship (Rom. 12:1f; Col. 3:23f) but worship is not reducible to work.
When Martin Luther spoke of the three overlapping estates of church, household, and civil government, he provided a structure for vocational life that grounds Christian responsibility within the spheres of the spiritual family, the natural family, and society.¹⁰
The Marxists and Capitalists make the same error about work when they turn man into a tool of the system. It’s a mistake to define the whole conception of man as a “worker” such that dignity is tied to output and man is reduced to an economic actor.
Hard work is not necessarily good. The essence of virtue is not in the amount of difficulty.¹¹
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “Through the divine mandate of work, a world should emerge that—knowingly or unknowingly—expects Christ, is directed toward Christ, is open for Christ, and serves and glorifies Christ.”¹²
Since work occurs in a fallen world, it involves suffering (Gen. 3:17-19), which is part of the process of a Christian conforming to Christ (James 1:2-4).
The point of rest and leisure is not to make for a better worker, but to restore the soul to wholeness. This allows a person to celebrate existence in God’s world, see the goodness of reality, and receive truth and beauty as gifts not measurable on a P&L sheet.
The real cure to poverty comes from production, not consumption, because work dignifies human beings (1 Thess. 4:12) whereas dependence incentivizes the poverty mindset (Prov. 6:6-11; 10:26;12: 24, 27; 13:4; 14:23-24; 15:19; 19:15, 24; 21:5-6; 22:13).
Christ’s redemption is cosmic (Col. 1:15–20), which means Christ did not come merely to save souls but to restore the whole creation including culture, institutions, and work.
Work will continue in the New Heavens and New Earth, though it will be purified, joy-filled, and freed from futility (Gen. 1-2; Is. 65:21f; Rom. 8:21f; Rev. 21:1-5).
Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of the books The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.
Other Resources
https://gotaminute.podbean.com/e/work-is-the-meaning-of-life-wdavid-bahnsen/
https://larsonhicks.podbean.com/e/should-you-have-work-life-balance-wjason-cherry-jed-hicks/
Footnotes
¹ Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:581.
² Joshua Gibbs, How to Be Unlucky: Reflections on the Pursuit of Virtue (Circe Institute, 2018), 85.
³ Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924).
⁴ Roger Scruton, How to be a Conservative (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 146.
⁵ Josef Pieper. Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Translated by Gerald Malsbary (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 22, 69f.
⁶ Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:579
⁷ Joel Biermann, Wholly Citizens: God’s Two Realms and Christian Engagement with the World, pg 98.
⁸ Michael Foster and Dominic Bnonn Tennant, It’s Good to Be a Man: A Handbook for Godly Masculinity (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2022), 170.
⁹ Josef Pieper. Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Translated by Gerald Malsbary (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 67f.
¹⁰ Gustaf Wingren, Luther on Vocation. Translated by Carl C. Rasmussen. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1957. See especially pages 17–25.
¹¹ Josef Pieper. Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Translated by Gerald Malsbary (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 33.
¹² Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, vol. 6 in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 71.