A church member shared with me a quote from Andy Crouch’s wonderful book, The Tech-Wise Family. In the quote, Crouch discusses work (this week’s sermon) and rest (last week’s sermon). He writes,
As technology has filled our lives with more and more easy everywhere, we do less and less of the two things human beings were made to do.
We are supposed to work, and we are supposed to rest.
Work is the fruitful transformation of the world through human effort and skill, in ways that serve our shared human needs and give glory to God.
Work requires wisdom - understanding something about the world, its limitations, and its possibilities. And work requires courage, because even work at its best involves risk and effort, and in a fallen world, work is not often at its best. Work also requires wisdom and courage because we always work together with others, and other human beings are never easy to understand or work with.
We are meant to work, but we are also meant to rest…One day out of seven - and, even more radically, one year out of seven - the people of God, anyone who depended on them or lived among them, and even their livestock were to cease from work and enjoy rest, restoration, and worship. They were called, you might say, to ceasing and feasting: setting aside daily labor and bringing out the best fruits of that work, stored up in the course of the week and the year, for everyone to enjoy.
This pattern is fundamental to human flourishing, and to the flourishing of the whole world that depends on our care, but it has been disrupted and distorted by human greed and sloth. Instead of work and rest, we have ended up with toil and leisure - and neither one is an improvement.
Crouch says this about toil: Think of toil as excessive, endless fruitless labor - the kind that leaves us exhausted, with nothing valuable to show for our effort. And on leisure, he writes, If toil is fruitless labor, you could think of leisure as fruitless escape from labor. It's a kind of rest that doesn’t really restore our souls, doesn’t restore our relationships with others or God. And crucially, it is the kind of rest that doesn’t give others the chance to rest.
Work and rest have been woven into the fabric of creational reality since the beginning. We need to recapture the goodness of both and think deeply about how our lives should be shaped by them. Last week, I gave some suggested reading on rest. For work, I would recommend Timothy Keller’s *Every Good Endeavor. Saints, may our work and rest more and more reflect the goodness and glory of God.
*Coming soon to the church library
