You Were Made for Work

Most of us spend around 90,000 hours of our lives working. That's more time than sleep, more than family, more than anything else. And yet for most people, work is what they're trying to escape: the mortgage-payer, the necessary evil, the thing standing between them and the weekend. Pastor Josh thinks we've got it completely backwards. Work isn't a curse to survive. It's the very thing we were made for.

God is a Working God

The Bible opens with God at work. Six days of creative effort: light, sky, land, sea, stars, creatures. Then on the seventh day, he rested. Not because he was tired, but because the work was finished. Genesis 2:1-3 frames this clearly: God himself is a worker, and his work was good.

When the religious leaders of Jesus' day accused him of working on the Sabbath, he didn't apologise. He said: "My Father is working until now, and I am working." (John 5) The God of the universe is not sitting idle in the clouds. He's active, engaged, creative. And he made us in his image.

Genesis 2:5 tells us there was a moment in creation when the ground hadn't yet produced plants because "there was no man to work the ground." Work wasn't an afterthought bolted onto creation. It was a necessary part of completing it. God deliberately left space for humans to participate. We weren't made to observe creation from the sidelines. We were made to co-create with God.

Your Original Assignment

Genesis 2:15 is one of the most overlooked verses in the Bible: "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it." Before sin. Before the fall. Before anything went wrong. God put humanity to work.

Two Hebrew words explain what God had in mind. Abad means to serve, to minister, to cultivate and care for. Shamar means to protect, to preserve, to guard. These two words describe the two great offices of the Old Testament: priest and king. The priest serves, bridging God and humanity. The king rules and protects. Both are doing the work they were assigned.

This is our original habitat. Not watching. Not consuming. Serving and protecting. Work, in its truest form, is how we express the image of God in us.

Create. Cultivate. Contribute.

P. Josh explains what work looks like in human DNA through three words.

Create. Humans are uniquely creative. We build, we sing, we make art, we solve problems in ways no other species can. That creative impulse isn't incidental. It reflects a Creator God who made the universe from nothing and put some of that capacity in us.

Cultivate. Why do people want children? Sleepless nights, sacrifice, years of pouring yourself out. And yet most parents will tell you it's the most meaningful thing they've ever done. That's not a coincidence. Caring for things, tending to them, watching them grow is in our DNA because it mirrors what God does for us.

Contribute. P. Josh describes it as the feeling of being truly witnessed: like a spouse who has watched your whole life and can say "I saw what you did there." Contribution creates the quiet joy of knowing you made a difference. Someone noticed. Something changed because you were here.

Who enjoys soccer more: the audience or the player? The player, of course. If you're in a church and feel unloved or excluded, don't wait to be served. Serve. You'll belong.

Spectating your own life is not how joy works. Joy flows from being in the game.

What the Fall Did to Work

Genesis 3:17-19 is where the story turns hard. Because of sin, the ground is cursed. Thorns and thistles appear. Work that was designed to be meaningful becomes laborious. "By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread."

The curse made work painful. It didn't eliminate it. And that pain shows up in two ways most of us recognise immediately.

First: painful circumstances. The toxic boss, the impossible environment, the team that undermines you, the structure that rewards the wrong things.

Second: painful outcomes. You work hard, you do everything right, and it still doesn't work out. The project fails. The business closes. The recognition never comes.

And over time, work drifts from its true meaning. It becomes transactional, a way to pay the mortgage, with early retirement as the dream. Identity gets tangled up in it: you start comparing what you earn with what others earn, and either pride or bitterness takes root. Work stops being abad and shamar and becomes just another way to feel like you're winning or losing.

The End of the Story

Revelation 21-22 gives us the final frame. New heaven, new earth. God dwelling with his people again. The garden of Eden imagery returns: the tree of life, fruit every month, leaves for the healing of nations. And then, the line that changes everything: "No longer will there be anything accursed."

The curse on work is lifted. What was broken is restored.

And what does eternity look like? Not clouds and harps and infinite passive rest. Revelation 22:3 says his servants will worship him. Eternal life is not boring. It is redeemed work: serving, creating, caring, contributing, with all the pain stripped away and all the purpose magnified. The joy we catch glimpses of when our work goes right? That's what eternity is made of, uninterrupted.

This is the through-line of Scripture: God designed work, the fall broke work, and Jesus came to restore it. John 10:10: "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life and have it to the full." Full life. Through redeemed work.

The Wedding, the Garden, and the Gift That Doesn't Disappoint

P. Josh gets personal here. His daughter Skye got married in Bowral. He worked so hard in the lead-up that he fainted while gardening in the heat. Nobody noticed. Then Skye, exhausted from making her own dress and going without sleep, expressed disappointment that a few things hadn't gone to plan. P. Josh felt the sting of it.

Sitting with it later, he saw something true: both of them had poured everything in, and both had faced the gap between effort and outcome that the fall introduced. He put it this way:

We pull back from giving 100% to protect ourselves from disappointment. But Jesus worked hardest of all, all the way to the cross, and he invites us to work, promising that even when things don't work out, he redeems it.

The gift of work can never fully replace the Giver. That's why the series turns to Sabbath next week: not to stop working, but to keep work in its proper place. Work, then return to God. Rest, then go again. That rhythm is built into creation itself.

Live It Out

Work is not your identity. It is not just how you pay bills. And retiring from your occupation doesn't mean you stop working. Full-time parents, volunteers, retirees serving at church are all doing the work they were made for. You are made for eternity, not just the mortgage.

This week, take one area of your life (at home, in your workplace, in your community) and ask: am I serving here, or spectating? Am I cultivating something, or just consuming? Am I contributing, or holding back to protect myself from disappointment?

Give 100%. Fix your eyes on Jesus. Your everyday work is worship to God, and he is in the business of redeeming every bit of it, even when it doesn't go to plan.