The Necessity of Paying Serious Attention to Your Work

In previous two article, I emphasised the need for Christian to have keen relationships with God and their families. God created man and placed him on earth.

While on the earth, humans must eat, cloth themselves, shelter themselves and meet other needs in their lives. This becomes important between the day humans settle on the earth and the day they depart from the earth,

To meet these basic needs, God tasked humans with crucial responsibilities. “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (John 2:15).

To keep the garden is to manage it. Men and women must not only be hard working, but also learn to be best managers of resources God put into their hands.

Prayer and fasting are good, but they do not make Christians financially rich or put food on the table, provide clothes or accommodation. Rather, these things come by working with hands.

Paul confirms this when he told the elders of the church at Ephesus that, “You yourselves know that these hands ministered to my necessities and to those who were with me” (Acts 20:34).

Again, in his letter to the church in Thessalonica, Paul stressed that “For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us, because we were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat anyone’s bread without paying for it, but with toil and labor we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you…For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:7-10).

The Bible connects provision of food, clothing, accommodation and other necessities of life to hard work with hands. Poverty is an evil thing which must not be tolerated but uprooted. We must, therefore, pay attention to our relationship with our work.

God does not hate money; He only hates the love of money. The same must be the attitude of Christians towards money, but a Christian who says money answers everything speaks by the spirit of pride, because money does not solve every problem humans face.

Conclusion

Now of these three: God, family and work, the greatest and most important is God. Thus, man’s relationship with God must be of utmost priority. It must be considered first.

Christ Jesus placed a strong emphasis on this when He said, “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you”, (Matthew 6:33).

Man comes from God at birth into the world to work and returns to God at death to face judgment of his works eventually.

You can clearly see that men and women leave every relationship on earth to waste away. Only our relationship with God lasts forever. Amen.

By James Quansah