There’s an old saying regarding work: “Find something you like to do, and also you’ll never work a day in your life.”
It’s a pleasant idea—albeit a tall order to realize. Some jobs are harder to like than others, and even essentially the most meaningful work can exhaust or frustrate us. Our relationships with work may be complicated; even essentially the most diligent amongst us succumb to quitting fantasies now and again.
And often, the demands of life mean we are able to’t devote ourselves to finding work we like to do. We simply should do the work mandatory. Stacks of bills don’t care about our job satisfaction or our inherent gifts. That weird pink mold growing within the shower doesn’t take vacations. few of us are doing jobs we don’t like to do, and we may thoroughly be doing them until the Lord returns.
Most of us picture infinite years of vacation within the New Jerusalem. In the continuing debate over whether the perfect vacations occur within the mountains or on the beach, the oceanless description of the brand new heavens and earth has threatened multiple saint’s concept of everlasting bliss. But regardless of the landscape, few consider the hereafter as a place of business.
For many, heaven is the final word quitting fantasy. After all, it’s the everlasting Sabbath where we stop our labors, right? Well, yes and no.
Revelation 14:13 does promise that the saints will “rest from their labor.” But in Revelation, that word labor means “toil,” as within the travail of persecution the saints will face on this life.
In Isaiah 65, God speaks of labor occurring in the brand new creation:
[My people] will construct houses and dwell in them; they’ll plant vineyards and eat their fruit. … My chosen ones will long benefit from the work of their hands. They is not going to labor in vain. (vv. 21–23)
This is the poetry of productivity unhindered by sin. In Zion we’ll rest from sin, sorrow, temptation, and persecution. But we’ll work with joy and gladness, as we were created to do. We will finally fulfill our vocational callings, free from frustration or toil. We don’t know specifically what our labor will probably be, but we all know it’s going to be fruitful, because it must have been all along.
Since the revolt in Eden, our relationship with work has been fraught. We haven’t any memory of labor because it was meant to be: at all times fulfilling, at all times an expression of affection for others, at all times bringing glory to God. Never thwarted. Never purposeless or dehumanizing. No cogs within the wheel, only humans bearing the image of God within the work of their hands.
Perhaps we’ve a faint sense of how work must be. Picture your most satisfying day of labor ever. For me, it’s the satisfaction of all of the cooking and cleansing that culminates in our family gathering together, or the great exhaustion of getting taught my heart out in a difficult passage of Scripture. That day is an echo of Eden and a foretaste of the New Jerusalem.
We are made for work as surely as we’re made for rest. Because of sin, we make idols of each, bending them to serve our self-promotion and sloth. Our work doesn’t fully satisfy, and our rest doesn’t fully restore.
But in the future, we’ll labor again as we were created to labor. And we’ll sabbath as we were created to sabbath. Our labor is not going to frustrate, and our rest is not going to bore.
For now, we are able to and may still do our jobs with all our hearts, as working for the Lord (Col. 3:23). When we see our labor as serving the Lord Christ, even menial tasks are transformed from work into worship. Our efforts turn out to be offerings, whether as expressions of our gifts or as acts of easy obedience.
I even have cleaned a variety of showers as unto the Lord, and I’ll likely clean many more before I walk the streets of gold. There will probably be no bills to pay in that celestial city, and there will probably be no pink mold. But there will probably be good work to do. May our joyful labor here and now serve because the firstfruits of our fruitful labor to come back.
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