Do you ever wonder if your work matters to God? Do you believe your work is part of God‘s work in the world, or is it just a necessary means to an end? Why does your work really matter in light of eternity?

For years, I viewed my work as a necessary means to a financial end. I believed that perhaps someday I might do work that could be seen as “God’s work,” but until then, my work was just, well, work.

Even then, in the grand scope of God’s plan and story, I had no frame of reference for viewing my work as having any significance in light of eternity.

But the truth is, eternity is already happening now. The real question is this: Does our work have anything to do with our life after death?

In Christian thinking, there’s often an unspoken delineation between the life we live now, and the life we live after death. Despite the western notion that the point of life on earth is to escape earth (including our bodies), there is actually a weighty significance to the fact that we are still born into this world. This world is the very world that God is in the process of transforming—a process that will be completed. And Jesus’s body is proof.

Jesus, the Resurrection Template

If you look at Jesus’s body as a template, God uses the old in order to make the new. Jesus’s body was not there in the tomb (Luke 24:3). He was raised from the dead, but God used His “old” body as an ingredient in the new body. His old body was transformed into a resurrected body. So is the hope of our bodies. So is the hope of this world. The world is groaning, waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God (Romans 8:19–22). The resurrection transformation that is now ongoing will result in a resurrection transformation for the whole world.

How does the resurrection reality of Jesus Christ make its way into this world right now? For that, we must look to the Holy Spirit. When Jesus began to teach His disciples about His death, He said in response to their sorrow that it was better that He left so that He could send the Holy Spirit (John 16:7). The Holy Spirit is the Spirit who raised Christ from the dead (Romans 8:11). He is the source of resurrection power. It is important to understand that it is that power which has been sent into this world, specifically into your body. Meaning, the Spirit who brings resurrection is now within your body right here, right now. Yes, your pre-resurrected body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, the source of resurrection (1 Corinthians 3:16 CSB).

Somehow, Jesus intends for the spirit of resurrection to have an effect upon our current, mortal bodies, and to work from within us to with-out us, to have an effect upon this world. That effect happens through what we do. And more specifically, for this article, that effect happens through work. Because of the resurrection, your work matters as a necessary means for the resurrection power of the Holy Spirit to make its way into the world…right now. Not merely at the end of history. Isn’t that interesting?

Let me put it this way: What you do as a temple of the Holy Spirit can bring resurrection life and true transformation—even if in the smallest of ways to the world around you through your work. That, friend, is what God is up to in the world.

Adam, The Vocational Human

Adam was created with a job—a vocation—in mind. According to Genesis 2:5–7, God created the earth perfectly primed, but not manifesting its potential without someone to “work”:

No shrub of the field had yet grown on the land, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not made it rain on the land, and there was no

man to work the ground. But mist would come up from the earth and water all the ground.

That’s the moment when God created man. And it was God’s very Spirit that brought Him to life. 

Then the LORD God formed the man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.

Adam and Eve sinned, the creation project went off track, and the earth was subject to futility. Then Jesus enters the scene. As the “Last Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:45), He is the gardener of a new creation, having conquered the death that made Adam unable to fulfill his vocation. Now, He has sent the same Spirit that “hovered over the deep” (Genesis 1:2) in God’s “new creation” project in the beginning—the Spirit that was breathed into Adam and the same Spirit Jesus sent after His death, resurrection, and ascension. And, again, He has not done this at the end of history, but right here in the middle of it.

Jesus didn’t just come to “save us” from a fiery fate, but to restore to each of us the vocation of stewarding a new creation. There are new heavens and a new earth in the works, and your vocation, because of the Holy Spirit, is to “garden” it—right here, right now.

How the Holy Spirit “Inspires” Your Vocation

The Holy Spirit has come to dwell within each of us. The work of the Holy Spirit has a transformational effect upon our internal world, producing fruit over time that manifests in how we live out our lives. What we are like on the inside affects our thoughts, which turn into actions, which affect the world outside of us. If our internal world is a resurrection reality because of the indwelling Holy Spirit, then, naturally, our external world will be transformed into a resurrection reality—a new creation.

If you take that as truth, then you can “feed” on the fruit of the Spirit (another garden reference) such as patience and perseverance in the midst of a reality that wants to pull everything into chaos, frustration, and overwhelm. Your resilient patience and perseverance can (even if slowly and imperceptibly) transform that reality from chaos to order, or, put another way, from death to life. If you are a mom, for example, your kids will literally feel the difference in the atmosphere of your home.

Whatever your vocation, if you are filled with the Holy Spirit, then you are in the business of new creation. Your vocation matters, and—just like Jesus’s body—will carry over into eternity. Don’t neglect the menial jobs, the long seasons of “gardening” like parenting, or the work that is hard, emotionally taxing or goes unnoticed. It matters. There is an eternal weight of glory in it. You are stewarding a new creation.

Additional Resources for Honoring God Daily:

James Bible Study		The Bible Study Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Reading, Understanding, and Applying the Bible		Peace Under Pressure		How the Gospel Transforms Your Work Life
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