HOW TO WORK AND BALANCE LIFE ACCORDING TO THE BIBLE

Genesis 1:1;31;2:1-3;15 “¹In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.³¹Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day.¹Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. ²And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. ³Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made. ¹⁵Then the Lord God took [d]the man and put him in the garden of Eden to [e]tend and keep it.

Introduction: Work – life balance. The very term suggests that our lives are compartmentalized into these two categories – work and life. And realistically, that’s probably how most of us think of our lives. We have our paid work, and then we have our “life” – everything else we do with our time – Church activities; Family, friends, hobbies, personal projects, volunteering, vacation, etc. And if we don’t have enough time for those things, we say we don’t have a life!

Three Types of People:

1. Those who talk about work-life balance, but they hate their work. Having a life means escaping from work. They hate their works because they don’t have life
2. Those who don’t talk about their work-life balance because they are workaholics. Their work is their life. They want to get to the highest point of their career and they just let everything else slide.
3. Those who have actually have work-life balance.

Let’s go to the Bible…

Observe 3 things

1. The first thing that stood out to me in the earliest pages of Scripture was that the first Person we see working in the Bible is God Himself. Genesis 1 and 2
2. God made man in His image and God gave him a job – Genesis 2:15
3. Apostle Paul in 2 Thessalonians 3:6–12also stresses this:
4. In 1 Timothy 5:8, Paul says this: But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
5. Then Jesus says in John 5:17 … “My Father has been working until now, and I have been working.”

What is the Biblical understanding of work-Life Balance? Genesis 2:1-3… REST.

When you read your Bible, there are some things that you should pay attention to: Whatever God blesses or whomever God blesses, you should pay attention to it. In Genesis 1, God has already blessed the animals and the humans to be fruitful and multiply. But the next thing He blesses is this period of time, the seventh day, because it is set apart from the work week. So why would God bless a day just because it was His day off? 

The answer is that God blessed the day of rest for our sake, which we see in the Ten Commandments. “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God” (Exodus 20:9). This commandment shows up twice. The first time, Moses explains that when we keep the Sabbath, we honor the God by obeying what He  established from creation. The second time, Moses urges us to remember that we rest from our work because we have been delivered and liberated from slavery.

Conclusion:

We as Christians shouldn’t look at the concept of work-life balance through the lens of work and life, but through the Biblical lens of work and rest. Work and Sabbath – God says in Exodus 20:8-11.

May God give you rest.