Work At It With All Your Heart

Colossians is one of the letters Paul wrote while under guard, most likely from a prison cell; he mentions his chains near the close of it, in Colossians 4:18. That setting quietly shapes the verse. A man whose own freedom has been taken from him is telling other people how to carry a free heart through an ordinary, hemmed-in day. Colossae was a modest town in what is now western Turkey, and Paul had not been the one to start the church there. By his own account that was Epaphras (Colossians 1:7), and part of why Paul writes is to steady a young congregation that seems to have been drifting after teaching he did not trust. By chapter three he has come down from the heights of who Christ is to the floor of the household: how husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants live with one another. Our verse sits in the middle of that very domestic list. I find it humbling that the same letter which names Christ as the one holding all creation together will then turn, without a flicker of embarrassment, to the question of how you do your work.

Where the World English Bible has “work heartily”, the Greek phrase means something closer to working from the soul, from the inside out; it is built on the word for soul or life itself. So this is not a call to look busy or to fake an energy I do not have. It asks the real me to turn up to the task, rather than a hollowed-out version going through the motions. There is a second thing easy to skim past. The verse opens with “whatever you do”. Not “in your important work”, not “when the job is worthy of you”. Whatever. That small word will not let me sort my tasks into the ones that deserve my best and the ones I can quietly phone in. And the shape of the line is a contrast: “as for the Lord and not for men”. Paul is not banning human employers or human thanks. He is naming the deeper audience, the one whose opinion actually sets the worth of a thing. A verse or two on he adds that there is an inheritance coming and that the Lord shows no favouritism (Colossians 3:24 to 25), which lands hardest on the people the world tends to overlook.

This verse only makes full sense because of who Jesus actually was. Before he taught a single word, he spent most of his life working with his hands; the people of his town knew him as the carpenter (Mark 6:3). So when Paul says do your work as for the Lord, he is not passing on a tidy slogan from someone who never broke a sweat. The Lord we work for has gripped a tool, met a deadline, and made things properly in a small place for years the Gospels say almost nothing about. There is a longer thread here too. Right at the start, work is given before anything has gone wrong, a calling to look after the garden (Genesis 2:15), not a sentence handed down for sin. And the thread runs on: Paul’s wider charge in this passage, to do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus (Colossians 3:17), is that plain obedience is one of the ways we are slowly reshaped into the likeness of the one who served. Jesus himself spoke of his own life as the work the Father gave him to finish (John 17:4). Our smaller finishings are a faint echo of that.

Let me be honest about where this catches me. The pull is hardly ever to down tools altogether. It is to mete out my care according to who happens to be looking. I bring my best to the meeting and the dregs to the email I assume no one will read with care. So the verse leaves me one searching question to carry through the week: not whether a task is worth my full attention, but whether the Lord is, because the answer to that one never moves. I think too of the people whose heaviest work is the kind nobody sees: sitting up through the night with a parent who no longer knows their name, holding down a job that chips away at their dignity, facing the same unthanked round again at dawn. This line does not ask them to call any of it lovely. It promises that heaven keeps its accounts differently, and that nothing offered to God is ever filed away and lost. That is no dodge around tiredness. It is the reason the tiredness is not spent for nothing.

Before Paul arrives at our verse he has been speaking, plainly, to bondservants (Colossians 3:22). These were people near the bottom of a Roman household, whose labour was not chosen and rarely thanked, whose days belonged to someone else. To them, of all people, Paul gives the longest single instruction in the whole household list, and tells them the master they are really serving is the Lord. He says almost the same thing in another letter: serve wholeheartedly, as if the work were done for the Lord and not for people (Ephesians 6:7). Nothing in their station changes; the work is still hard and still unthanked. What changes is the worth of it. If even forced and invisible labour can be offered to God and counted, then no honest work anywhere is too low, too dull or too overlooked to matter to him. I find the order of it preaches. The people the world ranked last are the first ones Paul looks in the eye.

There is a quiet shock in what comes next. Paul tells these same bondservants that they will receive an inheritance from the Lord as their reward (Colossians 3:24). Under Roman law a slave could not inherit; he was himself a thing to be inherited. So Paul promises the one thing the system said these people could never hold, and from a master who keeps perfect accounts. That is the shift the whole verse turns on. When I work mainly for the applause of people, I hand them the power to set the worth of what I do, and people are forgetful and often not looking my way. Working for the Lord moves the question somewhere steadier. He does not miss the effort, and the reward he gives does not run out. This is also what makes a dreary or thankless job bearable rather than soul-destroying. The task does not suddenly turn interesting. It is that the same wearing round, the form filled in again, the floor mopped again, can be lifted up and done for the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31), and so is never wasted breath. What is offered to God is kept.

This verse gets read out at staff meetings and rota briefings, often by someone who is not the one sweeping the floor or covering the night shift, at people who are. That is worth naming plainly. Paul’s audience in verse 23 is the bondservant, not the master standing over them. He speaks to people already under pressure and offers them dignity and a reward that nobody can dock. He does not hand their overseer a script for asking more.

When a manager, a vicar or a volunteer coordinator quotes “work heartily” at people stretched thin, a promise turns into a lever. The same thing happens when the verse answers a complaint about unpaid overtime, or shames someone for taking their annual leave, or talks a tired volunteer into one more thing. Heartily does not mean endlessly. Nothing in the line forbids asking a hard question about the arrangement you are working under. If you hold authority over somebody’s workload, I would say this verse is not yours to quote at them. It is yours to be measured against.

Read the passage to its actual close and it turns on you. After everything Paul has said to servants, he stops and speaks to the masters directly, telling them to give their people what is just and equal, because they too have a Master in heaven (Colossians 4:1). The chapter break falls in an unhelpful place. Those divisions were added centuries after Paul wrote, and this one lets a reader stop one sentence before the passage lands where it was always heading.

So a talk built on verse 23 alone is half a talk. If you are teaching this in a room where employers and employees, coordinators and the volunteers they ring on a Saturday night all sit together, the honest shape is to preach both ends in one breath. Here is the practical version: read 3:23 and 4:1 aloud, back to back, before you say a word about either. It costs you fifteen seconds. It also stops the people holding the power quietly assuming the verse was written for somebody else in the room.

This verse earns its place when someone is stepping into work rather than limping out of it. Read it over a volunteer being commissioned, a new member of staff on their first Sunday, someone starting out in a trade, or at a leaving service for a person retiring after decades of quiet and largely unthanked service. It sits well there because it names what those years were actually for.

Do not reach for it in a redundancy conversation, or as your reply when someone tells you they are exhausted, underpaid or badly treated at work. It was never written to answer “should I put up with this?”, and using it that way tells a struggling person that their tiredness is a spiritual failing rather than a real problem wanting a real fix: a fairer rota, a hard conversation with an employer, sometimes leaving altogether. Keep it back, too, from anyone signed off sick or unable to work at all. Their worth was never resting on their output, and this verse was written to lift people off that scale, not to quietly fasten them back onto it.

The word behind “Lord” in our verse is kyrios, and it is not a special heavenly term kept in a box marked God. It is the everyday word for an owner: the boss, the one holding the deed, the one who pays. A single verse earlier, speaking to these same workers, Paul tells them to obey their masters according to the flesh (Colossians 3:22), and the word for those masters is kyrios as well. He did not reach for grander vocabulary when he lifted his eyes from the courtyard to heaven. He took the ordinary word stamped on the actual arrangement these people were living under, and handed it upward.

I find that more unsettling than tidy. It would be safer if scripture kept a separate word for God, quarantined from the whole grubby business of ownership down here. Instead one word does double duty, deliberately. Every time a bondservant heard kyrios barked across a Roman house, Paul wants that shout to carry a second face standing behind the first one. English hides the seam from us: capital L for God, lower-case m for the man with the whip, and the collision disappears. In the Greek there was no seam to hide. There was one word, and a claim that the true owner of your effort was never the one whose name was on the papers.

Long before Paul, the writer of Ecclesiastes looked at this same daily grind and reached the opposite verdict. He came to hate all his toil, he says, because he must leave what he built to whoever comes next, a man who never laboured for it and might turn out to be wise or might turn out to be a fool (Ecclesiastes 2:18 to 19). He cannot even sleep on it; his heart takes no rest at night (Ecclesiastes 2:23). That is real work, the very category our verse addresses, weighed carefully and found to come to nothing. For years I assumed one of these two men simply had to be wrong.

Now I think they are standing at different heights. Ecclesiastes is watching on purpose from “under the sun”, a closed room with no window above the horizon, and inside that room his arithmetic is honest and I cannot fault a line of it. The business gets sold to someone who never swept its floor. The meal is eaten and forgotten by Thursday. The careful report is shredded eventually no matter how well it was written. Paul disputes none of those sums. What he adds is a second pair of eyes, belonging to someone who does not lose the ledger even when everything under the sun genuinely does come to nothing. There is one detail here I only caught late, and it still makes me sit up. Ecclesiastes’ precise grievance is the heir: some stranger inherits everything and never lifted a finger for it. Paul is writing to people at the opposite end of that complaint, people the law said could never inherit anything at all, and he calls them heirs. The rich man’s bitterness and the slave’s hope turn out to hinge on the very same word. So I keep both books open at once. A faith that has never sat down with Ecclesiastes has stopped noticing what our verse is actually pulling us out of.

Here is the thing about this passage that will not leave me alone. In the early nineteenth century an edited Bible was produced for use among enslaved people in the British Caribbean. Exodus, the great account of a people walked out of bondage, was stripped from it almost entirely. The household instructions telling servants to obey their masters were kept. Whoever assembled that book understood exactly what these words could be made to do, and built the edition around doing it.

I cannot file that under careless reading by people long ago. It was not careless. It was surgical. So if your stomach turns slightly at how smoothly “work heartily, as for the Lord” can be bent into “and never question your chains”, you are not misunderstanding the verse. You are reading it with your eyes open. I have no argument that dissolves that history, and I am suspicious of anyone selling one.

What I do have is this. The inheritance promised in the next verse and the warning fired at the masters at Colossians 4:1 were both sitting right there in the same book, and somebody had to reach in and take them out on purpose. That editorial hand is the tell. You do not cut what agrees with you.

Wind back to the middle of the chapter and Paul is not talking about chores at all. He is talking about clothes. The church has taken off an old self and put on a new one, being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator (Colossians 3:9 to 10), and then he lays out the actual wardrobe: compassion, kindness, lowliness, humility, patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another, with love over it all as the thing that binds the rest together (Colossians 3:12 to 14). Only after that full change of clothes does he walk through the rooms of a real house, wives and husbands, children and parents, servants and masters, and last of all the work itself. I used to read our verse as though it had dropped into the letter from nowhere, a stray scrap of advice about effort. It hasn’t. It is the last item on a list that starts with what you are wearing underneath.

That order changes what the verse is asking. Paul is not saying grit your teeth, work hard enough, and eventually you will become the sort of person God can approve. He has it the other way round entirely. The new self is already on. Working heartily is simply one of the rooms where that new clothing gets to be seen, instead of staying folded in a drawer until Sunday. Which means the question in front of me on a wet Tuesday is not “am I earning this?” but the far more searching “am I dressed, and does anything about the last hour show it?”

Try this verse on a child who is doing something they hate, tidying a room, finishing the vegetables, practising scales for the tenth time, and you find out quickly whether you believe it or were only repeating it. Children have unusually accurate radar for jobs nobody is checking. Ask an eight-year-old honestly whether they would tidy properly if their mum truly never looked, and you will get a grin and the truth before their manners catch up with them.

I would never tell a child this verse makes a dull job fun, because it doesn’t, and they spot that lie in about a second. Nor would I use it the way it is easiest to use it, as a nice religious way of saying God is watching so behave. That turns the Lord into a supervisor with better surveillance than mum, and a child raised on that grows into an adult who cannot rest. The truer and smaller thing is this: what gets shoved under the bed is not hidden from everyone, and the point is not that you will be caught. The point is that the tidying nobody will ever praise was not wasted on nobody. And I would want a child to overhear me saying the same thing about my own unglamorous work, out loud, on a bad day, because they believe what they watch far more than what they are told. A parent who quotes this at a messy bedroom while cutting every corner at their own desk has already taught the opposite lesson without using a word of it.

• Which task this week do I quietly decide is not worth my full attention, and what would shift if I did it as for the Lord?
• Whose approval am I really working for, and how is that approval setting the level of effort I give?
• Where am I doing hidden, unthanked work, and could I let it be enough that God sees it?
• Is there work in my own life I have refused to value, simply because no one else has?

If you would like to keep going, you could read the rest of this letter over at Colossians, or follow the theme elsewhere through our verses by topic.