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.

• 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.