Work - John's gospel and Acts

4:35-38

This is said in the context of Jesus' comment that his food is doing God's work. That is what sustains him. So we have to ask whether his comments in chapter four are then alluding to work, or to sustenance. Of course that's a false question - he is alluding about both, because his sustenance is his work for God.

Although talk about "working for God" doesn't first pop up in the New Testament, with Jesus on the scene it takes on a thoroughly different dimension than it does in the Old Testament, where working for God mostly means building the temple or the tabernacle, or killing people or something similar.

Now we have Jesus talking about his work. So God, as Jesus, is also a working God. And man obviously has work to do that God gives them - because Jesus is giving the disciples work here. And yes, that work will be sustaining, but in a different way - a way without food.

I hope you're getting all this.

One other thing, though - Jesus talks about the seed having been sown by someone else. And that, apparently, is the real work, because you can reap for what you didn't "work for". Who did do the sowing? It would be comfortable to just say "God" and get it out of the way, and in a sense God of course does all the work, sowing and reaping. But in another sense, of course, other people did the work of sowing. Sowing for God is hard work.

5:17

I have purposefully not spoken too much about God's work (for which there are probably many more references than there are for man's work), but this one is a key one. God didn't stop working after day 6 of creation. So don't let anyone fool you into that.

Acts 13:2

In many ways this verse has been the tent peg for the protestant view of mission work for hundreds of years. The idea of a "calling" from God for people to go out and serve him has been around a long time. Of course, many people don't really accurately use the verse here, and they talk about a 'personal calling' which for some reason doesn't seem to spontaneously come to the leadership of their church at the same time, as it seems to have done in Acts 13. Nevertheless, this sort of 'calling' has been used to separate spiritual and secular work for many years.

18:3

This verse is one which tentpegs "tentmaking" ministries - whereby someone uses their professional skills to work, and uses their spare time to minister to people. there are people who "tentmake" only just enough to get by, so that they are really spending a large amount of time ministering, and there are some people who "tentmake" fulltime, and ministry more like a hobby (with regards to time devotion - I'm sure they treat it more seriously than model trains).

Again, this idea just begs for the sacred and the secular to be separated in the workplace.