Do You Ever Feel Like Your Work Is Painful Toil?

Genesis 3:17-19

Do you ever feel like going to work is painful toil? I'm not talking about just having "one of those days." I mean the day-in-day-out exhaustion, the "I don't know if I can go on like this" kind of feeling that makes you not want to get out of bed. Maybe it's your supervisor, the tasks that you do, or your commute. Or maybe it's just not being able to do what you want, having to spend your time doing what someone else tells you to do. Why isn't work more fun?

There are a lot of people who enjoy what they do--I include myself in that category. But I would bet that even those of us who like our jobs have days where we're less than satisfied. That's part of being human. Literally. God told Adam that "through painful toil you will eat food...by the sweat of your brow you will eat your food." That was the Adam-specific punishment because he and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We had always been meant to work--God put Adam in the Garden to tend the plants. But now, the nature of work changed. It was going to be harder. There would be failures, frustrations, and other things interfering with our work (i.e., thorns and thistles). From then until eternity, work would never be as pleasant as it had been before.

That doesn't mean that work is something to evade. Remember that the Bible emphasizes the importance of working. God calls you to faithfulness where you are. God put you where you are at the time that you live so that you would seek Him (Acts 17:26-28).

Knowing that you have a job in an economy where many people don't may help some, but it's not going to make an unpleasant job into a great one. God never promises that work will be fun. In fact, He promises the opposite. But He calls you to faithfulness in spite of the difficulties of your job.