Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
We live in an increasingly workaholic world today. With the triumph of free-market Capitalism on a largely global scale the material bounty available for human use has never been greater and neither has the frenzy of billions of people to gain access to it. In the United States alone worker productivity has greatly increased since the 1970’s. While a substantial proportion of that increase has come about through instrumentalities like the Internet some of it can be attributed to a workforce that is putting in more hours on the job than at any time since the end of the Second World War. With the advent of the 50-60 hour week an entire population of the “upwardly mobile” is spending a greater proportion of life at work than anywhere else.
For some the motivation for such drudgery comes from a more vital issue: simple economic survival. As general consumer inflation continues to rise, along with fuel and food prices, on a global scale more and more men and women are working long hours simply to put food on the table for themselves and their families. They are not so much driven by materialism as by simple necessity.
Whatever the reason for the decrease in leisure time, the bottom line is that a sizable number of people are living in a perpetual state of near-exhaustion. We work, it seems, for everything we have and we are tired. It is in this grim reality of a world of human worker bees that true Christianity once again offers a viable alternative that weary Secularists might want to consider.
The core of the Christian message is that we are saved from our present, problematic human condition by grace, the unmerited, and unearned, love of the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe. The Bible tells us that we can be given new life through grace, by faith, and not by works “so that no one can boast”. What this means, among other things, is that our existence does not need to be defined by self-effort in an ultimately futile attempt to earn the peace and wholeness that we instinctively, if sometimes unconsciously, crave.
When Christ told his listeners to come to him so that he might give them rest he was speaking to a generation living in an era when, like today, people were working long hours just to keep their heads above water. He was also presumably speaking to at least some who had more than others and were working for whatever riches the ancient world had to offer.
Those who receive Christ as Lord and Savior receive two great antidotes to 21st century workaholism. The first is the assurance that the God who provides for every living thing on earth will provide for their true material needs, even if they do not put in a twelve hour a day at the office. The second and infinitely greater gift is the knowledge that the existential security of their souls has been secured for both this life and the next. They no longer have to work for acceptance from the only One who really matters, the Being who gave them their existence and all that is truly good in their lives. Once this happens endless work is no longer the defining criteria of their reality, endless love and life are.
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