Six Ways God’s at Work in You — At Work

Part 3

Article by Keith Welton

You showed up to work today, but it feels like God didn’t. He feels remote and absent from what you do all day long. There are temptations all around, opportunities for cutting corners. No one else cares one wit about serving God. Conversations are all banal. And yet you believe God is sovereign over all things, and that means sovereign over putting you in this job in the first place.
You grow doubtful about yourself and wonder what it must be like for businessmen who are giants in the faith, and who sail through meetings and private work carried along by the joy of serving God. And here you stand in a job where God feels so far away.
In reality, the workforce is not only how God works through you; it is a place where God works inside of you, conforming you to the image of Christ. He may feel distant, but he’s not. He is using the difficulties and pressures in your job right now to focus you in at least six areas. 

5. God is using your workplace to focus your mind.
If these things are true about your work and what you do every day, then the change most needed isn’t that of a different environment, but a change of how we think about it. We ought to pray to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2). One of the greatest challenges we face is not buying into the thought that what we see is all that is there. When we think God is not at work or not interested in work, then we have bought into the naturalistic worldview and not the biblical one.

6. God is using your workplace to focus your witness.

The gospel moves us to have an area of influence (2 Corinthians 10:13–16). Perhaps the reason you are in an office with people who have little regard for God, the products they make, or the way they work is because they struggle with a motivation to work and with direction for how to work. Perhaps the reason there is so much pressure at work is because people don’t have anything other than work to trust in. And perhaps you are there not to be a thermometer that reflects the conditions, but a thermostat that adjusts the conditions.

You have a great message to share with other people, and it might stir them to make the most of work and life. If you need help seeing more of what God has called you to on the job, then share that with your coworkers — tell them what you read in the Bible and how you need help with it. Ask others for help and invite them into your journey to be a better worker and teammate. They might say no, but they might appreciate your noble desire to make yourself and the workplace better. And it just might be a profound way you see God work.
God is at work in you as much on Monday morning as he is at work in you on Sunday morning, you just need to see it. Most of us do work behind the scenes that very few people understand or appreciate. No one realizes how much goes into making the pizza, writing the program, or shipping the product. In a similar way, God is at work in our lives in all we do, and sometimes we don’t see it until we really press in and think about it. When we do, we see that God is working behind the scenes in what we do, why we do it, how we do it, and where we do it. Realizing this truth might transform your workplace experience.

Keith Welton is a pastor at Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, MD. He joined the staff after a stint in the corporate world. He’s the author of Working for Glory: A Theology for Doing Work that Matters. He and his wife Amanda have four children.