Everything you do has value.
All of us have “vocations” which are our roles and states in life. Any aspect of your life where you have opportunity to relate to others, serve others, make the world a better place are your vocations: being a son, daughter, father, mother, husband, wife, friend, neighbour, and (of course) your employment.
These vocations have value, and that includes your work. Your work has value.
But why does it have value?
To answer that we need a word from the world of the Bible: “justification”.
Justification is the idea that “God has declared me right, is positive toward me, and does not want to punish me.” And while the idea of God isn’t as popular in Manchester today, the idea of justification is everywhere. To describe justification without reference to God, we could say to be justified means “to be valuable and right, to deserve to be rewarded and celebrated, and not to deserve to be punished in any way.”
Many of us in Manchester think this about ourselves. We think we’re justified.
This is how God sees you too, in his eyes you are justified: but not because of anything in you. Because of something completely outside of you that doesn’t depend upon you. God sees you as incredibly valuable because of what happened to Jesus. For this reason, he only wants good for you. He doesn’t want to punish you for anything in any way. And because it depends on Jesus and not on you, it can’t change.
We see ourselves as justified because of something about us.
God sees us as justified because of something outside of us.
This difference between us and God lies in why: God’s view of you doesn’t depend on you. So God’s view of you can never be diminished (or increased) by anything you do.
Today in Manchester, many people think “I am valuable because…” and we insert one of our vocations.
“…because I’m a good friend.”
“…because I’m a mother.”
“…because of what I do.”
That last one is far more common than many of us would like to admit. But on some level it’s there inside of most us. Our employed work is what we spend most of our lives doing, and it’s the way we our actions most impact the world around us. All of us on some level are tempted to feel, no matter how secretly, that we derive some value and worth from what we do.
That idea is not new. The Lutheran church exists because many people were saying “God is positive toward me because of my religious works.”
Since then, many people continue to think that they have value “because of something in me.” They just differ between themselves what that “something in me” is.
You have value because of Jesus. Because in Jesus, when he died on the cross, God justified the whole world. On the cross every reason to punish you was punished in Jesus. And at the cross the righteousness of Jesus (his value, worth and standing)—who is God himself—was given to you.
So you don’t need to do anything to earn or establish your value and worth, because your value and worth has already been freely given to you in Jesus.
This includes the work you do. Your work does not have value because:
- you are really good at it
- you work really hard
- or you earn anything by it.
But your work does have value because:
- God your Father calls you to do it
- to serve other people
- and Jesus died so that you can do it without having to earn anything from God by it.
If you do your work to earn value by it, you’ve just declared that you disagree with God that you already have value because of Jesus. You’ve just turned your work into something it was never meant to be. And you’re placing upon your work a load it cannot possibly bear: your worth.
That’s not the way God sees you. Because he’s a God of unconditional grace, not a god of conditional approval. You don’t earn value through your work. You’re already valuable. He sees you in this way because of the cross of Jesus: something objective that can never change. And that’s what frees us to do our work focused on how it helps other people, not on how it affects our scale of approval.
Your work doesn’t count for anything.
And that’s why it matters.
To hear more, listen to this: Isn’t Faith Just Invisible Fantasy
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