13 The Fruit of Fearful Faith: Work When we continue to learn how to faith down our fears, there is a very special relationship between the preceding fruit of worship and this fourth fruit of work. Tragically, these two fruits of fear have been largely divorced in our world today when in reality they are very compatible. God never meant that there should be a division between worship and work, the sacred and secular, or the worship place and the marketplace. To the Christian, all of life should be sacred. There are no longer any partitions between Sunday and the other six days of the week. All of life is an act of worship! For the mature Christian, everything we do is to be an offering of praise to God. From God’s perspective, work is a sacred assignment, regardless of what it is. It is not what we do that makes work become worship, but why we do what we do. The crucial question is, For whom we are working—ourselves or Christ? Sadly, we often live and act as if work came after the Fall, as if God condemned man to work as a result of his sin. For Adam and Eve, their judgment was a life of hard labor from dawn till dust as a result of their sin. But that false mentality reduces work to a curse rather than a blessing. The Bible is clear that God assigned man the dig-
87
