Work and the Meaning of Life

Author: John Stonestreet

As David Bahnsen observes in his book Full-Time, most Americans work in order to stop working. According to a recent survey from Natixis Investment Managers, which looked at retirement goals by demographic, this is especially true of younger Americans. While baby boomers plan to work until age 68, Gen X’ers only want to work until 60 and Gen Y’ers, those aged 25 to 40, want to be done with careers by 59. When combined with the demographic realities of declining birthrates, this is a recipe for all kinds of economic and social problems. 

At the root of this American work mood is a loss of meaning and purpose, expressed through a disillusionment with work. That’s not the way God created us. 

In his book Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life, Bahnsen describes why understanding God’s design for work is so essential. In a recent interview, I asked Bahnsen about this:  

If you think about it, to get an indication of what the culture’s honest view of work is, one of the most popular expressions that people routinely use, and I think most of the time believe it is benign, is they use that expression, “work-life balance.” So how far are we from having a proper understanding of where work fits into the meaning of our lives? We actually have pitted work against our lives, as if the two things are in need of some kind of equilibrium, balancing one another.  

I think work is viewed as a necessary evil. I mean, there aren’t that many people who will say you don’t need to work because most people will say you have to be able to provide for your family, make a living, make ends meet, things like that. But the underlying pretense and the mentality—and often, this is in the church as well as out in the mainstream culture—the view is either implicitly or often explicitly one that work is against the things of our life that matter most: getting to a place of peace and harmony, of time with family, of wellbeing and recreation. And work is standing in the way of that. And so, the book is really meant to be an antidote to that fallacious thinking. 

It is, by the way, a Marxian view of the world that work is the enemy of mankind, that man is in a sense in a battle against nature. And I have to, as a believer, start with Creation to really get a better understanding of these things. And so, when I go about saying something that can sound somewhat provocative but is by no means said for the purpose of being provocative, that I believe work is the meaning of life, I say it because God said it. And God made us for that purpose and imbibed us with a certain dignity and a status as an image bearer of Him that reflects our ability to produce, to create, to work. 

And so, for those of us who believe in the message of the Gospel, this is the great hope we have that we’re being restored to what we call the Immanuel principle, God with us. And God intended to be with us, but what was it we were to be doing as He was going to be with us? He says it four times in two verses in Genesis chapter one that what we were going to be doing was ruling over the earth, filling the earth, being fruitful, multiplying.  

A lot of Christians have reduced this to a procreative commandment, that we were to go have a lot of children. And I by no means would take away that it is procreative. But I would push back on the idea that it’s only procreative, because how in the world were we going to fill the earth without building roads and irrigation?

God’s making us for the purpose of these grandiose endeavors, which can be reduced to the word work. There’s a creativity, but then you also have to extract the message from creation itself, that God did not make the wheel. God did not create fire. He created chemical compounds. He created raw materials. But what He did is He created human beings with capacity for reason. As people have been removed from our created purpose, life does become meaningless. 

That’s David Bahnsen, author of the book Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life. As a thank-you this month for a gift of any amount to the Colson Center, we’ll send you a copy of this book, which is incredibly important, especially right now. Just visit us at colsoncenter.org/February.