This is a guest post by Courtney Reissig, author of The Accidental Feminist: Restoring Our Delight in God's Good Design. Courtney and eight other trusted authors have contributed to a 14-day email devotional for women called Refresh. Sign up for free today on Crossway.org!
Created for Work
The first thing we need to understand regarding why stay at home work matters to God is that God created us for work. Work is not an afterthought to him. After the fall, he didn’t one day decide to force us to work. Yes, work is cursed, so it’s hard. Nonetheless, it is part of God’s design for us as human beings.
This means that the work we’re doing in the home every day has great value to him because we are living out what it means to image him. We are living out what it means to be created by him and for him. So the laundry, for example, matters to God.
Love Your (at Home) Neighbor
Another component of stay-at-home work is that it is a means of loving God by loving our neighbor. For this reason also, it matters to God. All of our work is not just for ourselves. It’s not so everyone can look at your nice home and say, “Look at how great of a homemaker she is” or, “Look at how great she is at cooking or doing laundry or taking care of her kids.” Instead, it’s so that God gets glory and our neighbors feel loved.
And we are living with a bunch of neighbors, aren’t we? We’re living with children and husbands and friends coming into our homes. So work in the home matters to God because people matter to him and he wants them to see who he is through our everyday work.
This means that laundry matters because people are wearing that laundry and having clean clothes. When we see kids without clean clothes, there is something in us that says that’s not right. It’s not right because they are image bearers and they need clean clothes.
People see the goodness of God in the full bellies of those in our home. When we’re making food for them we are imaging God to our kids, our husband, and the people who come into our home. They get to see that it’s not us who are filling their bellies but it’s God who is meeting their needs.
So reorienting how we look at our work—that it is not for us, but for our neighbor; and that we were created to do good work—helps us see that the work we do in the home matters to God.
Written by Courtney Reissig, author of The Accidental Feminist: Restoring Our Delight in God's Good Design. Originally appearing on Crossway.org.
Related video:
Why Work in the Home Matters to God from Crossway on Vimeo.
Courtney Reissig is a wife, mother, and writer. She has written for the Gospel Coalition, Boundless, and Her.meneutics (the Christianity Today Online blog for women), where she is a regular contributor. She is also the assistant editor for Karis, a women's blog hosted by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and the author of The Accidental Feminist: Restoring Our Delight in God's Good Design. She lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Publication date: July 26, 2016