A sluggard does not plow in season; so at harvest time he looks but finds nothing.
~Proverbs 20:4
In ancient Judaism the highest level of spiritual life was to be a scribe and spend all your time studying the Law. So it's easy to imagine that this would also be the highest kind of Christianity.
And Eusebius, an early 4th century church father, considered secular work to be less spiritual than devoting oneself to God's service. He was one of the first to draw distinctions in life regarding what was considered sacred and what was considered common.
There are two ways of life given by the law of Christ to His church. One is above nature and beyond common human living, holy and permanently separate from the common customary life of man. It devotes itself to the service of God alone. Such is the perfect form of the Christian life.
~Eusebius
Eusebius perpetuated the idea that first-class Christians are those who serve God alone. The second-class Christians are those who have secular employment. So if you want to be a first-class Christian, then you must devote your life to serving God alone. And it was that kind of teaching that led to monasticism. Where priests gave up decades of their life, contemplating their spiritual navel, as it were, looking inward and constantly asserting their own humility before God. They believed that this in and of itself made them a perfect Christian, or an elevated Christian whereas anyone outside farming or doing a trade or working in a business was a second-class Christian.
Your job is not a secular job, it is a spiritual duty. You are serving the Lord with your attitude and your diligence. You're serving the Lord. You're doing it unto His honor and to His glory. You're even serving mankind for what you do provides a service to man that helps them in their life.
~John MacArthur
This idea of secular work making you a less than perfect christian is still around in Catholicism, but the Reformation dealt some pretty heavy blows against it. Martin Luther said there is absolutely no difference before God though there may be before men between one who preaches the Word of God and one who washes dishes.
Later on in the 16th and 17th century, the Puritans view was that God calls all workers to their tasks in the world dignifying all legitimate kinds of work. Above all, the Puritan doctrine of vocation sanctified common work.
If we look externally, there is difference betwixt washing of dishes, and preaching of the word of God; but as touching to please God, none at all.
~William Tyndale
Wash the dishes with the motive of Glorifying Christ... and God will be tremendously pleased.
God looketh not … principally at the external part of the work, but much more to the heart of him that doth it.
~Richard Baxter
Paul faced a wrong attitude toward work in the early Thessalonian church.
In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we command you, brothers, to keep away from every brother who is idle and does not live according to the teaching you received from us.
~2 Thessalonians 3:6
In Roman society menial labor was done by slaves. It could be there was a strong mentality for some that it's beneath them to work. They've never worked and now when they don't have the income that came from their prior occupation, they're thrust into the situation where they need to work and they're just above that, they're not about to work. It's true that christians are to take care of the poor, but the poor were defined as those who could not make a living on their own because of extinuating circumstances.
Or maybe some of them thought; if Jesus is coming, and we're in the day of the Lord and God's fury is about to fall and the Lord is about to return, we don't want to get involved in work. We need to be evangelizing instead.
But the Apostle Paul was very clear regarding what our attitude should be toward work.
For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: "If a man will not work, he shall not eat."
~2 Thessalonians 3:1
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a slave or free.
~Ephesians 6: 5-8
Our Christian faith has sanctified every occupation. There isn't any difference between the secular and the sacred, there isn't any at all. The church should remember that Jesus was a preacher for three years but a carpenter for at least 20. That sanctifies work. All of life is God's. All of it is for His glory.
~John MacArthur
Integration, of the secular with the sacred, is one of the most attractive features of the Puritans. Their goal was an ordered and disciplined daily life that integrated personal piety, corporate life, everyday work, and the worship of God.
~C.S. Lewis
Dos and Don'ts in the Workplace
From Richard Baxter's A Christian Directory
• Choose that employment or calling … in which you may be most serviceable to God. Choose not that in which you may be most rich or honourable in the world.
• Be diligent in your callings, and spend no time in idleness, and perform your labours with holy minds, to the glory of God, and in obedience to his commands.
• Idleness is a robbing God, who is the Lord of us and all our faculties.
• Take pleasure in your work, and then you will not be slothful in it.
• This interest of God in your lowest, and hardest, and servilist labour, doth make it honourable and should make it sweet.
• The question is, How they use that which they labour so hard for, and save so sparingly. If they use it for God, and charitable uses, there is no man taketh a righter course.
• Remember that riches do make it much harder for a man to be saved.
• If God show you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way (without wrong to your soul, or to any other), if you refuse this, and then choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your calling, and you refuse to be God's steward.
• You must not desire nor seek to get another's goods or labour for less than it is worth.
• You have far more cause to be afraid of prosperity, than of adversity; of riches, than of poverty.
• The devil suiteth his temptations to men's daily work and business.
This puritan work ethic has been largely misconstrued as the reason in our society that work is closely related to, and often motivated by guilt which produces a cultural anxiety. Instead of dealing with the truth of the guilt, it is said that to rid yourself from this unnecessary stress, you should...
...forget work and do what you want.
~Brian Dean Anxiety Culture
More and more parents today falsely believe that children should not be burdened with the everyday requirements we all must eventually face. American society tries to convince us that children would fall apart if we should put any sort of real life pressures on them. Holding our children and teenagers responsible for their own actions, expecting them to work for what they want and teaching them that money does indeed not grow on trees is looked upon as cruel and unusual punishment by some.
Our children must learn to work "as unto the Lord" and that...
Our sanctification does not depend as much on changing our activities as it does on doing them for God rather than for ourselves.
~Brother Lawrence
Lord help me to have a good attitude toward work and to not be slothful; rightly teaching my children so they may become worthy laborers in your vineyard.
Lord... Jesus embodied the human and the divine. Help me to live a one piece life, an ordinary life that is wholly sacred, because the Holy Spirit resides within, this body being the very house of God, with no divide between holy and sacred.
I need not a sanctuary. The kitchen sink will suffice.
Always Seeking Higher Ground,
Nora
The Puritans were pretty cool.
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