If you are reading this, then the title of this post did its job. You may be asking, “Why is Integrous promoting becoming a workaholic?” Culturally, words ending in “holic” are not good and certainly not seen as goals—alcoholic, chocoholic, shopaholic, workaholic.  It is a suffix that signals addictive and generally destructive behavior.

As we have shown in the past, adding the qualifier “faithful” or “Biblical” to a cultural word can turn it on its head, and Jesus loved turning the world’s thinking on its head.

“Faithful Integrity” recognizes that integrity alone lacks a transcendent anchor, but “faithful integrity” provides an important Biblical plumb line.

“Faithful Stewardship” requires a heart transformation that is missing from merely religious stewardship.

“Biblical Flourishing” is both more and less than how the world thinks about flourishing.

“Biblical DEI” and “Biblical ESG” are very different from the worldly concepts of DEI and ESG.

A workaholic is generally thought of as someone addicted to paid employment, productivity, achievement, or exhaustion, often at the expense of their family and their health. It is someone who worships work.

What we are calling a “faithful workaholic” is not someone addicted to work, productivity, achievement, or even obedience as a compulsion. It is someone devoted to obeying God’s commands around work. It is someone who worships God through work, recognizing the Biblical principles and priorities that God created to define and constrain work.

Becoming a faithful workaholic begins with understanding the broad nature of work in Genesis and receiving the broad calling of Genesis 1:28—to cultivate, steward, order, create, protect, and bless God’s creation. It continues by doing that work in alignment with biblical beliefs, principles, and priorities. It recognizes the importance of rest, understanding Sabbath as a gift rather than an obligation. It aims at the glory of God rather than the glory of self. And it accepts God’s ordering of life—God, spouse, children, work.

In other words, faithful workaholism is not working all the time “for God”. It is bringing all of life’s work under God’s lordship.

The Nature of Work and Our Role in the World

As we said way back in post #006 (The Basics–Fruit) and many times since, people are more “fully human” when engaged in meaningful work that unleashes their God-given productivity and creativity in a culture of Shalom built on Biblical principles of relationships, community, human dignity, and flourishing.

Work is Good. God created “work” as something “good” before the Fall, and God put us into the Garden to “work and keep it.” (Genesis 2:15).  You have probably heard that the Hebrew word avodah means work (Genesis 2:15), worship (Exodus 8:1) and service (Joshua 24:15).

That breadth matters. Work is not merely what we do for pay. It is not merely what appears on a resume, generates revenue, or produces measurable output. Work is the faithful use of God-given gifts to steward God’s creation and serve others for God’s glory.

Humans Were Created to Work. Humans were created in the image of a creative and productive God who displayed His “working nature” by creating for six days (and then resting), which means work is essential to our humanity in reflecting that nature.  Being “fully human” requires having an opportunity to reflect God’s image and reveal His Kingdom in all of life, including our work.  Dorothy Sayers observed about work:

It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.

Our Work Is Needed. The product of our work also has intrinsic Kingdom value because it is the way we fulfill the Creation Mandate in Genesis 1:28 to: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

We do that by taking the raw materials God created and applying our image-bearing creativity and productivity to produce new things that bring and promote flourishing, including by allowing the development of culture, society and economic prosperity. Because we live in a broken world, we also fulfill the Creation Mandate with “work” that uses our gifts to solve problems and “repair” the world—what is captured in the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam.

Because we are part of creation, we also “work” fulfilling the Creation Mandate when we do things that promote our flourishing, such as caring for our wellness. In that sense, caring for our bodies is not self-absorption when rightly ordered. It is stewardship of creation. Fitness, sleep, nutrition, healing, and wellness are not opposed to work; they are part of preparing and preserving the embodied creature through whom God calls us to love, serve, steward, and create.

Our Unique Gifts Are Needed. By our nature as creations in the image of God, and in order to equip us to fulfill the Creation Mandate by stewarding creation, we are given gifts of creativity and productivity through specific skills and physical and mental abilities.

Work is the platform God created for putting these gifts to creative and productive use for His glory, and 1 Peter 4:10-11 declares that we are to use these gifts–the basis of our work and stewardship–“to serve one another”:

As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace…in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.

Humans are meant to serve one another through work by applying their gifts to steward creation and promote flourishing of that creation.   When we reflect the image of God by exercising our God-given gifts through work to serve one another, we are also living out the commandments to love God and love one another.

“Work” is a vehicle for living out those commandments.

The Roots of Workaholism

Sadly, the idea of “work” has been corrupted by a broken world, barely resembling the work God designed to bring us life.  It has become “toxic” work as usual, which is a by-product of business as usual.

Work Is About Productivity and Money. Our culture has defined “work” in a very narrow way that does not reflect God’s design.  In the kingdom of the world, “productivity” and “provision” are inextricably bound, and “work” is something we do in exchange for money, because we “need” the money to survive and, for some, because it is a source of power and status.  If no one is paying us, it’s not “work.” If we are not “working” (for money), we are not being productive, and our success is tied to our productivity.

That narrow definition distorts both paid work and unpaid work. It tempts those in paid employment to make productivity, provision, and status ultimate. It tempts those doing unpaid work—raising children, caring for parents, volunteering, homemaking, mentoring, serving neighbors, healing relationships, or stewarding their own health—to believe they are not really “working.” Both temptations are false.

Worshipping Work. In describing the toxic impacts of business as usual on work, we wrote in post #173 (The Toxicity of “Work as Usual”) that one aspect of work as usual is work becoming an idol and identity.

American culture, in particular, glorifies our work as our primary identity. Business as usual demands that work be our primary loyalty.  In her book Overwhelmed: How To Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time, author Brigid Schulte described the “ideal worker”: “So tied to his job is the ideal worker that he works endless hours, even if it costs him his health and his family.”

Just as a person can only serve one master (Matthew 6:24, “No one can serve two masters“), they can only have one primary identity, and they will sacrifice their secondary identities to ensure success in their primary identity. With work as Identity and Idol, identities grounded in things like faith, family and fitness will be compromised or even sacrificed to ensure success at work. When work is our primary identity, work becomes about glorifying self.

Work can also become the means to acquire idols and identities.  The American culture of achievement and the American marketing message of “more and bigger” can put tremendous pressure on people to work longer and harder to “climb the ladder”, “fit in,” or “keep up with the Jones’s”.

Understanding Faithful Workaholism

Turning the world’s idea of “workaholism” on its head through faithfulness rests on that workaholism aligning with Biblical beliefs, principles, and priorities. In particular:

• Right Framework: Understanding the broad nature of “work” in Genesis and the broad calling of the Creation Mandate.

• Right Limits: Recognizing the importance of Sabbath rest.

• Right Purpose: Working to glorify God.

• Right Priorities: Accepting God’s ordering of life.

Right Framework

Unlike in the world’s understanding of work, in God’s Kingdom “productivity” and “provision” are decoupled.  God’s people are humanized by being obedient to God’s commands, leaving the outcome and their provision to God.

Those commands include the avodah “work” that makes us fully human–work, worship, service.  It is anything we do to use our God-given gifts of creativity and productivity to fulfill the Creation Mandate or live out the commandments to love God and love our neighbor—in the words of 1 Peter, “to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace.”

In God’s Kingdom, a job or career is simply a distribution mechanism through which God fulfills His promise of provision. Humans are called and commanded to “work”—to utilize their gifts to steward the flourishing of creation and fulfill God’s commandments–whether or not that work is a distribution mechanism for provision.

A parent taking care of a home and children is “working.”  A child caring for aging parents is “working.” A person volunteering for a non-profit is “working.” Someone helping their neighbor with a project is “working.” A person caring for the body God gave them is “working.” God worked six days and rested one.

Right Limits

God rested, and a workaholic is not faithful unless they are living out Imago Dei by resting.  In Exodus 20:8-10, we read:

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.  Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work.

Faithfulness in work requires obedience to God’s limits. But we can’t understand the nature of the Sabbath commandment without remembering what Jesus declared to those who accused him of breaking it (on several occasions):

The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. (Mark 2:27)

The Sabbath is a gift from God to those created in God’s image.  In fact, God told Moses it was a gift in Exodus 16:29:

See! The Lord has given you the Sabbath.

A worldly workaholic sees rest as laziness, a lack of productivity, or missed output. A faithful workaholic sees it as obedience to God and part of aligning work with Biblical beliefs, principles and priorities.

Sabbath is not the enemy of faithful work. Sabbath is one of God’s commands about faithful work.

Right Purpose

There is much talk about finding purpose and the intersection of “work” and “ministry.” A.W. Tozer put it this way:

Let every man abide in the calling wherein he is called and his work will be as sacred as the work of the ministry. It is not what a man does that determines whether his work is sacred or secular, it is why he does it.

The WHY of the world’s workaholism might be money, power, status, fear, or escape, but it is a self-directed worship.

The WHY of faithful work is different. The only WHY that can truly sustain work and ministry simultaneously is the only purpose for which we were created—to glorify God. That is the standard by which a faithful workaholic “works.”  It is what we called a “Ministry OF Work” in post #123 (“Why” in Deed: The Path to a Ministry OF Work). It requires crossing the Sacred/Secular Gap to understand the sacred nature of work.

The faithful workaholic does not worship work. The faithful workaholic worships God through work—and therefore refuses to let work become god.

Right Priorities

Faithful workaholism requires prioritizing work in accordance with Biblical priorities.

As we have boldly asserted in several posts (for example in post #107-Work As Life), “work-life balance” is a deception contrary to God’s design because it makes us see work as an obstacle to life.  In God’s design, work is an essential part of life to be balanced with other aspects of our life such as faith, family, and wellness.

Because we live in a fallen world, balancing “life” can become difficult.  We believe the Bible gives us a priority structure to help us see what is important and to get a sense of the relative priorities of the aspects of our life.  We believe that work comes in at #4 in that priority structure:  God, Spouse, Children, Work.  We are not alone in prioritizing faith and family ahead of work. John Beckett in his book Loving Monday: Succeeding in Business Without Selling Your Soul  writes:

Our priorities should be ordered like this: First, our relationship with God; then commitment to family; and only then commitment to our work and vocations.

When we hear these priorities, we just know they seem right.  In Mark 12:30-31, it is clear that loving God comes first and then loving others.  Ephesians 5 raises love for a spouse to a special level, and Ephesians 6:4 and Colossians 3:21 address the special attention needed in raising children.  But just because something “seems right” doesn’t mean it is easy.

The workaholism of the world operates with disordered priorities. That might result from work becoming a primary identity and a person’s source of worth and value or it might be work as a means to acquire idols and identities.  In either case, it comes at the expense of God and family.

The third category of disorder can be the most insidious because it is uniquely the failing of the most “faithful.” This disorder occurs because the worker confuses “God’s work” with God, catapulting their work to the top of the priority structure ahead of family.  This can happen with the pastor, missionary or non-profit ministry employee whose spouse and children suffer as a result of their “calling” if the person rationalizes the suffering as just part of putting God or “God’s work” first in their life.

The Bible tells us that ALL work is “God’s work”; and putting work ahead of family is a disordered priority, whether or not it is understood or labeled as “God’s work”.

A purely linear or hierarchical approach misses the reality of our world and the complexity of God’s commands. Commitments made to an employer should be honored, which means faith can’t be used as an excuse to do less than what was committed. Commitments to a family are covenantal and must be honored. There will be times when the seasonal demands of work can interfere with faith, family or wellness. Callings unfold in seasons—crunch times happen—but seasons mustn’t become identities, and work mustn’t become an idol.

The priority structure is not a mechanical formula for every scheduling conflict. It is a guardrail for the heart. It helps reveal when a season of demanding work is becoming a disordered identity, when a calling is being used to excuse neglect, or when “God’s work” is being confused with God Himself.

Faithful Workaholism v. Worldly Workaholism

Putting it all together, faithful workaholism does turn the world’s workaholism on its head:

Become a faithful workaholic. Not the kind who worships work, neglects people, ignores limits, and treats exhaustion as a badge of honor. Become the kind who is so committed to God’s design for work and God’s commands around work that you refuse to shrink “work” to a paycheck, refuse to expand “work” into seven-day self-salvation, refuse to see work as opposed to life rather than an integral part of it, and refuse to allow work to become a disordered priority.

Become the kind of workaholic who works when God calls you to work, rests when God commands you to rest, serves when God gives you gifts to steward, and orders all of it in alignment with Biblical beliefs, principles and priorities for the glory of God.

PERSONAL NOTE (from PM):  I have written on this topic in the past, but sometimes topics are worth, revisiting, repeating, and reworking.  God’s broad design and purpose for work, the toxicity of work as usual, and the balancing of work within life’s priorities are three of those topics.

This post was inspired by a text from a friend. She mentioned that she felt prompted to share at a recent faith/work conference about the importance of unpaid work and how it is an area that workplace ministry doesn’t focus on enough.  Just minutes after reading her message, I saw a link to an article titled “Catholic social teaching says all work is good for us—paid or unpaid.”  That was more than enough inspiration.

ESSENCE: You may be asking, “Why is Integrous promoting becoming a workaholic?” As we have shown in the past, adding the qualifier “faithful” or “Biblical” to a cultural word can turn it on its head, and Jesus loved turning the world’s thinking on its head. What we are calling a “faithful workaholic” is not someone addicted to work, productivity, achievement, or even obedience as a compulsion. It is someone devoted to obeying God’s commands around work.  Becoming a faithful workaholic requires the right framework, the right limits, the right purpose, and the right priorities. It begins with understanding the broad nature of work in Genesis and receiving the broad calling of Genesis 1:28—to cultivate, steward, order, create, protect, and bless God’s creation.  It recognizes the importance of rest, understanding Sabbath as a gift rather than an obligation. It aims at the glory of God rather than the glory of self. And it accepts God’s ordering of life—God, spouse, children, work. A faithful workaholic is so committed to God’s design for work and God’s commands around work that they refuse to shrink “work” to a paycheck, refuse to expand “work” into seven-day self-salvation, refuse to see work as opposed to life rather than an integral part of it, and refuse to allow work to become a disordered priority.

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Photo Credit: Original image by Photo by Jordan Whitfield on Unsplash
(photo cropped and inverted)