Gill and I have had a really hectic week, so I found myself twice this week getting up before 6am to write a sermon on work/life balance…! I tell you that at the beginning, lest I try to come over as someone who has got this sorted.
Work/life balance is something we all have to struggle with. And not just people in work. I know retired people and homemakers who end up with a worse work/life balance than people in work, because they end up doing everything for everyone else and having no time for themselves.
Ten years ago I was reading some research about the future which predicted that in the early 21st century the advance of technology would mean we would all work shorter hours and have more time for family and leisure…
One of the realities of the modern workplace is less job security, which leads people to work longer hours – you feel you have got to put in extra hours, or you might lose your job if others are willing to and you aren’t…
In the last 40 years we have invented all these time-saving gadgets – but how come we all seem to have less time than ever?
Article in paper – those who have all the gadgets work on average 20 days a year more
As a priest I have got to spend time with many people with not long to live, sometimes looking back on their lives with various regrets, but I have never yet had someone say to me, ‘you know Mark, I wish I’d spent more time at the office’
Those who work long hours are not just victims of the system. The truth is that we connive with the long hours culture. Why do we do that? In my experience it’s usually for one of 3 reasons. Let’s have a look at these, and see if any one of these is a subconscious factor in our lives:
Greed
We need the money. Or we think we do, to maintain the living standard we desire.
Most of us have a better standard of living than our parents did, but do we have a better standard of life??
Jesus teaches us that a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions…
Look at Matthew 6.19… ‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth…’ You can’t take it with you when you go…
Anxiety
If the boss asks me to work extra and I don’t, will I be the next one to get the push? I’ve got children at university and I’m on a short term contract. I need to work the hours now because I don’t know how many hours I’ll have next year…
Jesus speaks into our anxious culture in Matthew 6:
V25 ‘Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life…’
V32-33 ‘Your Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness…’
Ambition
We know we have gifts and talents, and we want to use them to the full. That is a good thing in itself, as Jesus makes clear in his parable. But maybe we also want to make a name for ourselves – to be seen to be successful at whatever we do, whether it’s in business, or in teaching, or in Christian ministry. We may also be a bit competitive - maybe we want to be the servant who uses his master’s money and produces ten talents… Maybe parents or employers have put us down at some point in our lives, and said we’ll never be any good, or maybe we failed the 11+, and we want to show people that we can achieve after all.
Ambition and success are not bad things in themselves, but we just need to be very careful that they don’t destroy our work/life balance, or mess up the work/life balance of our families or our employees.
If ambition has a bit of a hold in our lives, then the verse we could meditate on this week is 1 Timothy 6.6 – where Paul says, ‘Godliness with contentment is great gain’
OK Mark, so if we have diagnosed some of the factors that mess up our work/life balance, what is the solution?
Recovering a doctrine of Sabbath – Exodus 20.8-11
Richard began this series by reflecting on creation – work is good, we had work to do before the fall. Did you notice that the creation account in Genesis 1 also teaches us that God so ordered creation that human beings’ first full day of existence was God’s day off, so that they could play together..?
That means that Adam and Eve had to enjoy a day of rest before they could start their work of looking after creation. What a difference there would be if we could only recover that biblical sense that we work from rest, rather than using rest to recover from work…
That is why holidays should go in the diary before anything else – if we plan our holidays ahead then we have to fit work around them, rather than letting work dictate the diary and then struggling to fit in holidays
The root meaning of the word ‘sabbath’ is to cease, or to pause, derived from God pausing and resting on the 7th day of creation. No other commandment receives as much space and attention in the OT as the observance of the Sabbath, and the death penalty is even prescribed for its infringement!
The loss of Sunday as a family day, a day of rest, has done massive harm to our society – we were not created to live 24/7, so we as Christians are called to be counter-cultural, to live distinctive lives
One of the distinctives of our lives as Christians shd be our keeping of the Sabbath. Not a day off to catch up on jobs around the house, but a distinctive day of rest, recreation and worship…
It is interesting to compare the two lists of the 10 Commandments in the Bible for the differing reasons they give for the 4th commandment.
Look at Exodus 20.8-11 – following God’s example
Compare the other list of commandments in Deut 5.12ff
The Sabbath is commanded as a day to remember the escape from slavery in Egypt
The Christian Sunday is of course a day to remember the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, which gives it added significance… The fact that we keep Sunday rather than the Jewish Saturday as our Sabbath shd free us from legalism. Our keeping of Sunday shd not be a matter of law, with lots of legalistic rules, as in the Old Testament, but as a matter of grace.
But I believe we need to recover our concept of Sabbath, as an escape from unremitting toil…
Not everyone can keep Sunday as their day of rest… It wdn’t really work for me…but we keep Tuesdays. I tend to refer to it as my day off, but as I reflect on this series, I want to start calling it my Sabbath day
Which is your Sabbath day? What makes it different from the other days in the week?
3 other things that help my work life balance…
Having a wife…! Having a date, separate from my Sabbath
Having a hobby?
Having a quiet time, a time of stillness each day?
Devotional exercise
4 circles…
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