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Day Three: Created to Work

Welcome to Brad Formsma’s Wow Factor Leadership Devotional, where conversations with today's extraordinary business leaders will bring you Words of Wisdom to help you grow in business and beyond. Read this short devotional, or listen to Brad read it on audio by tapping here.

In our first two devotionals with David Green, CEO of Hobby Lobby, we discovered the power of teaching by example and the value of working hard at every job you have.

For this final day, I want to share something profoundly inspiring with you: you were created to work. 

According to the scripture, God created you and God created work for you to do. Living and working are two sides of the same coin. What that means is that we’re meant to find satisfaction in work—provided we’re working for God and for his kingdom of course.

The reason it’s so inspiring to be created to work is that when we’re working hard, as if for God, we can get so much enjoyment out of it, even when it isn’t easy or things aren’t going well. In fact, it’s likely the only way we’ll enjoy work when things aren’t going well is if we’re working for God!

As we saw yesterday, setting merely human goals for work is just setting ourselves up for failure. We can build a career, build a network of friends and coworkers, build a retirement plan, but if we aren’t building for the Lord, we aren’t doing what God designed us to do. You see, we don’t really own what we build—God does. David Green sees himself as a steward of the multi-billion dollar company God owns. This isn’t just something he pays lip service to either. Legally, not one single member of the Green family can obtain money from Hobby Lobby that isn’t earned. 

Once when I was walking through a distribution warehouse with David, I asked him if he’d share one of his favorite Bible verses with me. Right away he said, “Clean hands and a pure heart.”

I pretended that I understood the importance of that phrase, but later that day I opened my bible to look up the context in Psalm 24! What would “clean hands and a pure heart” mean for a manager in retail, hospitality, healthcare, or whatever industry you’re in?

The context made David Green’s message clear: if we work (and live) with clean hands and a pure heart, we can be sure that we can approach the Lord humbly, and even be blessed by the Lord.

At the end of the day, our work can’t only be about a set of external, human goals. This promotion, that title, this compensation, that status . . . none of those things can define us as workers. Or as people! Because what happens when we achieve them? We either become depressed because there is nothing left to strive for, or we become addicted to reaching the next goal, and the next goal, and the thousand after that.

How much simpler it is to recognize that we were not just created to work, but created to work as God would have us work. As leaders, we will have different callings. But how we work should be unchanging, no matter the job.

To Consider

On a sliding scale of 1-10, how much is your work motivated by external factors, and how much is it motivated by God creating you to work for him?

What are the biggest challenges to maintaining “clean hands and a pure heart” at your job?

To Pray

God, help me remember that you have blessed me with skills and the ability to work. Remind me each day to bring my best, give me clean hands a pure heart. Amen.

Listen to David's full episode now.