“I have to, as a believer, start with Creation…I believe work is the meaning of life, I say it because God said it. And God made us for that purpose and imbibed us with a certain dignity and a status as an image bearer of Him that reflects our ability to produce, to create, to work.”

As David Bahnsen observes in his book Full-Time, most Americans work in order to stop working. According to a recent survey from Natixis Investment Managers, which looked at retirement goals by demographic, this is especially true of younger Americans. While baby boomers plan to work until age 68, Gen X’ers only want to work until 60 and Gen Y’ers, those aged 25 to 40, want to be done with careers by 59. When combined with the demographic realities of declining birthrates, this is a recipe for all kinds of economic and social problems.

At the root of this American work mood is a loss of meaning and purpose, expressed through a disillusionment with work. That’s not the way God created us.

In his book Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life, Bahnsen describes why understanding God’s design for work is so essential. In a recent interview, I asked Bahnsen about this:

If you think about it, to get an indication of what the culture’s honest view of work is, one of the most popular expressions that people routinely use, and I think most of the time believe it is benign, is they use that expression, “work-life balance.” So how far are we from having a proper understanding of where work fits into the meaning of our lives? We actually have pitted work against our lives, as if the two things are in need of some kind of equilibrium, balancing one another. 

I think work is viewed as a necessary evil. I mean, there aren’t that many people who will say you don’t need to work because most people will say you have to be able to provide for your family, make a living, make ends meet, things like that. But the underlying pretense and the mentality—and often, this is in the church as well as out in the mainstream culture—the view is either implicitly or often explicitly one that work is against the things of our life that matter most: getting to a place of peace and harmony, of time with family, of wellbeing and recreation. And work is standing in the way of that. And so, the book is really meant to be an antidote to that fallacious thinking.

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