Why Work in the Home Matters to God
Created for Work
The first thing we need to understand regarding why stay at home work matters to God is that God created us for work. Work is not an afterthought to him. After the fall, he didn’t one day decide to force us to work. Yes, work is cursed, so it’s hard. Nonetheless, it is part of God’s design for us as human beings.
This means that the work we’re doing in the home every day has great value to him because we are living out what it means to image him. We are living out what it means to be created by him and for him. So the laundry, for example, matters to God.
This means that the work we’re doing in the home every day has great value to him because we are living out what it means to image him.
Love Your (at Home) Neighbor
Another component of stay-at-home work is that it is a means of loving God by loving our neighbor. For this reason also, it matters to God. All of our work is not just for ourselves. It’s not so everyone can look at your nice home and say, “Look at how great of a homemaker she is” or, “Look at how great she is at cooking or doing laundry or taking care of her kids.” Instead, it’s so that God gets glory and our neighbors feel loved.
And we are living with a bunch of neighbors, aren’t we? We’re living with children and husbands and friends coming into our homes. So work in the home matters to God because people matter to him and he wants them to see who he is through our everyday work.
This means that laundry matters because people are wearing that laundry and having clean clothes. When we see kids without clean clothes, there is something in us that says that’s not right. It’s not right because they are image bearers and they need clean clothes.
The Accidental Feminist
Courtney Reissig
Combining personal narrative, practical examples, and biblical teaching, this book pushes back against both feminism and 1950s stereotypes related to gender roles in an effort to help Christians recover God’s good design for women.
People see the goodness of God in the full bellies of those in our home. When we’re making food for them we are imaging God to our kids, our husband, and the people who come into our home. They get to see that it’s not us who are filling their bellies but it’s God who is meeting their needs.
So reorienting how we look at our work—that it is not for us, but for our neighbor; and that we were created to do good work—helps us see that the work we do in the home matters to God.
