Work is a glorious thing

I am honing in on one of my primary obstacles in life, and that is, I don't have a good Biblical foundation for the nature of work, and therefore, I don't work hard, or diligently, or to completion. This has plagued me perhaps all the way back to high school, and I don't know why exactly. I trust that if God needs me to know what happened to my ethic, He will tell me in due time so I'm not going to waste any more of it contemplating my past. For now, it is imperative to think about redefining my Biblical understanding of the doctrine of work.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” - Genesis 1:26

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. - Genesis 2:15

God is the primal worker - He is the Creator, and created first, making the world out of nothing. He then created us and set us inside the world to work it. His primal work was to create us, and our primary work is to continue creating out of his creation. This includes the creation we do through our minds, be it the work of industry, art, music, story telling, etc. Each of these is the closest approximation, I think, to us experiencing our lives in the image of our Creator. Out of nothing, He spoke things into existence. In the same way, the nature of our imaginations is to think and speak things into existence that did not exist before.

Also, God designed work to be creative, productive, and joyfully satisfying instead of aimless and random. It has a purpose, and that ultimate purpose is to glorify God, and therefore the byproduct of that work brings us joy.