Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.
Colossians 3:23 is the verse for Christians who dislike their jobs. It turns up in graduation cards and on office walls and in sermons about vocation, and the application is usually the same: your ordinary work matters to God, so do it well.
I believe that, and I think the verse teaches it. But there is something about the passage that almost never gets mentioned, and leaving it out changes what we are doing with the words.
Who it was written to
Read verse 22, immediately before.
Bondservants, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters.
That is the addressee. The paragraph is instruction to enslaved people about how to work for the people who owned them.
So the sentence we quote about finding meaning in a frustrating job was first spoken to people who did not have a job, or wages, or the option of leaving.
That ought to slow us down.
The paragraph it belongs to
Back up a little further and you can see the shape of the thing.
Colossians 3:18 through 4:1 is a household code — a run of short instructions to the pairs that made up a Roman household. Wives and husbands. Children and fathers. Slaves and masters. Down the list, briskly.
Then count the lines. Wives get one verse. Husbands one. Children one. Fathers one. Masters, one. The enslaved get four.
The longest address in the paragraph is to the people with the least power in it, and the verse on the office wall is sitting in the middle of that.
Look, too, at what brackets the code on either side. A few sentences before it: Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all. And a sentence after it: Masters, treat your bondservants justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.
Whatever you make of the instruction in the middle, it is not floating free. It has that on one side and that on the other.
Two things this does not mean
I want to be careful in both directions here.
It does not mean the verse cannot apply to us. Scripture regularly addresses a specific situation with a principle that carries beyond it, and Christians of every tradition have read this passage as speaking to work in general for a very long time. The instruction to work as unto the Lord is not a hostage to first-century labor arrangements.
But it also does not mean we can lift the sentence out and forget where it stood. Because the original context makes the claim much stronger than the office-wall version, and slightly harder to bear.
Paul is saying that the dignity of work does not come from the work. It cannot, in that setting. It comes from who you are ultimately doing it for.
An enslaved person had no prospect of promotion, no ownership of the product, no recognition, and no exit. If meaning depended on any of that, there was none available. Paul relocates it entirely: you are serving the Lord Christ.
The reward line
Verse 24 attaches something to it. Knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward.
Inheritance is a pointed word in that context. Enslaved people did not inherit. That was the one thing their legal status permanently excluded.
The Greek is klēronomia, and it is the ordinary term for an estate that passes to an heir — the same word the Greek Old Testament uses for the land allotted to the tribes of Israel. It is not a soft word for a good feeling. It means a portion, assigned, held by right.
Paul tells them there is an inheritance coming to them, from the Lord, as their reward.
Whatever else is happening in that paragraph, that sentence is doing something to the social order, quietly, from underneath.
The objection worth stating properly
A thoughtful reader arrives here with a hard question, and it deserves to be put in its strongest form rather than a softened one.
It is this. If Scripture tells enslaved people to obey, and does not tell the people who own them to stop, is the passage not part of the machinery? These verses were quoted, at length and for a very long time, by people defending the institution. That is not a slander. It is a documented fact about how they were used.
I do not think there is a way around that which is both honest and comfortable, and I am not going to attempt one.
What I can do is say what is on the page. Verse 25 tells the enslaved person that the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality — addressed into a legal world where partiality was the entire arrangement. Colossians 4:1 turns to the owners and informs them that they are themselves owned. A few verses before the code begins, the same letter has said that in Christ the categories slave and free do not describe anybody’s standing.
None of that is an abolition program, and pretending otherwise is just a way of not reading. But it is also not nothing. And the people who were later handed these verses as a chain were handed them with everything around them removed.
Two small words
Two things in the Greek are worth knowing, and both are checkable in any lexicon in about a minute.
The first is the phrase behind work heartily. It is ek psychēs — literally, “from the soul.” Translations reach for “heartily” or “with all your heart,” which is fair enough, but the flatter rendering is nearer: whatever you do, work from the soul outward. Not from the surface.
The second is the word translated eye-service in verse 22 — ophthalmodouleia, eye-slavery. Working while you are being watched. It appears in the New Testament only here and in the parallel passage in Ephesians, and the lexicons note that it is not found in earlier Greek writing, which is why some think Paul coined it. That is a “possibly,” not a certainty, and I would not build anything on it. But it is an exact word for something everyone has done, and if he did make it up, he made it up for people who had every reason on earth to work that way.
What this gives us
Most of us are not in anything like their situation, and it would be indecent to pretend otherwise.
But a great many of us are in work where the meaning is genuinely hard to locate. Not evil work. Just work where you cannot see what it is for.
The spreadsheet that feeds a process you have never seen the end of. The shift that is identical to yesterday’s. The care work that is invisible by definition — nobody notices a clean house, a fed child, a well-managed week. The job you took because it pays, in a season where paying was what mattered.
And the ordinary advice for that situation is to find your passion, or to reframe until it feels significant.
This passage does not do that. It does not tell them the work is secretly fulfilling. It says: whoever is nominally receiving this, the one actually receiving it is Christ.
That is a transfer of audience, not a change of feeling. You do not have to enjoy it or find it meaningful in itself. You have to know who it is finally being handed to.
The part I find genuinely useful
There is a phrase in there that I keep coming back to: not for men.
Because most of the misery in work, in my experience, is not about the task. It is about the audience.
Being unseen. Being credited to someone else. Doing it well and having nobody notice, again. The specific bitterness of realizing that the person you are working for does not care and will not care.
Not for men addresses precisely that. It does not remove the injustice — Paul goes on immediately to warn that the wrongdoer will be repaid, which is not a sentence about heaven, and then turns to masters and tells them they have a Master too.
What it does is cut the dependence. If the work is finally being handed to Christ, then the failure of your actual audience to notice does not determine what the work was.
A practice
Pick the least meaningful recurring task in your week. Not the hard one — the pointless one.
Do it once this week deliberately, with attention, as something handed over rather than something got through.
That is the whole practice, and it will not make the task interesting. It is not supposed to.
What it does, over time, according to people across every tradition who have tried it for centuries, is slowly detach your sense of your own worth from whether anyone noticed.
Which is worth more than an interesting job.
The passages in this article