Back On Track With Work

Saddleback Church Weekend Messages

Saddleback Church

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality

4.7 • 723 Ratings

🗓️ 2 February 2026

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

God’s original design for work was never meant to feel like a burden or simply a way to survive. From the very beginning, before sin entered the world, God created work as something good and meaningful, inviting his people to join him in shaping, cultivating, and caring for his creation. Yet for many of us today, work can feel complicated, misaligned, or even painful. In this message, Pastor Andy returns to Genesis to rediscover God’s original, divine design for work and to remind us that the struggle we feel does not mean we missed our calling. Instead, we are invited to receive work as a gift, not an identity. This message challenges us to stop working for pleasure, profit, or pride, and to see our work as an act of worship, offering our best to God and learning how to experience peace, purpose, and freedom in whatever work is in our hands.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody, this is Andy Wood, and I'm the pastor here at Saddleback Church, and this is our podcast.
0:07.9	Be sure to subscribe so we can get you these new messages every week, and I hope you enjoy today's message.
0:14.2	Let's dive in.
0:26.7	We are wrapping up this series that we've been in called Back on Track.
0:30.6	And we've been looking at how do we get areas of our life back on track at the beginning of the year.
0:31.4	And we're going to focus today on the subject of work.
0:34.6	So I want to invite you, if you have your notes, you can go ahead and pull them out.
0:38.0	And as we consider this subject of work, you know, we all have a relationship with work.
0:43.6	Our relationship with work starts as we're kids, teenagers. That relationship is impacted
0:49.3	by our parents, our upbringing. And one of the things for me on a personal level my dad is still to this day
0:56.4	almost 70 years old to this day he's one of the hardest workers I've ever met I mean he
1:00.7	loves to work he's a great example of faithfulness with work and I remember as a kid
1:06.4	growing up watching my dad as he had started a business this business had grown had multiple employees, and from time to time he'd take me to work
1:14.0	with him, and then there would be seasons where I would work for my dad.
1:17.8	One of those seasons happened to be the summer between my last year of high school and
1:22.4	my freshman year of college.
1:24.2	And so my dad at that time had just bought a piece of property that he was developing
1:28.6	and he was going to build some houses on this piece of property. So one day I went into my dad's shop and my friend Mike and I were working for my dad at the time. And my dad said, hey, Andy and Mike, I'm going to send you out to the property. I'm going to be shortly behind you. When you get there, You're going to see everything's laid out for you.
1:45.0	Just get to work and I'll be there maybe 15, 20 minutes behind you. So Mike and I, we start traveling. We're in a company car going to the property. We get to the property. It's kind of mid-morning by the time we get there. And it's Michigan, so if you're from the Midwest, you know there's about six weeks of the year where the weather's nice.
2:03.6	Kind of like the weather today in Southern California, there's about 30 of those days in Michigan.
2:08.6	And it was one of those.
2:09.6	And this piece of property was on a lake and it was just like a beautiful summer Michigan day
	...

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