Order From Chaos: Glorifying God in Our Housework

Home & Hospitality

Mar 10

Dishes? Laundry? Cleaning the bathrooms? Those tasks hardly feel like the mountaintop experiences I have longed for since I started dreaming big things. And yet, those very tasks are what make up my day—along with picking up trucks and trains, cooking meals, grocery shopping, and sweeping and mopping the floor (among other things).

Even when my work wasn’t primarily in the home, the dishes still needed to be done, the bed needed to be made, and we needed to eat—every day. From the time my mom first taught me how to clean the bathrooms as a kid until now, the daily upkeep of the home has been part of my life. I imagine it has been part of yours, too.

It’s easy to see at-home work as insignificant, even beneath educated people. But the truth is that there is so much more to the work that you are doing than you realize. You and I were created to work because God himself works. It is a function of being image bearers. Everything we do, whether it is work in the home or outside of the home, is imaging the God who made us to work.

So in light of God being part of the work that we do, being hidden in the work that we do, how do we as image bearers image him in such ordinary tasks as housework? How does working out the grass stain in your son’s baseball pants or shampooing the carpet image God? The work of the home is nothing to be ashamed of. It is valuable, important work. It is necessary work. It is work that God sees as integral to his work in this world.

In fact, because you bear his image, you are imaging him with every task you accomplish in your home on any given day. A task that does this clearly is when you bring order out of chaos. Let’s think for a moment about how you, as a created being, bring order out of chaos in your work.

You take a room that is cluttered and in disarray and organize it and declutter. Order out of chaos. You clean and disinfect a refrigerator that is growing things that are hardly edible. Order out of chaos. You sort, pretreat, wash, fold, and put away piles of laundry. Order out of chaos. With every ordinary task you do, you are bringing order into this chaotic world that we live in. While it might feel hardly God-like, I assure you that it is.

God, staring at the vastness of time and space, spoke creation into existence out of nothing (Gen. 1:1–3). God quiets storms to a whisper (Ps. 107:29). And most of all, God in the flesh brings order to our chaotic souls by dying on the cross and giving us his righteousness.

You also image him when you care for the details of your home. As God cares for the seemingly mundane details of creation, so you care for the seemingly mundane details of a home that needs to be kept in order. How does God care for creation? By watering the plants with rain, by providing gardeners and farmers to work the land, by bringing forth fruit in season (Psalm 1), by caring for animals (Matt. 6:26), and by giving us our daily bread (Ps. 78:23–25; Matt. 6:11; Luke 11:3). As his image bearers, we are part of this creation care. While God at times cares for his creation in spectacular ways, like causing a drought to cease through unexpected rain, more often he cares for creation through you and me, and more specifically for our purposes, through the work of the home.

But even when we understand how doing daily chores images God, we see that our work doesn’t always get done smoothly and easily. Life in a fallen world means bad things happen when the work doesn’t get done. Life in a fallen world means thorns and thistles get in the way of finishing our daily chores. Mold grows in refrigerators. Last night’s dinner is caked on dishes in the sink. And in our sin we don’t always have eyes to see how our work is doing God’s work of bringing order out of chaos or caring for his creation. Frankly, it just feels too mundane most days to be that grandiose.

This is all owing to the curse, isn’t it? We take the good things that God has given us (work, the home, etc.) and make them seem pointless. But for those in Christ, the futility of the ordinary chores isn’t the end of the story.

Our work is meant to be a means of loving God through loving our neighbors, so the greatest love we can show them (even the neighbors in our own home) is to bring some sense of order in a broken and chaotic world. Sometimes this looks like opening your home to a friend who is weary, and sometimes it looks like disinfecting the whole house after a stomach bug makes its way through.

We take the raw materials available to us (dish soap, clean hand towels, mops, brooms, storage bins), grab hold of the unruly clutter and mess of our homes, and bring it under our orderly care. We are imaging God by our work through obeying the creation mandate that still leads us today.

You are pushing back the forces of darkness by even such small measures as cleaning up the family desk in the kitchen by saying that chaos and disorder will not reign forever. You are imaging your Creator by making something out of nothing, by making clean what was once filthy, and by making broken things new.