Unlock God’s Favor to Empower the Way You Work
For a long time, I believed that God’s favor was something you earned. Not theologically, of course. I knew better than that. But the way I approached my work and my days held an undercurrent that said if I just did enough, showed up enough, produced enough, then maybe things would go smoothly. Maybe doors would open. Maybe it would feel like favor.
What I was actually describing was performance. And performance is exhausting! It sneaks up on you slowly.
What God’s Favor Is Not
God’s favor is not a cosmic reward system. It’s not the reason some people’s lives look easier from the outside. And it’s not withheld when you make mistakes or lavished on you because you said all the right prayers in the right order.
That version of favor turns God into a vending machine and us into people frantically searching for the right combination of coins.
Psalm 90:17 paints a different picture entirely: “May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us.” Rest. Not arrive as a transaction. Not appear as a prize. Rest — like something that settles, that stays, that isn’t contingent on the next thing you produce. Here at Get Rooted, we interpret REST as Release Everything, Surrender Totally.
God’s favor is relational. It flows from who He is, not from what we’ve managed to accomplish. And the favor comes from obedience, not from checking boxes.
How God’s Favor Changed the Way I Worked
When I stopped trying to earn favor and started working from within it, I approached my writing, my homeschooling, my content work — all of it — with a different perspective. Just like how we define WORSHIP in our community. When Our Relationship Serves Him In Praise. Relational, not transactional. Serving Him for who He is, not for what He can give us.
The pressure to perform didn’t disappear, but it lost quite a bit of its authority. Because I wasn’t working to secure something anymore. I was working in response to something already given. There’s a world of difference between those two postures, and you notice it once your start walking in it.
The second half of Psalm 90:17 kept grounding me: “Establish the work of our hands.” I started praying that over my work every morning. To make my work meaningful. To use what I was putting my hands to for something beyond what I could see.
God’s Favor and the Work Already in Front of You
God’s favor is most visible in the quiet faithfulness that makes ordinary work matter, not in the open doors that look like opportunity or rewards.
The manuscript that gets finished one page at a time. The lesson that lands for a kid who’s been struggling. The blog post that reaches exactly the person who needed it that day. God’s favor doesn’t always look like acceleration. Sometimes it looks like sustenance. The grace to keep going, to keep creating, to keep showing up with your hands open and your heart willing.
That’s the favor that provides true abundance. It’s not always in the spotlight moments, but the steady, established work of a life lived in relationship with God.
Join the Conversation
Where have you been working from a place of performance rather than from a place of favor, trying to earn something God has already freely given?
Take a few minutes to journal or record a voice memo finishing this: “An area where I’ve been striving instead of trusting is _____, and what it might look like to work from favor instead is _____.” That shift might be quieter than you expect and more freeing than you imagined.
