Coram Deo, Your Work, and the Other 166 Hours of Your Week

In California, we’re eagerly anticipating the January 2027 roll-out of a new law permitting “natural organic reduction” or “terramation.” When you die, you can be turned into compost. This is “the land of fruits and nuts,” right?

That law is a theology of what a human being is worth, and it’s not much. It says you’re compost; Scripture says you’re worth more. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit shared perfect life and love before there was a universe. This self-sufficient God was pleased to make image-bearers, to breathe His own breath into their lungs, and to share His life with the lifeless. You bear that image. You’re loved. You were made to reflect His face back to Him. No legislature, employer, or algorithm gets a vote on that.

Christian, you live in God’s presence every day by receiving what He’s already given, not by working up a feeling. We call this living coram Deo, before the face of God. Because God is present everywhere by His essential presence, and graciously present with His people in Jesus Christ by His Spirit (see Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 47), your work, your body, your suffering, and your ordinary week are all lived in front of Him. You don’t summon God into your week. You learn to recognize He’s already there.

Gathered worship might take up two hours of your week. That leaves about 166 hours somewhere else: in traffic on Pacific Coast Highway, at your desk doing remote work, out past the break waiting for a set, in a hospital waiting room, at school trying to fit in.

But we pour a lot of energy into those two hours. I can spend thirty hours preparing for two and quietly treat the other 166 as filler. That’s backwards.

When I traced this theme from Genesis to Revelation while writing A Christian’s Pocket Guide to the Presence of God, what surprised me most wasn’t how much the Bible says about God’s nearness in worship. It’s how much it says about His nearness everywhere else: at work, during exile, under temptation, in a body, on the pilgrim road.

Here’s what that means for your week.

Understanding Coram Deo

Coram Deo describes the whole of the Christian life lived consciously in God’s presence. He’s not only with us in a sanctuary. He’s with us in the ordinariness and messiness of the week.

The phrase reaches back to the Hebrew word for God’s presence, panim, usually translated “face.” When God reveals His face, He brings a person into close, personal encounter with Himself. To live coram Deo is to live as someone whose life is happening right in front of that face.

That’s not a mood you get into. It’s a fact you learn to notice.

 Ordinary Work Is Temple Work

Your ordinary work is priestly work, because the first workplace in Scripture was a temple. Genesis 2:15 says God put the man in the garden “to work it and keep it.” Behind those words sit two Hebrew verbs: ‘ābad and šāmar. Elsewhere in the Old Testament, when these two appear together, they describe the duties of the priests serving and guarding the tabernacle (Num. 3:7–8; 8:26; 18:5–6).

These words give us an ancient theology of work. The garden in Eden was the original earthly temple of God’s presence. It had trees for walls and God for light. Adam was its first priest. His labor was liturgy. He wasn’t doing secular work near a sacred place. He was doing holy work in a sanctuary world.

Then sin exiled him. Ever since, we’ve lived east of Eden, trying to build our own gardens. Yet note what God did anyway. He met Moses at a bush while Moses was shepherding someone else’s sheep in the middle of nowhere. The first thing He said was, “the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Ex. 3:5).

The ground was holy because God was there.

Moses was getting a glimpse of glory. After the Fall, Eden’s gate was barred by cherubim with a flaming sword (Gen. 3:24). Those same cherubim were later woven into the veil that shut Israel out of the Holy of Holies (Ex. 26:31). Now Moses bowed in the Lord’s presence. When Jesus died, that veil tore (Matt. 27:51). Now we have confidence to enter the Holy of Holies because of the final sacrifice of Jesus (Heb. 10:19–22).

The seventeenth-century Puritan, Stephen Charnock, spoke of God’s presence in life like this:

If we consider’d that God is present with us in our Shops, in our Chambers, in our Walks, and in our Meetings, as present with us as with the Angels in Heaven…The actual thoughts of the Presence of God is the Life and Spirit of all Religion.

That’s temple work Monday–Saturday.

 Holiness When No One Is Watching

If the shop is a sanctuary, so is the body. Why seek to be a person of integrity throughout the week if no one’s watching? Because Someone is. Paul asked the Corinthians a question that makes us shift in our seats: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Cor. 6:19–20).

Note the argument he doesn’t make: sexual holiness is what respectable people do. His argument is: God lives in you.

The Christian’s holiness isn’t virtue signaling. It’s temple logic. You don’t guard what happens in a sanctuary because someone might be watching. You guard it because Someone is. We pursue purity because He is our audience, not because our neighbors are.

That reframes decision-making in the other 166 hours. The question stops being “will anyone find out?” and becomes something far more searching and freeing: “what belongs in a place where God has taken up residence?”

 The Wilderness Is Not Abandonment

When life is hard, has God left me? No. In Scripture, the wilderness is often where God’s people are most closely accompanied, not least. Spiritual dryness and divine absence aren’t the same. Confusing the two is one of the most common sources of unnecessary despair in the Christian life.

Israel left Egypt and walked straight into a desert. Within weeks they were asking, “Is the Lord among us or not?” (Ex. 17:7).

They had every reason to think He wasn’t.

Except that the pillar of cloud and fire stood over them while they were asking. God’s presence was the one thing they weren’t lacking. They lacked water, and they mistook the two.

Then look at Jesus. After the heavens opened and the Father called Him “Beloved,” “Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted” (Matt. 4:1). The Spirit didn’t withdraw and the wilderness just happened. The Spirit went with Him into it.

That overturns how many of us read our hard seasons. Your wilderness isn’t proof God left you. It may actually be proof you belong to His Son.

Peter says the same thing to Christians getting hammered by a hostile culture: don’t be surprised by fiery trials, “because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you” (1 Pet. 4:14). What once rested over the tent now rests on you. When the world curses, God says you’re blessed.

I think of Moses in that little ark on the Nile. What’s the difference between an ark and a boat? An ark has no rudder. It’s faith given a shape: nothing to steer with, only Someone to trust. Some seasons of the Christian life are exactly that shape.

 “Practicing” the Presence of God

So what do you do with your 166 hours? Begin with what God has promised rather than with what you can produce. That’s the difference between Christian practice and spiritual technique.

Brother Lawrence described God’s nearness while doing kitchen work. He was right: the kitchen is no lesser place than the chapel. Where he goes wrong is in the grounding. We don’t become aware of the presence of God by a cultivated habit, but by a covenant promise attached to means.

God uses His Word, prayer, the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, in a gathered church (see Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q&A 88). They’re not exotic. None depends on you. They’re not methods for conjuring an absent God. They’re appointed places where the God who’s already near has promised to meet you.

That’s why the two hours and the 166 aren’t rivals. The gathering is where you’re fed. The week is where you walk.

Genesis 5 grinds through a genealogy where every man gets the same verdict: “he died.” Then it stops for one man: “Enoch walked with God” (Gen. 5:22, 24). The same phrase is used of Noah: “Noah walked with God” (Gen. 6:9). That’s a life spent in close company with Him, step-by-step, in conversation.

That verb never goes away. The blessed man doesn’t walk in the counsel of the wicked (Ps. 1:1). We once walked according to the ways of this world; now we’re His workmanship, created for good works we should walk in (Eph. 2:2, 10). Walk worthy of your calling. Walk in love. Walk as children of light. Walk by the Spirit.

Walk. One ordinary foot in front of the other, in company with God, on the road of life.

And note the order we do this. Scripture says God appeared, then Abraham built an altar. God spoke, then Isaac built an altar. God delivered Noah, then Noah built an altar. Grace, then gratitude. Gospel, then obedience.

You and I build our altars in the way we work, in what we refuse, in whom we love, and in how we suffer.

When you leave gathered worship, you don’t leave God behind. You reenter the world as a Spirit-indwelt witness: at a table, in a workplace, with your neighbors, in your sufferings.

The presence of God isn’t a vibe you chase on Sunday only to lose it Monday. “The presence” is God Himself, given to you in Jesus Christ, and made known by His Word and Spirit. He walks home with you on the road through your ordinary week.

One day that walk ends the way it was promised in Eden: “they will see his face” (Rev. 22:4).

Until then, walk with Him. He’s already walking with you.

Dr. Daniel R. Hyde is the founding pastor of Oceanside United Reformed Church in Carlsbad, California. His new book, A Christian’s Pocket Guide to the Presence of God (Christian Focus Publications, 2026, ISBN 978-1-5271-1425-8), is available now from Christian Focus and Amazon.