Second in a series on Relational Business from our colleague Glenn McMahan in Brazil.

When I was a kid, I remember seeing my dad leave early in the morning for the middle school where he taught biology for 25 years. He would come home at night, eat dinner and play with me, and then pull out a tall stack of papers to grade. I remember him sitting in a recliner, red pen in hand, struggling to stay awake at the end of his long day.

Over the years, my father gave his best to thousands of students. After his stint in the public schools, Dad went on to teach troubled adolescents who were undergoing psychiatric treatment. He finished his career instructing prisoners in a state penitentiary. One inmate told my dad that he was the only person who had ever taken a personal interest in him. When Dad died a few years ago, his prison students wrote roughly a hundred messages on large sheets of paper, thanking him for the investment he made in their lives.

I understood that my father’s hard work was mainly an expression of love — for his family and his students. For Dad, work was all about love. And there is no higher motivation for work.

The biblical narrative reveals a great deal about God’s work — the meaning behind his labor. First, love was God’s reason for creating the world and all he’s done throughout history. God did not create us because he was a lonely old man who needed attention. To the contrary, God exists outside of time in that eternal and perfect relationship we call the Trinity. God’s work is an outpouring of unlimited abundance, a generous gift to his creatures.

Second, the quality of God’s work is an expression of his love. To see this you need only read about the dazzling precision in our physical and biological world. Scientists continue to debate the cause behind our amazing world, but many if not most agree with Cambridge University physicist and cosmologist Brandon Carter, whose “anthropic principle” maintains that all the physical constants in our universe seem to have been fine-tuned to make life on Earth possible. Could the cosmos be a relational expression of a loving God?

And third, the way God performs his work is a perfect model of love. Jesus, who I’ve come to believe expresses the very nature of God in human form, displayed this during the final meal with his friends before his arrest and execution. Jesus interrupted their bickering over who would be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven by stripping down to the garb of a slave and washing their feet. In this act Jesus showed us that love is a verb — always revealed by action. I think it follows that the way we work should be an active expression of love, which is, above all, serving.

As we work each day, it helps to have these three aspects of loving work in our hearts and on our minds. The underlying motivation for work is love for our families and people in need, love for our employees and colleagues, and love for the clients and customers who benefit from our products and services. This love motive expresses itself in the quality of our work. Everyone makes mistakes, but people inspired by love will aim at excellence in all they do. By contrast, being slack in our work will bring hardship to others. Finally, love improves the way we perform our work. We need look no farther than the behavior of Jesus, who took the initiative to serve, making himself a slave to others rather than seeking his own ambitions.

There is great news about love and work — something often missing from contemporary notions of work. According to the New Testament, love is the ultimate means to success — as the apostle Paul has it: “Love never fails.” That’s not a bad standard to follow as we work through our days in the spirit of the Great Worker.

Glenn McMahan is a frequent contributor to InsideWork from his home Brazil. Glenn the author, with David Russ and Jim Petersen, of More Than Me: The 4 Essentials of Relational Wholeness.