Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

by Timothy J. Keller

A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it and you do it for them rather than for yourself. And so our work can be a calling only if it is reimagined as a mission of service to something beyond

merely our own interests.

Faithful work indeed means some kind of

public identification with Jesus, in such a way that a coworker might want to know more about him.

Work not only cares for creation, but also directs and structures it.

Faithful work, then, is to operate out of a Christian “worldview.”

Much of the mainline church does not feel the same urgency that evangelicals feel to evangelize, because it does not see classical Christianity as the only way to salvation.

God at work is just to do skillful, excellent work.

The way to

serve God at work is to work from a Christian motivation to glorify God, seeking to engage and influence culture to that end.

First, if you revise each of the propositions by adding the word “main”—as in “the main way to serve God at work is . . .”—then the views do in fact contradict.

these factors can assume very different forms and levels of importance depending on your particular vocation, culture, and historical moment.

“to work . . . in a fiddling or ineffective way . . . to spend time unnecessarily on petty details.”

He believed that God gives us talents and gifts so we can do for one another what he wants to do for us and through us.

Everyone wants to be successful rather than forgotten, and everyone wants to make a difference in life.

Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavors, even the best, will come to naught. Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and

behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavor, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God’s calling, can matter forever.

Why do you want to work?

Why is it so hard to work?

How can we overcome the difficulties and find satisfaction in our wor...

This view of work—connected with divine, orderly creation and human purpose—is distinct among the great faiths and belief systems of the world.

Work was not a necessary evil that came into the picture later, or something human beings were created to do but that was beneath the great God himself.

Finally, we see God not only working, but commissioning workers to carry on his work.

“It is perfectly clear that God’s good plan always included human beings working, or, more specifically, living in the constant cycle of work and rest.”

Work is as much a basic human need as food, beauty, rest, friendship, prayer, and sexuality; it is not simply medicine but food for our soul. Without meaningful work we sense significant inner loss and emptiness. People who are cut off from work because of physical or other reasons quickly discover how much they need work to thrive emotionally, physically, and spiritually.

They feel they have too much leisure and not enough work. The loss of work is deeply disturbing because we were designed for it.

we need the work itself to survive

and live fully human lives.

work is one of the ways we make ourselves useful to others, rather than just living a life for ourselves.

Freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, those that fit with the realities of our own nature and those of the world.32

the commandments of God in the Bible are a means of liberation, because through them God calls us to be what he built us to be.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that work is a curse and that something else (leisure, family, or even “spiritual” pursuits) is the only way to find meaning in life. The Bible, as we have seen and will see, exposes the lie of this idea.

You will not have a meaningful life without work, but you cannot say that your work is the meaning of your life.

you create an idol that rivals God.

Your relationship with God is the most important foundation for your life, and indeed it keeps all the other factors—work, friendships and family, leisure and pleasure—from becoming so import...

Pieper argues that leisure is not the mere absence of work, but an attitude of mind or soul in which you are able to contemplate and enjoy things as they are in themselves, without regard to their value or their immediate utility.

The work-obsessed mind—as in our Western culture—tends to look at everything in terms of efficiency, value, and speed. But there

must also be an ability to enjoy the most simple and ordinary aspects of life, even ones that are not strict...

Leisure is the condition of considering things in a celebrating spirit.

But it must play its proper role, subservient to God.

In fact, overwork is often a grim attempt to get our lifetime’s worth of work out of the way early, so we can put work behind us. These attitudes will only make work more stultifying and unsatisfying in the end.

is not itself a curse. We were built for it and freed by it.

Still, we see that work is a major component of human dignity—it resonates today even with the most secular thinkers. That was not always so.

Contemplation helped you realize that the material world is temporary and even illusory, and that being overinvolved or emotionally attached to it pulls you down into a kind of animal existence of fear, anger, and anxiety. Instead,

involved, and the least invested, in the material world. Work, then, was a barrier to the highest kind of life.

The Greeks

understood that life in the world required work, but they believed that not all work was created equal.

Christian philosopher Lee Hardy and many others have argued that this “Greek attitude toward work and its place in human life was largely preserved in both the thought and practice of the Christian

church” through the centuries, and still holds a great deal of influence today in our culture.43

One is that work is a necessary evil.

Pervasive lie