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

by Timothy J. Keller

God gives out gifts of wisdom, talent, beauty, and skill according to his grace—that is, in a completely unmerited way.

all of creation and culture should have fallen apart by now. The reason it is not worse is because of the gift of common grace.

Yet so many of the gifts God has put in the world are given to nonbelievers.

So Christians are free to study the world of human culture

in order to know mor...

Christians’ work with others should be marked by both humble cooperation and respectful provocation. An understanding of common grace,

At the same time, an understanding of the gospel worldview means we should at times respectfully pursue a different path or winsomely point out how our own Christian faith gives

powerful resources and guidance for what we are doing.

Sin can essentially be removed from your life through separation and discipline.

view of sin that is easier to conquer through conscious effort.

The complex, organic nature of our sin will still be at work making idols out of good things in our lives—such as our moral goodness, financial security, family, doctrinal purity, or pride in our culture.

A theologically “thick” view of sin, by contrast, sees it as a compulsive drive of the heart to produce idols.

a thin, or intellectualistic, view of common grace.

knowledge of God and his character. But many conceive of this knowledge mainly (or strictly) as cognitive information

the reality of God’s nature and our obligations to him are continuously presented to us. These realities are not static, propositional information, but rather a continually fresh, insistent pressure on the consciousness of every individual.

human culture is an extremely complex mixture of brilliant truth, marred half-truths, and overt resistance to the truth.

“Dualism” is a term used to describe a separating wall between the sacred and the secular. It is a direct result of a thin view of sin, common grace, and God’s providential purposes.

People with this view cannot see that work done by non-Christians always contains some degree of God’s common grace as well as the distortions of sin.

The opposite dualistic approach,

Christians think of themselves as Christians only within church activity. Their Christian life is what they do on Sundays and weeknights, when they engage in spiritual activities.

While the first form of dualism fails to grasp the importance of what we have in common with the world, this form fails to grasp the importance of what is distinctive about the Christian worldview—

Our thick view of sin will remind us that even explicitly Christian work and culture will always have some idolatrous discourse within

it.

We will learn to recognize the half-truths and resist the idols; and we will learn to recognize and celebrate the glimpses of justice, wisdom, truth, and beauty we find around us in all aspects of life.

The reason is that our modern and postmodern idols work against our inclination to ask such questions. They tell us that if the practice is legal and if everyone is doing it, the only fundamental question is: Can money be made?

In other words, most people argue—or at the very least, live out—ethics on the basis of cost-benefit analysis. Integrity is profitable; dishonesty isn’t. And most of the time, at least in the long run, this is true.

at least some situations in which the short-term gains for an ethically questionable act will be so great, and the danger to you or your friends so small, that on the basis of cost-benefit analysis the potential gains vastly outweigh the risk? Of course.

On the very slim chance that he’d get caught, he had a plausible excuse. The benefit outweighed the cost and risk. And by the way, he was pretty sure everyone did this sort of thing.

So was there anything wrong with it?

In frustration he finally

emigrated, leaving behind the country that so greatly needed both his skills and his commitment to justice.185 Paul Batchelor of Transparency

“Salt and Light: Christians’ Role in Combating Corruption.”186

investors.187 Batchelor points out that corruption does not mark only the business world. He lists revelations of corruption, outright bribery, and gross self-interest by elected and government officials. This leads to increasing cynicism on the part of the citizenry,

On Thinking Institutionally

Why couldn’t he just have been honest and shared that he thought the two weeks’ vacation he’d be sacrificing was worth an additional few thousand dollars? Why couldn’t he just trust that God, who was providing the interview in the first place, would provide for the salary?

Everyone would trust one another a little less. And he realized that to work for the money instead of the value that the work itself might contribute would damage the culture of the company he was joining.

We are to be honest, compassionate, and generous not because these things are rewarding (which they usually are, hence the cost-benefit approach to ethics), but because they are right in and of themselves—because to do so honors the will of God and his design for human life.

the Bible says that the very definition of righteous people is that they disadvantage themselves to advantage others, while “the wicked . . . are willing to disadvantage the community to advantage themselves.”189

It is important to

be as skillful, diligent, savvy, and disciplined as we can possibly be.

Many argue that being a person of integrity and dedication is simply common sense, that it does not require Christian faith.

Christians are equipped with an ethical compass and power of the gospel that can set us apart—sometimes sharply, sometimes subtly—from those around us. This is because biblical Christian faith gives us significant resources not present in other worldviews, which, if lived out, will differentiate believers in the workplace.

Christian teaching raised the definition of the idea of love to a new level, to include loving one’s enemies and forgiving persecutors.

God created people, not to receive love and honor from them but to share the love, joy, honor, and glory he already had within the Trinity.194

down to loving God and loving our neighbor.

At the end of your life, will you wish that you had plunged more of your

time, passion, and skills into work environments and work products that helped people to give and receive more love? Can you see a way to answer “yes” to this question from your current career trajectory?

But here Scripture helps in the best way when it teaches that we are not to consider that men merit of themselves but to look upon the image of God in all men, to which we owe all honor and love.

Remember not to consider men’s evil intention but . . . look upon the image of God in them, which . . . with its beauty and dignity allures us to love and embrace them.197

Christianity held that all human beings are made in the image of God and therefore have an inviolable right to be treated with honor and love, regardless of whether they culturally, morally, and personally appeal to or offend us.