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

by Timothy J. Keller

God to do something is empowering enough. We are to see work as a way of service to God and our neighbor, and so we should both choose and conduct our work in accordance with that purpose.

Then he made his famous discovery in Scripture that justification was by grace through faith in Christ apart from any good works of his own.

But the gospel frees us from the relentless pressure of having to prove ourselves and secure our identity through work, for we are already proven and secure.

now we may work simply to love God and our neighbors. It is a sacrifice of joy, a limitation that offers freedom.

Christians who understand biblical doctrine ought to be the ones who appreciate the work of non-Christians the most.

to honor God by loving your neighbors and serving them through your work.

Work is the form in which we make ourselves useful to others . . . in which others make themselves useful to us.

[Our] paycheck turns out to buy us the use of far more than we could possibly make for ourselves in the time it takes us to earn the check.

Work . . . yields far more in return upon our efforts than our particular jobs put in. . . .

in caves, clothed in raw animal hides. The difference between [a wilderness] and culture is simply, work.

There may be no better way to love your neighbor, whether you are writing parking tickets, software, or books, than to simply do your work. But only skillful, competent work will do.

“ministry of competence.”

If God’s purpose for your job is that you serve the human community, then the way to serve God best is to do the job as well as it can be done.

“If laypeople cannot find any spiritual meaning in their work, they are condemned to living a certain dual life; not connecting what they do on Sunday morning with what they do the rest of the week.

‘Your work is your prayer.’”

the very first way to be sure you are serving God in your work is to be competent.

We must use our talents in as competent a manner as possible.

If it is true, then if you have to choose between work that benefits more people and work that pays you more, you should seriously consider the job that pays less and helps more—particularly if you can be great at it. It means that all jobs—not merely so-called helping professions—are fundamentally ways of loving your neighbor. Christians do not have to do direct ministry or nonprofit charitable work in order to love others through their jobs.

that is, consciously seeing your job as God’s calling and offering the work to him.

Your daily work is ultimately an act of worship to the God who called and equipped you to do it—no matter what kind of work it is.

It was an opportunity for the human race to voluntarily make our relationship with God the primary value of our lives and to obey his Word simply because it was his due.

That is, they put themselves in God’s place; they took upon themselves the right to decide how they should live and what was right and wrong for them to do.

We were designed to know, serve, and love God supremely—and when we are faithful to that design, we flourish.

Entertainment distracts us from our discomfort.

Another manifestation of this deep unease includes a mistrust and fear of others.

Adam and Eve each became desperate to control what the other knew, to hide and create facades to block the other’s gaze. This mistrust and fear quickly led to friction and anger, as it now does in all relationships.

From the moment of the fall, humankind has suffered from moral schizophrenia: neither able to deny sinfulness nor to acknowledge it for what it is.”

“Do you find the two great tasks in life—love and work—to be excruciatingly hard? This explains why.”

Both childbearing and farming are now called “painful labor.”

In other words, work, even when it bears fruit, is always painful, often miscarries, and sometimes kills us.

kinds of human labor and culture building, this is a statement that all work and human effort will be marked by frustration and a lack of fulfillment. “Part of the curse of work in a fallen world is its frequent fruitlessness.”

We mean that, in all our work, we will be able to envision far more than we can accomplish, both because of a lack of ability and because of resistance in the environment around us.

The experience of work will include pain, conflict, envy, and fatigue, and not all our goals will be met.

So even on our best days, each of us is working within a system that feels stacked against us.

But daily I am aware of the maddening encroachment of thorns and thistles in the patch of the world that has been entrusted to me for this season.

Just because you cannot realize your highest aspirations in work does not mean you have chosen wrongly, or are not called to your profession, or that you should spend your life looking for the perfect career that is devoid of frustration. That would be a fruitless search for anyone. You should expect to be regularly frustrated in your work even though you may be in exactly the right vocation.

it is perfectly natural that changing careers may be necessary to maximize fruitfulness. God can—and often does—change what he calls us to do.

But because of the fall of the human race, our work is also profoundly frustrating, never as fruitful as we want, and often a complete failure. This

that our deepest aspirations in work will come to complete fruition in God’s future.

We accept the fact that in this world our work will always fall short, just as we sinners always “fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) because we know that our work in this life is not the final word.

We have seen that work in a fallen world can be fruitless; it can also be pointless.

we base our lives on work and achievement, on love and pleasure, or on knowledge and learning, our existence becomes anxious and fragile—because circumstances in life are always threatening the very foundation of our lives, and death inevitably strips us of everything we hold dear.

The first is a quest to make sense of life through learning and wisdom

The second is an effort to make life fulfilling through the pursuit of pleasure

Nothing is more satisfying than a sense that through our work we have accomplished some lasting achievement. But the Philosopher startles us by arguing that even if you are one of the few people who breaks through and accomplishes all you hope for, it’s all for nothing, for in the end there are no lasting achievements.

Whether quickly or slowly, all the results of our toil will be wiped away by history.

In this poignant picture, the author is consciously contrasting us with the God whose labor led to real rest (Genesis 2:2), and unconsciously with the Savior who could even sleep through a storm

Work can convince you that you are working hard for your family and friends while you are being seduced through ambition to neglect them. Work

Ecclesiastes says, “A person can do nothing better than to . . . find satisfaction in their own toil”

In whatever field you go into, you will face greed, frustration and failure.