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

by Timothy J. Keller

The gospel assures me that God cares about everything I do and will listen to my prayers. He may not answer them the way I want, but if he doesn’t it is because he knows things I do not. My degree of success or failure is part of his good plan for me. God is my source of strength and perseverance.

The gospel reminds us that God cares about the products we make, the companies we work for, and the customers we serve. He not only loves us, but also loves the world and wants us to serve it well. My work is a critical way in which God is caring for human beings and renewing his world. God gives us our vision and our hope.

The gospel is good news. In the words of pastor and counselor Jack Miller, “Cheer up: You’re a worse sinner than you ever dared imagine, and you’re more loved than you ever dared hope.” 1 In other words, I will continually err and sin, and...

To make a real difference . . . [there would have to be] a reappropriation of the idea of vocation or calling, a return in a new way to the idea of work as a contribution to the good of all and not merely as a means to one’s own advancement. 3 That is a remarkable statement. If Bellah is right, one of the hopes for our unraveling society is the recovery of the idea that all human work is not merely a job but a calling. The Latin word vocare—to call—is at the root of our common word “vocation.” Today the word often means simply a job, but that was not the original sense. 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. As we shall see, thinking of work mainly as a means of self-fulfillment and self-realization slowly crushes a person and—as Bellah and many others have pointed out—undermines society itself.

the workplace. We’ll be referring to this connection—and all the ideas and practices surrounding it—as the “integration of faith and work.”

Oh, dear!’ said poor Niggle, beginning to weep, ‘And it’s not even finished!’” Sometime after his death the people who acquired his house noticed that on his crumbling canvas his only “one beautiful leaf” had remained intact.

But the story does not end there. After death Niggle is put on a train toward the mountains of the heavenly afterlife. At one point on his trip he hears two Voices. One seems to be Justice, the severe voice, which says that Niggle wasted so much time and accomplished so little in life. But the other, gentler voice (“though it was not soft”), which seems to be Mercy, counters that Niggle has chosen to sacrifice for others, knowing what he was doing. As a reward, when Niggle gets to the outskirts of the heavenly country, something catches his eye. He runs to it—and there it is: “Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished; its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind that Niggle had so often felt or guessed, and yet had so often failed to catch. He gazed at the Tree, and slowly he lifted his arms and opened them wide. ‘It is a gift!’ he said.” 14 The world before death—his old country—had forgotten Niggle almost completely, and there his work had ended unfinished and helpful to only a very few. But in his new country, the permanently real world, he finds that his tree, in full detail and finished, was not just a fancy of his that had died with him. No, it was indeed part of the True Reality that would live and be enjoyed forever. 15

Niggle was assured that the tree he had “felt and guessed” was “a true part of creation” 18 and that even the small bit of it he had unveiled to people on earth had been a vision of the True. Tolkien was very comforted by his own story. It helped “exorcise some of Tolkien’s fear, and to get him to work again,” though it was also the friendship and loving prodding of C.S. Lewis that helped get him back to the writing. 19

But really—everyone is Niggle. Everyone imagines accomplishing things, and everyone finds him- or herself largely incapable of producing them. Everyone wants to be successful rather than forgotten, and everyone wants to make a difference in life.

But that is beyond the control of any of us. If this life is all there is, then everything will eventually burn up in the death of the sun and no one will even be around to remember anything that has ever happened. 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. That is what the Christian faith promises. “In the Lord, your labor is not in vain,” writes Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15, verse 58.

According to the Bible, we don’t merely need the money from work to survive; we need the work itself to survive and live fully human lives.

Unless we regularly stop work and take time to worship (which Pieper considers one of the chief activities within “leisure”) and simply contemplate and enjoy the world—including the fruit of our labor—we cannot truly experience meaning in our lives.