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January 7 - February 26, 2021
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.
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.
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.”
We’re supposed to treat all people and their work with dignity. We’re to create an environment in which people can flourish and use their God-given gifts to contribute to society. We’re to embody grace, truth, hope, and love in the organizations we create.
We’re to express our relationship with God and his grace to us in the way we speak, work, and lead,
What were my responsibilities to all our stakeholders, including the culture at large?
Katherine Leary Alsdorf Executive Director, Redeemer’s Center for Faith & Work
Robert Bellah’s landmark book, Habits of the Heart,
expressive individualism.”
Bellah argued that Americans had created a culture that elevated individual choice and expression to such a level that there was no longer any shared life, no commanding truths or values that tied us together.
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
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.
When J.R.R. Tolkien had been working on writing The Lord of the Rings
As a leading scholar in Old English and other ancient Northern European languages,
He had experienced firsthand the horror of World War I and had never forgotten it.
defines “niggle” as “to work . . . in a fiddling or ineffective way . . . to spend time unnecessarily on petty details.”
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 indeed part of the True Reality that would live and be enjoyed forever.
Niggle was assured that the tree he had “felt and guessed” was “a true part of creation”
it was also the friendship and loving prodding of C.S. Lewis that helped get him back to the writing.
everyone is Niggle. Everyone imagines accomplishing things, and everyone finds him- or herself largely incapable of producing them.
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.
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.
“In the Lord, your labor is not in vain,” writes Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15, verse 58.
you need to know the Bible’s answers to three questions: Why do you want to work? (That is, why do we need to work in order to lead a fulfilled life?) Why is it so hard to work? (That is, why is it so often fruitless, pointless, and difficult?) How can we overcome the difficulties and find satisfaction in our work through the gospel?
ONE The Design of Work
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. Genesis 2:1–3, 15 (ESV)
The Bible begins talking about work as soon as it begins talking about anything—that is how important and basic it is.
In the Babylonian creation story the Enuma Elish, the god Marduk overcomes the goddess Tiamat and forges the world out of her remains.
The Greeks’ account of creation includes the idea of successive “ages of mankind” beginning with a golden age.
work was part of paradise.
“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.
The fish is not more free, but less free, if it cannot honor the reality of its nature.
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.
The Greeks saw death as a friend, because it liberated us from the prison of physical life. The Bible sees death not as a friend, but as an enemy
Human beings “filling the earth” means something far than plants and animals filling the earth. It means civilization, not just procreation. We get the sense that God does not want merely more individuals of the human species; he also wants the world to be filled with a human society.
Paul directs, “Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him. This is my rule in all the churches.” 57
the purpose of work is to serve and exalt something beyond ourselves, then we actually have a better reason to deploy our talent, ambition, and entrepreneurial vigor—and we are more likely to be successful in the long run, even by the world’s definition.
How does God “make peace in your borders?” His answer is, through good neighbors, who practice honesty and integrity in their daily interactions and who participate in civic life.
if religious work did absolutely nothing to earn favor with God, it could no longer be seen as superior to other forms of labor.
It also frees us from a condescending attitude toward less sophisticated labor and from envy over more exalted work. All work now becomes a way to love the God who saved us freely; and by extension, a way to love our neighbor.
during the war many people were drawn into the army and found a new, surprising sense of fulfillment in their work. “The reason why men often find themselves happy and satisfied in the army is that for the first time in their lives they found themselves doing something, not for the pay, which is miserable, but for the sake of getting the thing done.”
Work is the form in which we make ourselves useful to others . . . in which others make themselves useful to us. We plant [with our work]; God gives the increase
only skillful, competent work will do.
few days after the harrowing experience, an interviewer asked Captain Cronin about his first thoughts following the loss of the cargo door. He said, “I said a prayer for my passengers momentarily and then got back to business.” 82
Competency is a basic value. It is not a means to some other end, such as wealth or position, although such results may occur.
Contemporary Western culture tries to account for this restlessness without recourse to the biblical doctrine of sin.
work becomes, under sin, “painful toil” (verse 17). Work is not itself a curse, but it now lies with all other aspects of human life under the curse of sin.
gardening is representative of all 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.
