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

by Timothy J. Keller

the circumstances shaping my parents’ generation perhaps gave them a lower view of work than the one found in the Bible’s description of creation, so my children’s generation has a more naïve and utopian view of work than is suggested by the Bible in its description of the world’s fall into sin.

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.

we need to take a moment to understand the literary genre of the book and how the author gets his points across. Anyone who reads through Ecclesiastes will be struck by many things that appear to contradict the rest of the Bible.

Old Testament scholar Tremper Longman points out that there was a literary form at that time called “fictional autobiography.”

In this form, the writer could introduce a fictional character, give a description of his or her life’s course, and then conclude with general insights and teachings drawn from the case study of the recounted life.

the writer of the prologue introduces the fictional character Qoheleth, who in turn speaks in the first person about all the ways he sought to find fulf...

refers to life in this world considered in and of itself, apart from any greater or eternal reality.

Finally, the original writer speaks in his own voice again and does an evaluation in the epilogue

Thus the writer can dramatize his main themes by depicting the wisest, richest, most gifted man possible, who nonetheless could not find fulfillment in this life.

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.

illustrates the need for everyone to work out in clear personal terms how their work serves the world.

“To make a name” in the language of the Bible is to construct an identity for ourselves.

we can either build a better mousetrap (taller building, faster computer, cheaper airline, more luxurious hotel) out of interest in excellence and service to human beings, or we can do so in a race to move our organization and ourselves into a position to look down on others.

He points out that what you have in the story of Joseph is a highly successful secular official.

the book of Nehemiah is about an urban planner and developer who used his management skills to rebuild the wall of Jerusalem and reinstate stability so that economic and civic life could begin to flourish again.

Esther saved her people through identification and mediation. Her people were condemned, but she identified with them and came under that condemnation.

God says, “I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods before me.” Notice that God says that either he will be our God or something else will.

Nietzsche was looking mainly at modern cultures, but he observed that all cultures—even self-styled “secular” ones—promote moral absolutes and transcendent values to which (they said) all people must conform if they are to have worth or meaning.

These cultural ideals are truly idols in the biblical sense;

they are treated as holy and u...

They are said to bestow happiness and fulfillment (earthly f...

while ancient cultures ostracized anyone who disbelieved in the gods, modern culture castigates anyone who is thought guilty of bigotry or appears to be an enemy of equality and individual freedom.

Keeping in mind that an idol is a good thing turned into an ultimate thing, then a corporate idol is an overemphasis and absolutizing of an admirable cultural trait.

modern society dethroned the idols of religion, tribe, and tradition—replacing them with reason, empiricism, and individual freedom as the ultimate values that overrule all others.

Modern societies no longer saw the world as containing binding moral norms of truth to which all people must submit.

they insisted that there was no standard higher than the right of the individual to choose the life he or she wanted to live. The only moral wrong, in this view, was to keep other individuals from choosing to live as they found fulfilling.

Nietzsche declared that the idea that science will lead to inevitable human progress was an idol—a new quasi-religious faith—

Science can tell us only what is, never how things ought to be.

science will simply serve the interests of whoever is in power. There is no particular reason, he pointed out, to think science will somehow lead us to a better world. It could just as easily lead us into a bleak future through armed conflict, or an ecological disaster...

Heidegger, Docx, and others such as Jacques Ellul 138 are saying that technology, uncertainty, and the market have become the idols of a postmodern society.

modern capitalism is no longer simply a useful instrument for the distribution of goods and services, but has become a near-absolute idol.

many recognize the cultural contradiction that consumerism tends to undermine the very virtues of self-control and responsibility on which capitalism is founded.

worldview is not merely a set of philosophical bullet points. It is essentially a master narrative, a fundamental story about (a) what human life in the world should be like, (b) what has knocked it off balance, and (c) what can be done to make it right.

You may believe the world would be dramatically improved if everyone were free-spirited and progressive and willing to defy oppressive traditions. Or perhaps you think the world would be far better off if we were standing for proven moral absolutes.

each case, the person assumes he or she is a protagonist, one of the good people contributing to the way the world ought to be.

Plato saw our main problem as being the physical body and its weakness; for Marx it was unjust economic systems; for Freud it was inner unconscious conflicts between desire and conscience; for Sartre it was not realizing we are completely free since there are no objective values; for B.F. Skinner it was not realizing we are completely determined by our environment; and for Konrad Lorenz it was our innate aggression because of our evolutionary past.

Each of these theories is really a story—of what is wrong with us and what we can do about it.

Marxism assumes that our problems come from greedy capitalists who won’t share the means of economic production with the people. The solution is a totalitarian state.

Philosopher Al Wolters writes:

The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain.

Only the Christian worldview locates the problem with the world not in any part of the world or in any particular group of people but in sin itself

(our loss of relationship with God).

Without an understanding of the gospel, we will be either naïvely utopian or cynically disillusioned. We will be demonizing something that isn’t bad enough to explain the mess we are in; and we will be idolizing something that isn’t powerful enough to get us out of it.

The whole world is fallen. There is no aspect of the world affected by sin more or less than any other.

point each entrepreneur to a vision of serving a need in a way that reflects God’s plan for the world.

To be a Christian in business, then, means much more than just being honest or not sleeping with your coworkers. It even means more than personal evangelism or holding a Bible study

Rather, it means thinking out the implications of the gospel worldview and God’s purposes for your whole work life—and for the whole of the organization under your influence.

Andrew Delbanco’s fine book College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be

He notes that older worldviews (both Christian and Greco-Roman) believed that much important wisdom had to be rediscovered afresh by new generations as they wrestled with older texts

today the Christian idea—that no one deserves a good life, that all wealth and talent and power are only a gift of God—has largely been lost in our culture, and the “dark side of our meritocracy” is now creating greater inequities than existed before.