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

by Timothy J. Keller

As Bellah wrote, “. . . we are moving to an ever greater validation of the sacredness of the individual person, [but] our capacity to imagine a social fabric that would hold individuals together is vanishing. . . . The sacredness of the individual is not balanced by any sense of the whole or concern for the common good.”

A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it and you do it for them rather than for yourself.

We can think of the current “faith and work movement” as a river being fed by a number of streams from very different headwaters.

The ecumenical movement has contributed an emphasis on Christians using their work to further social justice in the world.

The small group movement of the twentieth century emphasized the need for believers to give one another nurture and support for the struggles and hardships of work. This showed us that faithful work requires inner spiritual renewal and heart transformation.5

The revivalist impulse within evangelicalism has seen the workplace especially as a place to be a witness for Jesus Christ.

The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers, particularly Martin Luther and John Calvin, argued that all work, even so-called secular work, was as much a calling from God as the ministry of the monk or priest.7 The headwaters of Lutheran theology put special stress on the dignity of all work, observing that God cared for, fed, clothed, sheltered, and supported the human race through our human labor. When we work, we are, as those in the Lutheran tradition often put it, the “fingers of God,” the agents of his providential love for others. This understanding elevates the purpose of work from making a living to loving our neighbor and at the same time releases us from the crushing burden of working primarily to prove ourselves.

Work not only cares for creation, but also directs and structures it. In this Reformed view, the purpose of work is to create a culture that honors God and enables people to thrive.

if you are a Christian who is trying to be faithful in your work, you might find yourself trying to weigh sentiments as varied as these: • The way to serve God at work is to further social justice in the world. • The way to serve God at work is to be personally honest and evangelize your colleagues. • The way to serve God at work is just to do skillful, excellent work. • The way to serve God at work is to create beauty. • The way to serve God at work is to work from a Christian motivation to glorify God, seeking to engage and influence culture to that end. • The way to serve God at work is to work with a grateful, joyful, gospel-changed heart through all the ups and downs. • The way to serve God at work is to do whatever gives you the greatest joy and passion. • The way to serve God at work is to make as much money as you can, so that you can be as generous as you can.

And we can begin by making two observations about the list of propositions above. First, if you revise each of the propositions by adding the word “main”—as in “the main way to serve God at work is . . .”—then the views do in fact contradict.

But if you keep the propositions the way they are, claiming that each is a way to serve God through work, then the different statements are ultimately complementary.

The Oxford English Dictionary, to which Tolkien was a contributor, defines “niggle” as “to work . . . in a fiddling or ineffective way . . . to spend time unnecessarily on petty details.”

Tolkien had a very Christian understanding of art and, indeed, of all work.16 He believed that God gives us talents and gifts so we can do for one another what he wants to do for us and through us.

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.

Whatever your work, you need to know this: There really is a tree. Whatever you are seeking in your work—the city of justice and peace, the world of brilliance and beauty, the story, the order, the healing—it is there. There is a God, there is a future healed world that he will bring about, and your work is showing it (in part) to others.

I just said, “If you know all this.” In order to work in this way—to get the consolation and freedom that Tolkien received from his Christian faith for his work—you need to know the Bible’s answers to three questions: Why do you want to work?

The Bible begins talking about work as soon as it begins talking about anything—that is how important and basic it is.

God worked for the sheer joy of it. Work could not have a more exalted inauguration.

God left creation with deep untapped potential for cultivation that people were to unlock through their labor.

Work did not come in after a golden age of leisure. It was part of God’s perfect design for human life, because we were made in God’s image, and part of his glory and happiness is that he works, as does the Son of God, who said, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working” (John 5:17).

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. Without meaningful work we sense significant inner loss and emptiness. People who are cut off from work because of physical or other reasons quickly discover how much they need work to thrive emotionally, physically, and spiritually.

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.

[It] is that work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties . . . the medium in which he offers himself to God.”31

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.32 So the commandments of God in the Bible are a means of liberation, because through them God calls us to be what he built us to be.

You will not have a meaningful life without work, but you cannot say that your work is the meaning of your life. If you make any work the purpose of your life—even if that work is church ministry—you create an idol that rivals God. Your

In short, work—and lots of it—is an indispensable component in a meaningful human life. It is a supreme gift from God and one of the main things that gives our lives purpose. But it must play its proper role, subservient to God. It must regularly give way not just to work stoppage for bodily repair but also to joyful reception of the world and of ordinary life.

When we think, “I hate work!” we should remember that, despite the fact that work can be a particularly potent reminder (and even amplifier) of the curse of sin on all things, it is not itself a curse. We were built for it and freed by it. But when we feel that our lives are completely absorbed by work, remember that we must also honor work’s limits. There is no better starting point for a meaningful work life than a firm grasp of this balanced work and rest theology.

One of her characters in Atlas Shrugged states, “Whether it’s a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: . . . the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before.”36

Work of all kinds, whether with the hands or the mind, evidences our dignity as human beings—because it reflects the image of God the Creator in us.

In other words, while the plants and animals are called to simply “teem” and “reproduce,” only humans are explicitly given a job. They are called to “subdue” and “have dominion,” or rule the earth.

While the Greek thinkers saw ordinary work, especially manual labor, as relegating human beings to the animal level, the Bible sees all work as distinguishing human beings from animals and elevating them to a place of dignity.

Work has dignity because it is something that God does and because we do it in God’s place, as his representatives.

But in Genesis we see God as a gardener, and in the New Testament we see him as a carpenter. No task is too small a vessel to hold the immense dignity of work given by God. Simple

Hebrew scholar Derek Kidner argues that work was prominent among the full range of delights there: “The earthly paradise . . . is a model of parental care. The fledgling is sheltered but not smothered: on all sides discoveries and encounters await him to draw out his powers of discernment and choice, and there is ample nourishment for his aesthetic, physical and spiritual appetites;

Human beings “filling the earth” means something far than plants and animals filling the earth. It means civilization, not just procreation.

Instead, “ruling” the world as God’s image bearers should be seen as stewardship or trusteeship. God owns the world, but he has put it under our care to cultivate it.

His world is not hostile, so that it needs to be beaten down like an enemy. Rather, its potential is undeveloped, so it needs to be cultivated like a garden.

No, we are to be gardeners who take an active stance toward their charge. They do not leave the land as it is. They rearrange it in order to make it most fruitful, to draw the potentialities for growth and development out of the soil. They dig up the ground and rearrange it with a goal in mind: to rearrange the raw material of the garden so that it produces food, flowers, and beauty.

He pointed them to Genesis and showed that God was a creator/investor who made the world as a home for all kinds of creativity. Mouw urged his audience to think of God as an investment banker. He leveraged his resources to create a whole world of new life.

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

Paul uses these same two words here when he says that every Christian should remain in the work God has “assigned to him, and to which God has called him.”

Our daily work can be a calling only if it is reconceived as God’s assignment to serve others. And that is exactly how the Bible teaches us to view work.

We are not to choose jobs and conduct our work to fulfill ourselves and accrue power, for being called by 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. The question regarding our choice of work is no longer “What will make me the most money and give me the most status?” The question must now be “How, with my existing abilities and opportunities, can I be of greatest service

If the point of work is to serve and exalt ourselves, then our work inevitably becomes less about the work and more about us. Our aggressiveness will eventually become abuse, our drive will become burnout, and our self-sufficiency will become self-loathing. But if 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.

Luther says that “when you pray for ‘daily bread’ you are praying for everything that contributes to your having and enjoying your daily bread. . . . You must open up and expand your thinking, so that it reaches not only as far as the flour bin and baking oven but also out over the broad fields, the farmlands, and the entire country that produces, processes, and conveys to us our daily bread and all kinds of nourishment.”

parents give their children what they need—character—through the diligence required for the chores they assign them. Luther concludes that God works through our work for the same reason:

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. 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.

“Why should I not therefore freely, joyfully, with all my heart, and with an eager will . . . give myself as a Christ to my neighbor, just as Christ offered himself to me . . . since through faith I have an abundance of all good things in Christ?”

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 to unify the human race. . . .

One of the main ways that you love others in your work is through the “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.