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

by Timothy J. Keller

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, or the rise of tyrants who use technology for powerful social control.

there are no moral absolutes and everyone must choose his or her own standard for right and wrong, yet it then turns and says we must respect human rights and honor the freedom and dignity of every human being. “But on what basis?” Nietzsche would ask. If there are no moral absolutes, then how can you arbitrarily declare that there are? If human beings are simply the product of the same natural processes that formed rust and rocks, why does every person deserve to be treated with equality and dignity?

Because in postmodern society no one is sure or can agree about “ends” or goals for the human race, we now have only “means” or techniques. Since there is no longer any dominant vision of healthy human life or good human society, we are left with nothing but individual competition for personal success and power.

Delbanco argues that, ironically, the heyday of the new Left in the 1960s and of the new Right in the 1980s “cooperated in installing instant gratification as the hallmark of the good life. . . . What was lost . . . was any conception of a common destiny worth tears, sacrifice, and maybe even death.”139

How does this shifting of mood and meaning affect our work now? I spoke to a man, now in his eighties, who was one of the pioneers of the hedge fund industry. He told me that in the late 1950s and most of the 1960s, the great majority of the best and the brightest did not want to go into financial services—they wanted to go into education and science. They wanted to teach the young, put people on the moon, and solve world hunger. And the leading voices of the day told them they could do it. At some point by the late 1980s he sensed a change in society. There was far less optimism about social progress or even how to define it. People were divided by the culture wars. Cynicism set in, and over time the most ambitious and talented people wanted to go into business and finance. The perception was that unless you were a highly paid professional, you could not live a fulfilled, free life. “It’s not healthy,” he told me, and he was right.

Those with more politically liberal sensibilities are quick to perceive the postmodern idols of “means without ends” in the area of business. They are not as sensitive to the even more pervasive problem that we now get a sense of self not from our roles in family and society, but as consumers. We are encouraged to create a persona through the brands we choose to purchase and the identity we are able to construct for ourselves online.

Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff observes that modern culture defines the happy life as a life that is “going well”—full of experiential pleasure—while to the ancients, the happy life meant the life that is lived well, with character, courage, humility, love, and justice.

Christians agree that when we sell and market, we need to show potential customers that a product “adds value” to their lives. That doesn’t mean it can give them a life. But because Christians have a deeper understanding of human well-being, we will often find ourselves swimming against the very strong currents of the corporate idols of our culture.

Nothing will be put perfectly right, as St. Paul says, until the “day of Christ” at the end of history (Philippians 1:6; 3:12). Until then all creation “groans” (Romans 8:22) and is subject to decay and weakness.

First, the gospel provides an alternate story line for our work;

Second, the Christian faith gives us a new and rich conception of work as partnering with God in his love and care for the world.

Third, the gospel gives us a particularly sensitive new moral compass, through a host of sound ethical guidelines to help us make decisions, as well as wise counsel about human hearts. Finally, the gospel radically changes our motives for work and fills us with a new and durable inner power that will be with us through thick and thin.

People cannot make sense of anything without attaching it to a story line.

And if you get the story of the world wrong—if, for example, you see life here as mainly about self-actualization and self-fulfillment rather than the love of God—you will get your life responses wrong, including the way you go about your work.

A story begins when something knocks life off balance. Then the story progresses, or the plot “thickens,” as the protagonists struggle to restore that balance and peace while antagonistic forces block and resist them. Finally, the story ends as the struggle results in either the restoration of balance or the failure to recover it.

a story must have an account of how life should be, an explanation of how it got thrown off balance, and some proposed solution as to what will put life right again.

The term “worldview,” from the German word Weltanschauung, means the comprehensive perspective from which we interpret all of reality.

There is something wrong within us. Nothing ever seems to make us happy or fulfilled except in the most fleeting way. There is also wrong among us. The world is filled with poverty, war, suffering, and injustice. Something seems to have knocked the whole world off balance.

We are wired to move through our lives chasing and rehearsing narratives that will promise to bring the world back into balance.

MacIntyre argues that human actions are “enacted narrative.” All people are living out some mental world-story that gives their lives meaning.

In each case you are putting yourself into a larger story that assumes the world would be a better place if more people were doing what you were doing.

Leslie Stevenson’s classic book, Seven Theories of Human Nature,

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.

Our worldview places our work in the context of a history, a cause, a quest, and a set of protagonists and antagonists, and in so doing it frames the strategy of our work at a high level. At a day-to-day level, our worldview will shape our individual interactions and decisions.

The gospel, however, teaches that the meaning of life is to love God and love our neighbor, and that the operating principle is servanthood.

the biblical worldview uniquely understands the nature, problem, and salvation of humankind as fundamentally relational. We were made for a relationship with God, we lost our relationship with God through sin against him, and we can be brought back into that relationship through his salvation and grace.

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.

Many people have a worldview that to some degree is indebted to the Greeks and Plato. They think the problem with the world rests in undisciplined, selfish people who won’t submit to traditional moral values and responsibilities. The solution is a “revival” of religion, morality, and virtue in society.

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). And it locates the solution in God’s grace (our restoration of a relationship with God through the work of Christ).

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 good. God made the world and everything in it was good. There are no intrinsically evil parts of the world. Nothing is evil in its origin.

Every field of work is to some degree influenced by alternate worldviews and their attendant idols, each assigning ultimate value to some idol—that doesn’t fully take into consideration our sin or God’s grace.

The Christian worker or business leader who has experienced God’s grace—who knows “You are not your own; you were bought at a price” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20)—is free to honor God, love neighbors, and serve the common good through work.

“profit without purpose is a recipe for disaster.”

The gospel-centered business would have a discernible vision for serving the customer in some unique way, a lack of adversarial relationships and exploitation, an extremely strong emphasis on excellence and product quality, and an ethical environment that goes “all the way down” to the bottom of the organizational chart and to the realities of daily behavior, even when high ethics mean a loss of margin. In the business animated by the gospel worldview, profit is simply one of many important bottom lines.

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 at the office. 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.

the original founders of Ivy League schools were “stringent Protestants” who believed “the mark of salvation was not high self-esteem but humbling awareness of one’s lowliness in the eyes of God. . . . Those whom God favors are granted grace not for any worthiness of their own, but by God’s unmerited mercy.”

artists shaped by the gospel cannot be characterized either by sentimentality or bitter hopelessness.

From a Christian perspective the problem with both kinds of stories is that they tend to blame problems on things besides sin and identify salvation in things besides God—and therefore are ultimately too simplistic.

It is easy to become extremely cynical about people and emotionally hardened to life. You see so much of the messy stuff of life and death that you feel your essential defense mechanism is to become emotionally detached and keep a distance in order to maintain your sanity.

Horder responded that he reckoned only about a third of the problems that are brought to a physician are strictly medical—the rest are due to or aggravated by anxiety and stress, poor life choices, and unrealistic goals and beliefs about themselves.

People have a spiritual nature, a moral nature, and a social nature, and if any of these are violated by unwise or wrong beliefs, behaviors, and choices, there can be interlocking physical and emotional breakdown.

Just as important is the growth in influence of a view that has been called “evolutionary social constructivism,” which believes that “all aspects of every level of reality [have] a single evolutionary explanation.”

The old idea of a person consisting of body, mind, and spirit is gone—now there is only a body that has mental, emotional, and spiritual neurology. In addition to this reductionistic understanding of human nature, the increasing economic and legal pressures on doctors and hospitals are likely to push medical professionals more cautiously to “mind their own business” when it comes to treating the whole person.

God created and will resurrect our bodies—and so they are important!

think of the gospel as a set of glasses through which you “look” at everything else in the world.

Many have argued, and I would agree, that the very rise of modern science could have occurred only in a society in which the biblical view of a sole, all-powerful, and personal Creator was prevalent.

Are you thinking about your work through the lenses of a Christian worldview? Are you asking questions such as: • What’s the story line of the culture in which I live and the field where I work? Who are the protagonists and antagonists? • What are the underlying assumptions about meaning, morality, origin, and destiny? • What are the idols? The hopes? The fears?

How does my particular profession retell this story line, and what part does the profession itself play in the story? • What parts of the dominant worldviews are basically in line with the gospel, so that I can agree with and align with them? • What parts of the dominant worldviews are irresolvable without Christ? Where, in other words, must I challenge my culture? How can Christ complete the story in a different way? • How do these stories affect both the form and the content of my work personally? How can I work not just with excellence but also with Christian distinctiveness in my work? • What opportunities are there in my profession for (a) serving individual people, (b) serving society at large, (c) serving my field of work, (d) modeling competence and excellence, and (e) witnessing to Christ?