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

by Timothy J. Keller

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The current economic era has given us fresh impulses and new ways to stigmatize work such as farming and caring for children—jobs that supposedly are not “knowledge” jobs and therefore do not pay very well. 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 physical labor is God’s work no less than the formulation of theological truth.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sin leads to the disintegration of every area of life: spiritual, physical, social, cultural, psychological, temporal, eternal.

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.

if you are unwilling to risk your place in the palace for your neighbors, the palace owns you.

Idols of comfort and pleasure can make it impossible for a person to work as hard as is necessary to have a faithful and fruitful career. Idols of power and approval, on the other hand, can lead us to overwork or to be ruthless and unbalanced in our work practices.

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 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.

The stories of sacrifice and perseverance are a more fitting culmination of the gospel narrative than stories of neglect.

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.

“In the early days of a medical career you work such enormous hours that your prayer life just dries up. That is deadly. Only if Jesus stays real to the heart can you be consistently joyful enough in him to avoid making medicine your whole self-worth, and then becoming hardened when you meet so much ingratitude.”

Christians in business will see profit as only one of several bottom lines; and they will work passionately for any kind of enterprise that serves the common good.

The Christian writer can constantly be showing the destructiveness of making something besides God into the central thing, even without mentioning God directly.

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 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?

Becoming a Christian is a lot like moving to a new country; only it is more profound, because it gives us a new perspective on every culture, every worldview, and every field of work. In the long run, the gospel helps us see everything in a new light, but it takes time to grasp and incorporate this new information into how we live and pursue our vocations.

every advancement in learning, every work of art, every innovation in health care or technology or management or governance, is simply God “opening his book of creation and revealing his truth” to us.

According to the Bible, wisdom is more than just obeying God’s ethical norms; it is knowing the right thing to do in the 80 percent of life’s situations in which the moral rules don’t provide the clear answer.

the gospel also gives us new power for work by supplying us with a new passion and a deeper kind of rest.

person characterized by acedia—in which their driving passion is for their own needs, comfort, and interests—does not necessarily look lazy at all.

Anyone who cannot obey God’s command to observe the Sabbath is a slave, even a self-imposed one.