More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 5 - March 25, 2019
acknowledge both how deeply frustrating and difficult work can be and how profound the spiritual hope must be if we are going to face the challenge of pursuing vocation in this world.
God gives us talents and gifts so we can do for one another what he wants to do for us and through us.
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.
Why do you want to work?
Why is it so hard to work?
How can we overcome the difficulties and find satisfaction in our wor...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties . . . the medium in which he offers himself to God.”
leisure is not the mere absence of work, but an attitude of mind or soul in which you are able to contemplate and enjoy things as they are
in themselves,
without regard to their value or their imm...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Leisure lives on affirmation. It is not the same as the absence of activity.
We learn not only that work has dignity in itself, but also that all kinds of work have dignity.
All work has dignity because it reflects God’s image in us, and also because the material creation we are called to care for is good.
Caring for and cultivating this material world has worth, even if it means cutting the grass.
This also means that “secular” work has no less dignity and nobility than the “sacred” work of ministry.
to work it and take care of it.
should be seen as stewardship or trusteeship.
real assertion of will.
even in its original, unfallen form, God made the world to need work.
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.
we are not to relate to the world as park rangers,
Nor are we to “pave over ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
we are to be gardeners who take an active stance tow...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
They rearrange it in order to make it ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Farming takes the physical material of soil and seed and produces food. Music takes the physics of sound and rearranges it into something beautiful and thrilling that brings meaning to life. When we take fabric and make a piece
of clothing, when we push a broom and clean up a room, when we use technology to harness the forces of electricity, when we take an unformed, naïve human mind and teach it a subject, when we teach a couple how to resolve their relational disputes, when we take simple materials and turn them into a poignant work of art—we are continuing God’s work of forming, filling, and subduing. Whenever we bring order out of chaos, whenever we draw out creative potential, whenever we elaborate and “unfold” creation beyond where it was when we found it, we are following God’s pattern of creative cultural
...more
“making beautiful things of enduring value.”
Mouw urged his audience to think of God as an investment
banker.
Greek word for church— ekklesia—literally means the “ones called out.”
Remember that something can be a vocation or calling only if some
other party calls you to do it, and you do it for their sake rather than for your own.
Our daily work can be a calling only if it is reconceived as God’s assignment to serve others. And that is exactly how ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
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.
“How, with my existing abilities and opportunities, can I be of greatest service to other people, knowing what I do of God’s will and of human need?”
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.
First,
second
All work now becomes a way to love the God who saved us freely; and by extension, a way to love our neighbor.
to honor God by loving your neighbors and serving them through your work.
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.”
What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.
“I said a prayer for my
passengers momentarily and then got back to business.”
“You can praise the Lord by peeling a spud, if you peel it to perfection.”
John Coltrane
tongues. May He help and strengthen all men in every good endeavor.
the Bible locates the root issue as our separation from
God.
