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February 5 - March 25, 2019
From the moment of the fall, humankind has suffered from moral schizophrenia: neither able to deny sinfulness
It goes for the jugular, as if to say, “Do you find the two great tasks in life—love and work—to be excruciatingly hard? This explains why.”
You should expect to be regularly frustrated in your work even though you may be in exactly the right vocation.
make sense of life through learning and wisdom
make life fulfilling through the pursuit of pleasure
chase away his sense of pointlessness ...
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of achievement through...
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Because there is no longer an operative consensus on the dignity of all work, still less on the idea that in all work we are the hands and fingers of God serving the human community, in their minds they had an extremely limited range of career choices.
we would want to choose work that we can do well.
we would want to choose work that benefits others.
we do not simply wish to benefit our family, benefit the human community, and benefit ourselves—we also want to benefit our field of work itself.
increase the human race’s capacity to cultivate the created world.
But if your mind is set upon serving the work, then you know you have nothing to look for; the only reward the work can give you is the satisfaction of beholding its perfection.
to serve the work is a labor of pure love.
It is the work that serves the community; the business of the worker is to serve the work.
“There is nothing better for a person than to enjoy their work, because that is their lot” (Ecclesiastes 3:22).
One of the reasons work is both fruitless and pointless is the powerful inclination of the human heart to make work, and its attendant benefits, the main basis of one’s meaning and identity.
Instead it becomes a way to distinguish myself from my neighbor, to show the world and prove to myself that I’m special.
Sin has natural consequences.
We say people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others.
Don’t just get into the palace and bend every rule you can to stay there.
Serve. You have come to your royal position for such a time as this.
you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?”
He is reminding Esther that she did not get to the palace except by grace.
identification and mediation.
His is ultimate mediation.
She becomes a person of greatness not by trying to make a name for herself; and you will become a person of greatness not by trying to make yourself into one, but by serving the One who said to his Father, “For your sake, thy will be done.”
“If I had that, it would fix everything; then I’d feel my life really had value.”
If circumstances threaten to take it away, we are paralyzed with uncontrollable fear; if something or someone has taken it away, we burn with anger and struggle with a sense of despair.
While we are usually blind to our own idols, it is not very hard to see them in others, and
to see how others’ counterfeit gods fill them with anxiety, anger, and discouragement.
Every culture has a set of answers to the questions addressed in the book of
Ecclesiastes—questions such as “What are we here to accomplish in our life? What are we getting, spending, and living for?”
an idol is a good thing turned into an ultimate thing,
family, race, and nation can become dangerously paramount.
the tendency to privilege the interests of one’s own tribe or nation over others is due to the “cosmic insecurity” of our sinful hearts.
it is possible to make national security or cultural and racial purity into an end in itself, justifying militarism and domestic oppression or at least indifference to the plight of minorities.
the human being . . . is a very poorly designed machine tool. The human being excels . . . in coordination. He excels in relating perception to action. He works best if the entire human being, muscles, senses, and mind is engaged in the work.”
No one [today] can be reasonably convinced that this teeming and disruptive evolutionary impulse . . . leads infallibly to what is better.
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.
Nothing will be put perfectly right, as St. Paul says, until the “day of Christ” at the end of history
First,
Second,
Third,
Finally,
ultimately complementary and very practical.
if, for example, you see life here as mainly about self-actualization and self-fulfillment rather than the love of God—
“worldview,”
the comprehensive perspective from which we interpret all of reality.
No one can really function in the world without some working answers to those big questions, and so, to provide those answers, we adopt a world-story, a narrative that explains things—
