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

by Timothy J. Keller

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.

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.

Repeatedly the first chapters of the book of Genesis describe God at “work,” using the Hebrew mlkh, the word for ordinary human work. As one scholar put it, it is wholly “unexpected that the extraordinary divine activity involved in creating heaven and earth should be so described.” 25 In the beginning, then, God worked. Work was not a necessary evil that came into the picture later, or something human beings were created to do but that was beneath the great God himself. No, God worked for the sheer joy of it. Work could not have a more exalted inauguration.

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. The reasons for this are developed more fully in later chapters, but they include the fact that work is one of the ways we make ourselves useful to others, rather than just living a life for ourselves. Also, work is also one of the ways we discover who we are, because it is through work that we come to understand our distinct abilities and gifts, a major component in our identities.

“What is the Christian understanding of work?. . . [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.”

But think of a fish. Because a fish absorbs oxygen from water, not air, it is free only if it is restricted to water. If a fish is “freed” from the river and put out on the grass to explore, its freedom to move and soon even to live is destroyed. The fish is not more free, but less free, if it cannot honor the reality of its nature. The same is true with airplanes and birds. If they violate the laws of aerodynamics, they will crash into the ground. But if they follow them, they will ascend and soar. The same is true in many areas of life: 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

Many people make the mistake of thinking that work is a curse and that something else (leisure, family, or even “spiritual” pursuits) is the only way to find meaning in life. The Bible, as we have seen and will see, exposes the lie of this idea. But it also keeps us from falling into the opposite mistake, namely, that work is the only important human activity and that rest is a necessary evil—something we do strictly to “recharge our batteries” in order to continue to work. We look to what we know about God to make this case. He did not need any restoration of his strength—and yet he rested on the seventh day (Genesis 2:1–3). As beings made in his image, then we can assume that rest, and the things you do as you rest, are good and life-giving in and of themselves. Work is not all there is to life. 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 relationship with God is the most important foundation for your life, and indeed it keeps all the other factors—work, friendships and family, leisure and pleasure—from becoming so important to you that they become addicting and distorted.

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 immediate utility. The work-obsessed mind—as in our Western culture—tends to look at everything in terms of efficiency, value, and speed. But there must also be an ability to enjoy the most simple and ordinary aspects of life, even ones that are not strictly useful, but just delightful.

And every Christian should be able to identify, with conviction and satisfaction, the ways in which his or her work participates with God in his creativity and cultivation.

The earth had been completely unformed and empty; in the six-day process of development God had formed it and filled it—but not completely. People must now carry on the work of development: by being fruitful they fill it even more; by subduing it they must form it even more . . . as God’s representatives, [we] carry on where God left off. But this is now to be a human development of the earth. The human race will fill the earth with its own kind, and it will form the earth for its own kind. From now on the development of the created earth will be societal and cultural in nature.

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 development. In fact, our word “culture” comes from this idea of cultivation. Just as he subdued the earth in his work of creation, so he calls us now to labor as his representatives in a continuation and extension of that work of subduing.

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 to other people, knowing what I do of God’s will and of human need?”

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.

In Luther’s Large Catechism, when he addresses the petition in the Lord’s Prayer asking God to give us our “daily bread,” 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.” 67 So how does God “feed every living thing” (Psalm 145:16) today? Isn’t it through the farmer, the baker, the retailer, the website programmer, the truck driver, and all who contribute to bring us food?

modern people seek a kind of salvation—self-esteem and self-worth—from career success. This leads us to seek only high-paying, high-status jobs, and to “worship” them in perverse ways. 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.

Christians who understand biblical doctrine ought to be the ones who appreciate the work of non-Christians the most. We know we are saved by grace alone, and therefore we are not better fathers or mothers, better artists and businesspersons, than those who do not believe as we do. Our gospel-trained eyes can see the world ablaze with the glory of God’s work through the people he has created and called—in everything from the simplest actions, such as milking a cow, to the most brilliant artistic or historic achievements.

The habit of thinking about work as something one does to make money is so ingrained in us that we can scarcely imagine what a revolutionary change it would be to think about it instead in terms of the work done [itself]. . . . 77 . . . I believe there is a Christian doctrine of work, very closely related to the doctrines of the creative energy of God and the divine image in man. . . . The essential [modern] heresy . . . being that work is not the expression of man’s creative energy in the service of Society, but only something one does in order to obtain money and leisure. 78

[Look at] the chair you are lounging in. . . . Could you have made it for yourself? . . . How [would you] get, say, the wood? Go and fell a tree? But only after first making the tools for that, and putting together some kind of vehicle to haul the wood, and constructing a mill to do the lumber and roads to drive on from place to place? In short, a lifetime or two to make one chair! . . . If we . . . worked not forty but one-hundred-forty hours per week we couldn’t make ourselves from scratch even a fraction of all the goods and services that we call our own. [Our] paycheck turns out to buy us the use of far more than we could possibly make for ourselves in the time it takes us to earn the check. . . . Work . . . yields far more in return upon our efforts than our particular jobs put in. . . . Imagine that everyone quits working, right now! What happens? Civilized life quickly melts away. Food vanishes from the shelves, gas dries up at the pumps, streets are no longer patrolled, and fires burn themselves out. Communication and transportation services end, utilities go dead. Those who survive at all are soon huddled around campfires, sleeping in caves, clothed in raw animal hides. The difference between [a wilderness] and culture is simply, work. 80

Even though, as Luther argues, all work is objectively valuable to others, it will not be subjectively fulfilling unless you consciously see and understand your work as a calling to love your neighbor.

If we base our lives on work and achievement, on love and pleasure, or on knowledge and learning, our existence becomes anxious and fragile—because circumstances in life are always threatening the very foundation of our lives, and death inevitably strips us of everything we hold dear.

One young man explained, “I chose management consulting because it is filled with sharp people—the kind of people I want to be around.” Another said, “I realized that if I stayed in education, I’d be embarrassed when I got to my five-year college reunion, so I’m going to law school now.” Where one’s identity in prior generations might come from being the son of so-and-so or living in a particular part of town or being a member of a church or club, today young people are seeking to define themselves by the status of their work.

What wisdom, then, would the Bible give us in choosing our work? First, if we have the luxury of options, we would want to choose work that we can do well. It should fit our gifts and our capacities. To take up work that we can do well is like cultivating our selves as gardens filled with hidden potential; it is to make the greatest room for the ministry of competence. Second, because the main purpose of work is to serve the world, we would want to choose work that benefits others. We have to ask whether our work or organization or industry makes people better or appeals to the worst aspects of their characters.

If someone claims that your professional status is a result of grace, you immediately think they don’t know how hard you worked to get into your school, how hard you worked in school and at your internships, how you have performed better than your peers at work, and so on. However, you worked with talents you did not earn; they were given to you. You went through doors of opportunity you did not produce; they just opened for you. Therefore, everything you have is a matter of grace, and so you have the freedom to serve the world through your influence, just as you can through your competence.

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.

So when we say that Christians work from a gospel worldview, it does not mean that they are constantly speaking about Christian teaching in their work. Some people think of the gospel as something we are principally to “look at” in our work. This would mean that Christian musicians should play Christian music, Christian writers should write stories about conversion, and Christian businessmen and -women should work for companies that make Christian-themed products and services for Christian customers. Yes, some Christians in those fields would sometimes do well to do those things, but it is a mistake to think that the Christian worldview is operating only when we are doing such overtly Christian activities. Instead, think of the gospel as a set of glasses through which you “look” at everything else in the world. Christian artists, when they do this faithfully, will not be completely beholden either to profit or to naked self-expression; and they will tell the widest variety of stories. 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 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?

An American who first moves to a foreign country is shocked to discover how many of her intuitions and practices that she considered common sense and universal are actually particularly American ones—and are ridiculous to many other people. By living in another culture she gets a new vantage point from which she can be critical of herself, and as a result she will slowly change, dropping some attitudes and adopting others. 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.

And because all human beings are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26–28) and all are given their talents and skills for work in the world by God (1 Corinthians 7:17), we should not be surprised that many people without belief in Jesus can do great work—even better work—than Christians.

Christians should place a high value on all human work (especially excellent work), done by all people, as a channel of God’s love for his world.

Paul says that God’s law is written on the heart of every human being. People have innate consciences that are preloaded with senses of honesty, justice, love, the Golden Rule, and so on. 170 People know at some deep level that there is a God, that we are his creatures, that we should serve him, and that he makes demands on us for relationships with him and other people. God further reveals himself to all people through the magnificence of nature—but also through human culture, which is essentially the forming and filling of nature as God created it.

James 1, verse 17 says that “every good and perfect gift is from above . . . from the Father of the heavenly lights.” This means that every act of goodness, wisdom, justice, and beauty—no matter who does it—is being enabled by God. It is a gift, and therefore a form of grace.

God gives out gifts of wisdom, talent, beauty, and skill according to his grace—that is, in a completely unmerited way. He casts them across the human race like seed, in order to enrich, brighten, and preserve the world. By rights, sin should be making life on earth here much more unbearable than it is—and in fact, all of creation and culture should have fallen apart by now. The reason it is not worse is because of the gift of common grace.

Without an understanding of common grace, Christians will believe they can live self-sufficiently within their own cultural enclave. Some might feel that we should go only to Christian doctors, work only with Christian lawyers, listen only to Christian counselors, or enjoy only Christian artists. Of course, all non-believers have seriously impaired spiritual vision. Yet so many of the gifts God has put in the world are given to nonbelievers. Mozart was a gift to us—whether he was a believer or not. So Christians are free to study the world of human culture in order to know more of God; for as creatures made in His image we can appreciate truth and wisdom wherever we find it.

Properly understood, the doctrine of sin means that believers are never as good as our true worldview should make us. Similarly, the doctrine of grace means that unbelievers are never as messed up as their false worldview should make them. For in the Christian story, the antagonist is not non-Christians but the reality of sin, which (as the gospel tells us) lies within us as well as within them.

And so we are likely to be on firm footing if we make common ground with non-Christians to do work that serves the world. Christians’ work with others should be marked by both humble cooperation and respectful provocation. An understanding of common grace, as well as an experience of God’s pardoning grace in Christ, should lead us to freely and humbly work with others who may not share our faith but can be used greatly by God to accomplish enormous good. At the same time, an understanding of the gospel worldview means we should at times respectfully pursue a different path or winsomely point out how our own Christian faith gives us powerful resources and guidance for what we are doing. 175

“Dualism” is a term used to describe a separating wall between the sacred and the secular. It is a direct result of a thin view of sin, common grace, and God’s providential purposes. Dualism leads some to think that if their work is to please Christ, it must be done overtly in his name. They feel they have to write and perform art that explicitly mentions Jesus, or teach religious subjects in a Christian school; or that they must work in an organization in which all people are professing Christians. Or they must let everyone know that they lead Bible studies in the office in the morning before work hours. (Remember how Luther railed against the separation of all work into the “spiritual estate” and the “temporal estate.”) This kind of dualism comes both from a failure to see the panoramic scope of common grace and the subtle depths of human sin. People with this view cannot see that work done by non-Christians always contains some degree of God’s common grace as well as the distortions of sin. And they cannot see that work done by Christians, even if it overtly names the name of Jesus, is also significantly distorted by sin.

The opposite dualistic approach, however, is even more prevalent—and based on our experience, even more difficult to dismantle. In this approach, Christians think of themselves as Christians only within church activity. Their Christian life is what they do on Sundays and weeknights, when they engage in spiritual activities. The rest of the week they have no ability to think circumspectly about the underlying values they are consuming and living out. In their life and work “out in the world,” they uncritically accept and reenact all of their culture’s underlying values and idolatries of self, surface appearances, technique, personal freedom, materialism, and other features of expressive individualism. While the first form of dualism fails to grasp the importance of what we have in common with the world, this form fails to grasp the importance of what is distinctive about the Christian worldview—namely, that the gospel reframes all things, not just religious things.

We are to be honest, compassionate, and generous not because these things are rewarding (which they usually are, hence the cost-benefit approach to ethics), but because they are right in and of themselves—because to do so honors the will of God and his design for human life. Sometimes, of course, that will put us in the minority and even at a disadvantage. But indeed, as Bible scholar Bruce Waltke points out, the Bible says that the very definition of righteous people is that they disadvantage themselves to advantage others, while “the wicked . . . are willing to disadvantage the community to advantage themselves.”

So Christians and non-Christians can share the same education and expertise, can appreciate together advances in the field and admire the most skilled practitioners, whatever their faith. It is important to be as skillful, diligent, savvy, and disciplined as we can possibly be. In Colossians 3, verse 23 we are told “whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord.” Those who take this biblical directive seriously will seek the respect of their colleagues for the quality and integrity of their work. This means having a track record of saying what we mean and doing what we say, following through on commitments every time, whether formal or informal, and being transparent and fair-minded.

God created people, not to receive love and honor from them but to share the love, joy, honor, and glory he already had within the Trinity.

Think of the cliché that nobody ever gets to the end of their life and wishes they had spent more time at the office. It makes good sense, of course, up to a point. But here’s a more interesting perspective: At the end of your life, will you wish that you had plunged more of your time, passion, and skills into work environments and work products that helped people to give and receive more love? Can you see a way to answer “yes” to this question from your current career trajectory?

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward” (Colossians 3:23–24).

Christians, you see, have been set free to enjoy working. If we begin to work as if we were serving the Lord, we will be freed from both overwork and underwork. Neither the prospect of money and acclaim, nor the lack of it, will be our controlling consideration. Work will be primarily a way to please God by doing his work in the world, for his name’s sake.

Work is to be done with all your heart and might, as skillfully as you can, and it should feel not like a burden, but a privilege.

For employers. Here Paul tells masters that they are slaves too—slaves of Christ (verse 9). That is an extraordinary and radical word to speak into a rigidly hierarchical culture. He is saying, “Conduct yourself among your servants as if you are a fellow slave”! It is easy to overlook the little phrase “in the same way.” In what way? In the way that slaves were to treat their masters—with the greatest respect for their needs!

We all work for an audience, whether we are aware of it or not. Some perform to please parents, others to impress peers, others to win over superiors, while many do what they do strictly to live up to their own standards. All of these audiences are inadequate. Working for them alone will lead to overwork or underwork—sometimes a mixture of the two, based on who is watching. But Christians look to an Audience of One, our loving heavenly Father, and that gives us both accountability and joy in our work.

Christians should be also known to be calm and poised in the face of difficulty or failure. This may be the most telling way to judge if a person is drawing on the resources of the gospel in the development of personal character.