Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

by John Mark Comer

When you look out at the world, what do you see and do you think, Somebody needs to fix that?

Maybe that somebody is you. Remember abad? Work is serving.

We’re followers of Jesus. We believe that fulfillment is found in giving our life away, not hanging on to it. Jesus was a servant. So are we. So where does the world need people to serve?

calling. The novelist Frederick Buechner put it this way: Work is “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

the intersection between what you love and what your world needs.

Does it contribute to human flourishing? Is it good for the earth? Good for you? Good for your city, your nation, your world? Good for culture?

Most importantly, is it something that God smiles on?

There are some kinds of work that cannot be a vocation, or a calling from God. Using your body in a pornographic or sexualized way. Manipulating first-time home buyers into loans they can’t afford. Siphoning the natural resources of the developing world so the 1 percent can live just a little bit better.

God is involved in your story to the degree that you open up your life to his authorship.

What’s the Spirit stirring in your heart?

sometimes the Spirit will call us to do stuff we don’t want to do.

Is there something stirring in your heart that you feel like you just have to do? To let out? To try, whether you succeed or fail. Is there something that you feel like God’s put in your head that one day you’ll stand in front of your Maker and answer for?

Remember that for most of us, our sense of calling starts out vague and unclear — more of a feeling and a desire than a five-year plan — but over time it comes into focus.

Talk about three radically disparate jobs! But he said the most insightful thing: Really, they’re are all the same. It’s people. I love people. And I love getting them excited about something new. That’s what God made me to do. Brilliant.

if you don’t do it, not only do you rob yourself of the life God’s called you to live, but you rob the rest of us. We need you to be you. Don’t sell us short. Give us all you got.

To get to a robust, deep, rich, charged theology of work, and for that matter, rest, we have to cross the chasm that is the sacred/secular divide.

The sacred/secular divide is this erroneous idea that some things are sacred or spiritual, and they matter to God; but other things are secular or physical, and by implication, they don’t matter to God, at least, not all that much.

The problem with this widespread, ubiquitous, domineering, destructive way of thinking is that, well, by this definition, most of life is secular.

The sacred stuff is a dinky slice of the pie — going to church, praying, reading the Scriptures, evangelism. What is that, 5 percent of our l...

Most of life — the other 95 percent — is spent grocery shopping or walking the dog or cutting your toenails or reading at the park or doing yoga with your wife or eating a burrito and then feeling bloated afterward — but less so if yo...

Did you know there’s no word for spiritual in the Hebrew language? Hebrew is the language of the first three quarters of the Bible — what we call the Old Testament.

Look up the word spiritual in Genesis to Malachi— the Bible used by Jesus. It’s not there. Why? Because in a Hebrew worldview, all of life is spiritual.

Even when you get to the New Testament, the word spiritual is really only used by Paul. In his writings it means “animated by the Holy Spirit.” And for Paul, every facet of our life should be spiritual.

And for Jesus and his way, God wants to be involved in every square inch of our lives. Because everything is spiritual.3 Everything matters to God.

Plato — whose fingerprints are all over Western culture — used this dichotomy of a spiritual world and physical world, as if they were two separate places. His goal was to get from one to the other. And over time, this worldview sunk into the church.

as the church spread out from Jerusalem to cities like Philippi and Corinth and then Athens itself — Plato’s hometown — and as Gentiles (non-Jewish people, born into a very different worldview) started to join the church, over the years, the tide turned, and platonic, dualistic, sacred/secular thinking started to infiltrate and infect the ethos of Jesus’ people.

And so the cosmic, gargantuan 24/7 kingdom of God was shrunk down to a few hundred people singing songs in a nice building for an hour every weekend.5

You mediate between the Creator and the creation. You’re his representative. You pass his blessing on to people who know him and to others who don’t. And you’re called. What you do matters to God a whole lot. Because it’s your ministry.

All the word ministry means is “service.”8 Your ministry is your service — it’s the part you play, the slot you fill, the place you do your thing to work for a Garden-like world.

We’re all in ministry. Some of us, like myself, are serving inside the church, which is great. But the vast majority of you are serving outside the church — as a paramedic or a landscape architect or a designer for Google or a hunting guide or a surf instructor or a radiologist or a parking-lot attendant — but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re serving outside the kingdom. And it definitely doesn’t mean that what you do isn’t spiritual or that it doesn’t matter to God.

Some people think of themselves as followers of Jesus, but only in the church. So at church, they’re all-in. They take notes from the sermon and volunteer in the kids’ wing and show up for the quarterly justice project. Maybe they even tithe. But when they go to work or the car dealership or the movie theater, they are just like everybody else.

beautiful. It doesn’t matter if you make a million dollars and give away 90 percent of it if you made that money doing something cheap or ugly or sketchy or greedy or wasteful or harmful to the earth. What you do for work matters just as much as, if not more than, what you do with the money you make from your work.

I’ve heard it said that “Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective.”9 There is no such thing as Christian music, because a melody can’t be a Christian, only a songwriter can.

What’s sad is when people think that working at a nonprofit is spiritual and for-profit work isn’t. As if “to really serve Jesus” you have to work for a church.

True, but a number of scholars point out the parallel between the cultural mandate in Genesis 1 (“Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.”) and the so-called Great Commission in Matthew 28 (“Go and make disciples of all nations.”). They argue Jesus is rephrasing the cultural mandate in light of human sin in exile from Eden, and in light of his in-breaking kingdom. If that’s right (and I think it is), then as followers of Jesus we have a dual vocation. Not one, but two callings.

The original calling — to rule over the earth. To make culture. And a new calling — to make disciples.

To help people come back into relationship with the Creator, so that they can rule over the creation. Not just so they can get forgiveness and go to heaven when they die. But so that they can come back from heave...

The new calling to make disciples does not negate or cancel out the original calling to create culture. It’s a both/and. A dual vocation.

Paul, for example, worked as an artisan — a tentmaker — all through his years as a church planter. At one point, he said to his friends, “We worked night and day in order not to be a burden to anyone while we preached the gospel of God to you.”10 Paul didn’t see his job as a distraction from his calling to the kingdom, but as a vital part of it. If tent making wasn’t beneath the most prolific author in the New Testament, why wouldn’t it be good enough for us?

But my hope and prayer is that most of you are starting to realize that what you do for a living is a calling and that it matters more than you know. Even if it has absolutely nothing to do with the church, it still has theology and weight and backing and umph to it.

Because we live in a world with no compartments. For those who are spiritual — who are filled with the active, dynamic Spirit of God himself — the line between heaven and earth is thin at best. The sacred is never far away. And your job, your career, or whatever it is you do all day long, isn’t something outside of Jesus’ calling on your life — it’s right at the center of

it.

So God’s glory is his weight? His heaviness? The idea behind kavod is God’s significance. He’s weighty, as in important. There’s something about this God that we need to stand in awe of. And all through the Scriptures, God’s glory is about two things: Presence and beauty.

“When Solomon finished praying, fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices, and the glory of the LORD filled the temple. The priests could not enter the temple of the LORD because the glory of the LORD filled it.” And when everybody saw God’s glory, they fell face down and “they worshiped and gave thanks to the LORD, saying, ‘He is good; his love endures forever.’ ”2 God’s kavod here isn’t his fame; it’s his presence — the fact that he was there, not far away, but close. Heaven and earth were wed, if only for a moment. And it’s his beauty — this staggering sense of how good he really is.

It was the prophet Habakkuk who said that we’re heading toward a world where “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.”

One of the most jarring commands in the New Testament is from the writer Paul: “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.”5

Because so many people are blind to God’s glory, we, as God’s people, are to live in such a way that people start to see God’s presence and beauty.

How do any of us glorify God with our work if it’s not overtly Christian? Well, here’s my take: we’re the image of God, remember? Our job is to make the invisible God visible — to mirror and mimic what he is like to the world. We can glorify God by

doing our work in such a way that we make the invisible God visible by what we do and how we do it.

Well, if God’s glory is his presence and beauty, then, as I see it, we glorify God by reshaping the raw materials of the world in such a way that, for those with eyes to see, God’s presence and beauty are made visible.