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

by John Mark Comer

There’s a nasty rumor floating around the church right now, and it sounds something like this: “It’s who you are that matters, not what you do.” Really? Where do the Scriptures teach that?

In the church, we often spend the majority of our time teaching people how to live the minority of their lives.

And what’s the first thing Jesus does with his rule? He shares it with us. Why? Because from the beginning of the story God has been looking for partners.

And then lastly, this means that every human on the planet is bursting with raw, uncut potential. You are bursting with raw, uncut potential. You have the blood of royalty in your veins.

And because each one is spilling over with raw, uncut potential, each one is a full-time job.

She’s free to invest more of her time in what’s commonly called parenting — the art of unfolding children.

This word subdue seems to indicate there’s an inherent wildness to the world. It’s untamed. Out of control. In desperate need of ruling.

The first word is abad in Hebrew, and it basically means work. But that’s not the only way it’s translated into English. Sometimes it’s translated “service.” So work is service. Service to God. Service to people made in his image — which is everybody. And, I would argue, service to the earth itself. But abad is also the same word used all over the Hebrew Bible for worship. Interesting. So work and worship aren’t two separate ideas. They are connected at the hip. They are two translations of the same word.5 It’s tragic that we think of worship as a few songs at church every Sunday. That is worship — of course. But in a Genesis-shaped worldview — all of life is worship.

I love Tim Keller’s definition of work. He puts it this way: work is “rearranging the raw material of God’s creation in such a way that it helps the world in general, and people in particular, thrive and flourish.”

Good culture is the result of even better people hard at work, rearranging the raw stuff of Planet Earth into a place of delight.

Here’s what you have to understand: the Garden was dynamic, not static. Put another way, creation was a project, not a product.

and human was the one entrusted with that job, to “fill the earth” with the Garden’s reality.

This is a provocative metaphor. Most of us think of ourselves as God’s employees, not his coworkers. As if we’re working for God. And there’s some truth in that. Paul loves to call himself God’s servant. But if we’re God’s coworkers, that means we’re not only working for God, we’re also working with God.

What’s the difference between an employee and a partner? In one word — ownership.

to take the creation project forward as an act of service and worship to the God who made you.

the sacred/secular divide and how there is no such thing and it was basically made up by men like myself with self-esteem issues.

I think a better way to think about calling is as what God made you to do. How you’re hardwired by God.

I honestly think that we’re more likely to figure out our calling from a four-letter Myers-Briggs label than we are from a burning bush. Although, if I had the option, I would go for the bush every time. But so much of finding your calling is about finding out who you are and what you alone can contribute to the world.

The word vocatio can also be translated voice. Man, that says a lot. Your vocation is your voice.

The Quakers have a saying about calling that I love: Le...

I can’t be anything I want to be, no matter how hard I work or how much I believe in myself. All I can be is me. Who the Creator made John Mark to be. If we fight the image of God in us — even if we succeed in the short run — it will come back to eat us alive.

But burnout isn’t always the result of giving too much; sometimes it’s the result of trying to give something you don’t have to give in the first place.

God’s made my calling clear — I’m just a voice. I’m supposed to speak vision to the church, teach the Scriptures, and write a little bit.

We need to learn to embrace our potential and our limitations. Because both of them are signposts, pointing us forward into God’s calling on our life.

Work is “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”6

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

Sometimes a calling is staring us in the face, we just need to make eye contact.

We live in a time of overlap between the ages. What one theologian called “the time between the times.”6 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.

The question that Steve has to wrestle with — that we all have to wrestle with in our own way — is, how does he glorify God with bags?

The Anglican writer John Stott said the kind of work we’re called to is, “The expenditure of energy (manual or mental or both) in the service of others, which brings fulfillment to the worker, benefit to the community, and glory to God.”

Nothing about creation says that God is a tightfisted, utilitarian, bean-counting pragmatist; God is a lavish, opulent, extravagant artist, and creation is his beauty on display.

ADHD, stress, workaholism, burnout, connectivity — these are just words we come up with to name a world that is unraveling at the seams.

Benjamin Franklin.1 What he actually said was that every person should be a “Jack of all trades, master of one.”

Discipleship is about learning how to become a good human being.

Do you see your work as an essential part of your discipleship to Jesus and as the primary way that you join him in his work of renewal? If not, you should.

Learning how to become a really good mom or dad to your children and a really good disciple of Jesus are the exact same thing.

Sayers went on to say, “The church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him to not be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours and to come to church on Sundays. 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.”

Your job isn’t to be the best in your field, just the best version of yourself.

“We don’t work like that here. We do things the long, hard, stupid way.”

ten thousand hours. That’s how long it takes to get really good at something.

And do that one thing well as an act of service and love for the world and to the glory of God. That last part is the key. The cultural milieu we live in is one of celebrityism. The temptation, when you get really good at something, is to do it to serve and love yourself, not the world, and to do it for your own glory, not God’s.

God is looking for people he can give more “grace” to. People who can handle grace, with grace.

“Good design is putting our best forward; it is working hard to bring beauty into the world. When I see something that is brilliant it wrecks me in the best sort of way. I am also constantly returning to this idea that we were created with the ability to create and that makes our God the most generous of all. I’m humbled after I complete every new project, and as I stand there with a big silly grin on my face, I feel his presence and approval.”

My point is that as human beings, we have this slant to look to our work for significance we can only find in God.

But workaholism is more than an addiction; it’s a twisted kind of worship, a search for meaning and purpose in what we do.

We’re the children of affluence. A lot of the jokes about how millennials live at home until thirty and goof off and are flaky and immature and travel a lot make it sound like this is something new. Honestly, this is how rich kids have always behaved.

A pair of sociologists used this formula: “Happiness equals reality minus expectations.”

All these somethings push us to Someone.

You would think that after creating the world, God would make a holy space— a mountain or a temple or a shrine. After all, every other religion has a holy space. Islam has Mecca. Hinduism has the Ganges River. Paganism has Stonehenge. Baseball has Wrigley Field.

The Ten Commandments are just the beginning of the Torah. All in all there are 613 commandments. They get a bad rap as rules, but in reality they’re more like a manifesto for how Israel was to live as the people of God.