Ploductivity: A Practical Theology of Work & Wealth

by Douglas Wilson

People who are only relaxed are frequently slackers, and much of the book of Proverbs would appear to apply to them. But people who are driven give a diligent work ethic a bad name. Nobody wants to be like that. We might admire the house they can afford, but no one wants to be like the people who live in it.

“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”

But do you want to be efficient like a machine, or fruitful like a tree?

once a technique is implemented for a few weeks, the book goes on the shelf with all the others, like a piece of exercise equipment in a garage full of exercise equipment.

The technophile is the early and eager adapter. He tries everything out, and subscribes to magazines and web digests that help him try everything out. He is the guy waiting overnight on the sidewalk for the latest iPhone release. He can’t wait until some tech giant develops a thumb drive for the base of his skull that will give him instant fluency in Spanish. He is urging Google on in their pursuit of their version of everlasting life, where they will upload his digital consciousness to the cloud. It does not occur to him that he is simply yearning to become an old-fashioned ghost, haunting the computers of his old co-workers and weirded-out family members.

If we get the theology of the thing right, then it should be something that our great-grandchildren can apply fruitfully fifty years from now when they are trying to incorporate who-knows-what into their daily lives. It probably won’t be the iPhone 92.

However, what I have failed to grasp in all this is why Royal Standard typewriters have been allowed to squeeze out the quill pen.

We have a perennial temptation to locate sin as resident in the stuff.

Plenty of sin accompanies technology, just as plenty of sin accompanies lack of technology. However, the basic driving problem is always in the human heart, always in our use of technology, and that use is shaped and driven by our attitudes about it. Maxwell’s silver hammer did come down upon somebody’s head, but we go astray when we blame the silver hammer. The problem was in Maxwell.

Now, what we call technology is simply an array of tools laid out on the bench for us. Technology is therefore a form of wealth. The reason this is important is because the Bible says very little about technology as such, but it gives us a great deal of blunt and pointed teaching on the subject of wealth. If we learn how to deal with wealth scripturally, then we will have learned how to deal with technology.

So if technology is wealth, then we are all surrounded with astounding amounts of it. This is what I refer to as tangible grace. If you have a smartphone, you have more wealth in your pocket than Nebuchadnezzar accumulated over the course of his lifetime. We have a responsibility to turn a profit on these astounding resources—and that is what is meant by productivity. We have a responsibility to do this methodically, deliberately, and intentionally. This is what I mean by ploductivity. This is deliberate faithfulness: working in the same direction over an extended period of time. Our electronic servants may be super fast, but we should be as deliberate as ever.

The Scriptures speak to our condition, and because we are wealthy, they speak to it very directly. But we have to be prepared to listen.

work over time matters, and no work over time matters.

You can, and should, draw conclusions about people based on their work. Our ability to evaluate the labor of others is not absolute because we are limited and finite. Our judgments should be made in all humility. But this does not alter the fact that we still need to evaluate others, and an important part of that evaluation includes the quality of their work.

This is why the Scriptures say, “He also that is slothful in his work is brother to him that is a great waster” (Prov. 18:9). Laziness is a destroyer. But how can it be, when it didn’t touch anything, when it didn’t consume anything? The problem is that it did consume something—it burned a lot of daylight.

True Christian fellowship and camaraderie should exist between an outstanding web designer and an outstanding architect, in a way that does not exist between a great architect and a lazy one. This is because cream rises. We must learn to draw the lines of solidarity in the right places. Shared honesty across professions is a sound basis of solidarity. A shared profession, with some who are honest and others who are scoundrels, is not.

If you get together with a friend and talk about how so-and-so is having trouble in his marriage, and you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem. You are a gossip. But if you tell a friend who asked about it that your brother in Christ installed your kitchen cabinets upside down, that is not gossip. People who do not want public evaluation of the quality of their work are people who have no business being in business. They should just buy a shovel and dig where they are told to.

First, work is a good thing, and the hard way is actually the easy way. As a general rule, the difficult parts should be moved to the front of the project. There is a way of avoiding work that multiplies work, and there is a way of embracingwork that saves work in the long run. “The way of the slothful man is as an hedge of thorns: But the way of the righteous is made plain” (Prov. 15:19). As the saying goes, if you don’t have time to do it right, then how will you have time to do it over?

The issue is not whether we are saved by works. Of course not. The issue here, rather, is what salvation looks like. We are saved by grace, but grace works. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12–13, esv).We are not saved by good works (Eph. 2:8–9), but we are saved to good works (Eph. 2:10). Immediately after this famous verse where Paul says we are saved by grace through faith, he then says that we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand for us to do. This salvation by grace is a salvation unto good works. In our sin, we were a bad work. The grace of God picked us up and placed us on God’s work bench, where He made us His project. The word there is poiema, which means creation or work—we are God’s craftsmanship. He fashioned us into the kind of creatures who are able to do good work. Our good works are never at the front end, but they most certainly are at the back end. Work is not a curse. The curse affects work, but work remains a gift from a gracious God. We were created for work, and we were created for work in an astoundingly fruitful world. In short, the grace of God leads to salvation and salvation leads to good works. As we consider this, we ought not to limit the phrase “good works” to helping little old ladies across the street or volunteering at soup kitchens. Those are included, certainly, but good wor...

We can’t throw our hearts away. We can’t get a new heart, or at least we cannot get a new heart on our own. If I were to make a decision to throw my old heart away, that decision would have to be made by my old heart. And if my old heart could do something as wonderful as throwing my old heart away, what is the need for a new heart?

God has to give us a heart that is capable of being rightly related to Him in the presence of things that seem to beckon us to be wrongly related to Him.

When Noah worked the wood with tools, he was doing the same thing that Jesus did millennia later in his father’s shop. And the two of them together were doing the same thing some other carpenter was doing when he fashioned the cross upon which Jesus was going to be crucified. They were all doing the same thing—working with wood—and that thing they were doing tells us nothing about the sinfulness of the activity or not. In order to evaluate a tool, we have to account for the telos, the end, the purpose. Hammers are used to build both brothels and barns.

And so we should define a tool in this way: something that is not part of a man’s body which makes something that the man wants to do possible or easier.

Tools enable us to widen our reach. Tools make it possible for our radius of fruitfulness (now there is a phrase for the ages) to extend much farther than it otherwise would.

So when Adam found the beehive-knocking-down stick, he was wealthier than he was before. When a man purchases an app for ninety-nine cents, he is wealthier than he was before. Tools are technology, and technology is a form of wealth.

This will be developed more fully as we continue, but what this means is that we should regard our tools the same way we regard our money—with grateful suspicion. Or perhaps, on alternating weeks, with suspicious gratitude. This ha...

Our first parents were clothed to cover the shamefulness of their nakedness, but we do not need to assume that clothes would never have been developed in a world apart from sin. Presumably there would have been some hikes that required shoes, and some temperatures that required warmth, and other occasions which would require majesty and glory. So, working outward, the first line of media would be clothing.

We ought not to be thrown by the fact that we even think using language. And this fact should tell us that we were created for community.

The theological aspect is found in the reflection that all of this appears to be a design feature. Such things do not get in the way of our essential, interconnected humanness, but rather express our essential, interconnected humanness.

I think it is plain that God intended for us to eat the meat of the coconut, which means getting the coconut cracked open.

a right recognition of the inescapability of media helps us to understand that when a man buys a tool belt and fills it up, he is doing something that in principle pleases God. This is what he was created to do.

Enjoy your life, the one Christ has given you. And it is not possible to do this without enjoying Christ Himself.

We do not have pastors and evangelists as hired guns to do all the evangelism for us. They are trained and equipped so that they can prepare God’s people for works of service (Eph. 4:12). The saints are to do the work of ministry, although not at the same level as someone gifted or trained. But all of us are involved and engaged. And to be honest, how much training does it take to share or retweet something?

It is not a matter of this technique or that one, this social media trick or that one, but rather experiencing the presence of Christ in your life and communicating that. Who is the Lord Jesus? Who is this King of glory? He is, among many other things, the Lord of the Internet. His lordship and His offered forgiveness should therefore be proclaimed there. Why would it not be? Is the world there? Do unforgiven men and women spend a lot of time there?

So, again, what is media? I said earlier that media includes our clothes, other people, tools (especially tools for communication), and infrastructure. These are all means through which Christians communicate—first with God, then with the other saints, and then with unbelievers. Respectively, we pray through Christ, we have fellowship in Christ, and we proclaim Christ. What do we use as we do all these things? We use, among other things, ink, newsprint, microphones, email, toner, power point, algorithms, video clips, all of which are made out of molecules. They are t...

There has never been a time when Simple Simon couldn’t go to the fair.

We have to trust God for the future, always. If we try to control the future because it makes us nervous, we will only succeed in achieving the disasters we fear.

The future, like salvation, is the gift of God, and it must be apprehended by faith alone.

If we resist the temptation to meddle, if we let the free market just run, we will find that the zippers improve over time. They had better. And this is not a form of idolatry called “trusting the free market,” or some abstraction called “capitalism.” To speak about markets, or Adam Smith’s invisible hand, is to use a form of shorthand. When we speak about the law of supply and demand (outside the control of any human agency), we are talking about the Author of that law, and of others. (I refer to the law of gravity, for example, or the three laws of motion.) In other words, the free market does not decide the price of the new zippers. That decision is made by the Lord Jesus.

All of it is personal.

We demonstrate that we understand this by expressing our gratitude for God’s past goodness to us and by trusting Him for His future goodness. As I said, one necessary aspect of that trust is the refusal to try to control the future through utopian schemes. God will provide.

If slipshod work is allowed to fail, then quality work will remain.

But for Christians who want to be faithful in their work, their internal motivation will also contribute to the quality of the work.

We are to put our hand to the work, doing the best we can with it, and we are to keep...

“Do you see a man skillful in his work? He will stand before kings; he will not stand before obscure men” (Prov. 22:29, esv). Notice how this works. What happens in the future—the standing before kings part—is in the hands of God. My work is in the hands of God also, but in a different sense (Eph. 2:10). So my responsibility is, so to speak, whatever is in front of me, there on my workbench or desk or counter. I should do a first-rate job with that, and other things will fall into place. And as they fall into place...

God gives us the wealth that we will be tempted to put in place of Him. When God does this, we may show ourselves ingrates by turning away from Him, wealth in hand, or by throwing the wealth to the ground in front of Him. The technophile just assumes that man is the measure of all things, and he plumps his resume in order to get a job with Google, so that he too may become one of the lords of the earth. The technophobe just memorizes the poetry of Wendell Berry, and yearns for the days of yesterday when all our food was eked out under a hot sun by a slow mule and a picturesque peasant staggering behind it. Both are forms of ingratitude; both are grotesque. The only obedient response is to accept that wealth as the gift of God that it is, and to keep it in its proper creaturely place.

Although there is a bias toward sin in the possession of such blessings, it is important to emphasize by means of reiteration that sin is not resident within the things themselves. In this respect, it is like the old covenant—God finds fault with the people (Heb. 8:7–8). There is no sin in immunizations, in iPhones, in Google searches, in air travel, or in Lasik eye surgery. To the extent it is progress, it is the result of God’s kindness as mediated through our culture as fruit of the gospel.

Now, Americans are bottom line people, and we like to check how the Dow is doing, and what the GDP has been up to lately. And so here is the takeaway cash value to this particular point: In the long run, pragmatism doesn’t work. Focusing on the GDP alone is bad for the GDP. It does not profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul, and there is an additional sting when he then loses the world too. Whatever you worship in place of God is another thing you lose. Whatever you surrender gladly to Him is returned to you, pressed down, shaken, and running over.

There is not one blessing that we enjoy that was not given to us by the hand of Jesus Christ. If we insist on ignoring His lordship, His blood, His authority, and His kindness, then the time is coming, and now is, when He will chastise us by taking it all away. If we seek first the Kingdom, then other things will be added. If we don’t acknowledge Him, worship Him, or bow down before Him, He takes away that which was blocking the view, which in our case is all our stuff.

The first step toward genuinely productive work is to make it a point to work coram Deo, in the presence of God.