Ploductivity: A Practical Theology of Work & Wealth

by Douglas Wilson

To whatever extent it is not a blessing, it is not progress. If it is progress, then we must thank God for it—He is the one who gives us the power to get wealth, and there is no appropriate or safe response to that wealth other than complete and simple gratitude.

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.

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.

We cannot have the blessings of God if we hate the God who alone can give these blessings.

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

In Scripture we are told to pray without ceasing (1 Thess. 5:17). We are told that whatever we do, down to the eating and drinking, we are to do it to the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31). And we are told to present our bodies as living sacrifices to God, holy and acceptable (Rom. 12:1–2).

Now if my body is a living sacrifice, this means that everything it rests upon is an altar. The car I drive is an altar, the bed I sleep in is an altar, and the desk where I work is an altar. Everything is offered to God, everything ascends to Him as a sweet-smelling savor. Faith is the fire of the altar, and it consumes the whole burnt offering, the ascension offering. What ascends to the Lord is the sweet savor of our good works: “So as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God” (Col. 1:10, esv). Bearing fruit in every good work is fully pleasing to Him.

He gives us the works that are intended to return to Him. “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10). Those works include, but are not limited to, writing code, making birdhouses, repairing a carburetor, outlining a novel, or manufacturing microchips.

what constitutes a truly productive person is the fact that they are laboring under the blessing of God.

Living in the presence of God means that you are living in such a way as to invite or seek His favor.

Would you rather work hard for seven unblessed days, or work hard for six blessed days? Would you rather try to live on a hundred percent of an unblessed income or on ninety percent of a blessed income?

Pray that God establish the work of your hands, and not just the work of your heart. This is not a facile “health and wealth” approach because God is not to be treated as some kind of a vending machine. God’s blessing includes both temporal victories and temporal defeats, and evangelical faith knows how to handle all of it.

At the same time, although the faith can thrive in times of persecution, we are not to pray for persecution. We are instructed to pray for quiet and peaceable lives (1 Tim. 2:2).

A Christian should be able to be content whether he is out in the cold, or inside by the fire (Phil. 4:12). But even so, everything else being equal, the apostle Paul knew enough to come in out of the rain. We know which way to go, which way to pray, which direction to set our sights as we work.

Finitude is one of our glories. God will not say well done to any human whose work is the size of three galaxies. He will say well done to pipsqueaks with a couple of fists full of nanoworks.

Too many people confound our finitude with our sinfulness, but the breach between us and God is one that was caused by our unholiness, not by our size. Before Adam sinned he was just as small as the day after he sinned, but he was still able to walk with God in the garden in the cool of the day. Our size is a feature, not a bug.

Remembering the finitude of your labors will keep you humble. Recognizing that your labors have a place in God’s cosmic intentions for the universe will keep you from thinking that your tiny labors are stupid labors. They are nothing of the kind. Your labors in the Lord are not in vain (1 Cor. 15:58).

The true Christian is characterized, not by a lack of desire, but rather through a desire that is calibrated to its appropriate object, which is ultimately Christ.

He enables forgiven sinners to attempt audacious things, and to do so without vainglory or lust for an ego shrine built in one’s own honor.

Setting ambitious goals is therefore a good thing, and determining whether or not we are desiring something sinful, or desiring it sinfully, is heart work. We do that heart work by praying to the Lord about it, by reading the Word faithfully, looking to be instructed, and by worshiping God together with His people, gathering regularly to be edified by Word and sacrament. Every week you place all your ambitions on His altar and watch them ascend to Heaven in a column of smoke. When you get to your office Monday morning, they will be there on your desk, cleansed and waiting for you.

The kind of ambition that wants to clamber over half-finished work in your initial radius of influence, in order to get that next promotion, is an ambition that is being driven by the wrong kind of motivation entirely. Do you see a man who excels in his work? He will stand before kings (Prov. 22:29).

Mastery is quite different from getting a promotion, which is often the result of mastery—but not always. Some want the results of mastery without all the tedious efforts that go into attaining to mastery.

Work for the work, not the award. Those who work for the work, and not the award, are—get this—more likely to win the award.

Another key to mastery is realizing that the key to originality is imitation.

Intensity is manifested when the deadline approaches and the manager of the project gets some lighter fluid, douses his hair with it, sets it ablaze, and runs around in tight little circles. Extension is the solution called “working late.” Intensity says that forty-eight hours of work needs to be crammed into a twenty-four-hour day. Extension says that work days need to be extended to fourteen hours instead of eight.

What this means is that productive work requires a rhythm, a metronome. Long distance runners settle into a pace. Rowers in crew fall into what they call “swing.” This action, performed at this pace, methodically and deliberately, will in fact get us where we are going.

Many people put off working on something until they have been able to “carve out” adequate time to work on it.

This is another way of saying that an awful lot of us waste an awful lot of time. We blow our fifteen-minute opportunities like they grew on trees.

You can walk farther than you can sprint.

The thing to take away is that brief but daily routines are capable of accumulating a large amount of whatever the work product might be.

But the Bible teaches that whenever a gift is given, there will immediately be a temptation arising in our hearts to steal the glory and gratitude that should go to God alone. That temptation will say, fundamentally, that we owe none of this to God, and that we did it all ourselves. That attitude is what we call the Enlightenment.

If it is a good thing, as my smartphone is a good thing, then God is to be thanked for it. If it is a sinful thing, like thinking that man does things he can’t ever do, then we should abandon our folly, repent of our sins, and return to the gospel