Ploductivity: A Practical Theology of Work & Wealth

by Douglas Wilson

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.

In the cosmic scheme of things, the work that is assigned to us, and which God has given us to do, is tiny. The work that we will do by the grace of God, and to which God will respond with “well done, good and faithful servant,” will be work that is teeny tiny.

He will say well done to pipsqueaks with a couple of fists full of nanoworks. We sometimes marvel at those dedicated engravers who can carve the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin, but we must always remember that our Creator put our whole planet on the head of a pin.

When God created ex nihilo, He was doing all the work. When we work as sub-creators, to use Tolkien’s word for it, we are dealing with pre-existent materials and processes.

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.

God created us for glory, and there is no way for us to find a switch that will turn that off. We are inveterate glory-seekers, and the thing that distinguishes a good man from a bad man is what he finds glorious—not whether he finds something glorious.

It is not a sin to pursue glory. It is not a sin to be ambitious for glory. It is actually a sin to surrender your glory.

But the actual problem is not that we desire, but that we desire the wrong things, or that we desire the right things wrongly. We are not supposed to love the world, or the things in it (1 John 2:15–16). We are not supposed to ask for good things wrongly, that we may spend them on our desires (James 4:3).

So the first step in achieving mastery is taking responsibility for the results. You should know what the best practices are. You should constantly be learning something fresh and new in your field. When something blows up, as it will invariably do sometimes in this fallen world, you communicate with your customers and your creditors, refusing to make them chase you. You tell the truth, and you do not resort to those evasive half-truths called excuses.

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

The third key to mastery is repetition.

When people do something over and over again—and this should not come as a surprise—they get good at it. But to some, this seems suspiciously like work.

But you likely have another spare fifteen minutes a day lying about, not to mention some other possible projects you have your eye on. Chip away at them. Do a little bit, and do not fall for the idea that unless you can pour yourself into something for half a year, there is no point doing it at all. And if you say that you could not possibly do anything like this without outlining the whole thing first, well, fine. Work on an outline for fifteen minutes a day.

I say this from experience. What plodding requires is predictability and routine. This is not a process that thrives in the midst of chaos.

As Mark Twain supposedly said, a classic is a book that nobody wants to read but everybody wants to have read.

The birth of the modern age, measured in terms of conveniences, technology, wealth, medical advances, and so on was largely a legacy of the Reformation. 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.

Jesus is the Lord of history, and this is why we don’t need to be afraid of Twitter. Or Facebook. Or teenagers typing with their thumbs. Jesus is the Lord of history, which is why we don’t need to worry about Google making us stupid.

am a man who has ten thousand servants in his pocket, and thousands more in my study and office, and every year that goes by I am learning how to put more of them to productive labor. For this I am most grateful.

The world, this world, is presently going where Jesus is taking it. So we should be wise, and stop worrying.

Part of being wise is that we do not forget the doctrine of sin. Sin is radical and deep, and capable of many cultural grotesqueries. We see them all the time, and we read about them all the time. Welcome to the spiritual war. Belief that we will win the war is not a denial of the reality of that war. My optimism is not of the kind that denies the existence of the battle. My optimism is of the kind that maintains that we are winning the battle.

And so here is my central thesis, stated yet again: technology in all its forms is a type of wealth. The Bible contains no warnings about technology as such, but is crammed with warnings about the bias of wealth.

Now some will object that the books I have cited are not by believers. And I will point out in reply that things have gotten really bad when unbelievers can see what Jesus is doing more accurately than the believers can. When unbelievers by common grace are reading history right side up, why should we reject that in favor of believers who are reading their Bible upside down?

My optimism about tools and technology is, at bottom, an optimism about the future history of the world. And that, in its turn, is an optimism that is grounded on the fact that at the darkest point of human history, God in the flesh was crucified by arrogant sinners, by all the important people. Three days after that, the Lord came back from the dead.

The mission given to the Lord Jesus was that of saving the world. And He has laid the foundation of that salvation in His death, burial, and resurrection, and in the two thousand years since that time, the Spirit He poured out on the Church has been working through all human cultures, the way leaven works through the loaf.

A truncated view of Christ’s lordship is one that limits it to His authority over my personal life. A person taking this view says, again rightly, that Christ cannot be received on an installment plan, first as Savior and then, five years later, as Lord. But even here, what is frequently being asserted is that Jesus needs to be Lord of a man’s life.

Jesus is already Lord of those who recognize it, and He is already Lord of those who refuse to recognize it. This means that the authority of Jesus Christ, right now and not later, currently extends over Facebook, Google, and Twitter. He is the Lord of all the ones and zeroes. He is the Lord of the microprocessor. He is the Lord of the dark web. He is the Lord of all silicon, and the sand it rode in on. He is the Lord of Amazon, and the Lord of that little indie bookstore around the corner. He is the Lord of all our military drones, and all our delivery drones. He is the Lord of all of our great ones, and He is the Lord of the municipal dogcatchers.