Every Good Endeavor Quotes

“A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it for them rather than for yourself. And so our work can be a calling only if it is reimagined as a mission of service to something beyond merely our own interests. Thinking of work mainly as a means of self-fulfillment and self-realization slowly crushes a person.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World

“Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavours, even the best, will come to naught.

Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavour, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God's calling, can matter forever.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

“Our daily work can be a calling only if it is reconceived as God’s assignment to serve others.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

“The material creation was made by God to be developed, cultivated, and cared for in an endless number of ways through human labor. But even the simplest of these ways is important. Without them all, human life cannot flourish.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World

“we are continuing God’s work of forming, filling, and subduing. Whenever we bring order out of chaos, whenever we draw out creative potential, whenever we elaborate and “unfold” creation beyond where it was when we found it, we are following God’s pattern of creative cultural development.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World

“If God’s purpose for your job is that you serve the human community, then the way to serve God best is to do the job as well as it can be done.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

“So when we say that Christians work from a gospel worldview, it does not mean that they are constantly speaking about Christian teaching in their work. Some people think of the gospel as something we are principally to “look at” in our work. This would mean that Christian musicians should play Christian music, Christian writers should write stories about conversion, and Christian businessmen and -women should work for companies that make Christian-themed products and services for Christian customers. Yes, some Christians in those fields would sometimes do well to do those things, but it is a mistake to think that the Christian worldview is operating only when we are doing such overtly Christian activities. Instead, think of the gospel as a set of glasses through which you “look” at everything else in the world. Christian artists, when they do this faithfully, will not be completely beholden either to profit or to naked self-expression; and they will tell the widest variety of stories. Christians in business will see profit as only one of several bottom lines; and they will work passionately for any kind of enterprise that serves the common good. The Christian writer can constantly be showing the destructiveness of making something besides God into the central thing, even without mentioning God directly.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

“It (idolatry) means turning a good thing into an ultimate thing.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World

“Two things we want so desperately, glory and relationship, can coexist only in God.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World

“To practice Sabbath is a disciplined and faithful way to remember that you are not the one who keeps the world running, who provides for your family, not even the one who keeps your work projects moving forward.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World

“But in Genesis we see God as a gardener, and in the New Testament we see him as a carpenter. No task is too small a vessel to hold the immense dignity of work given by God.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

“Community service has become a patch for morality. You can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World

“the gospel also gives us new power for work by supplying us with a new passion and a deeper kind of rest.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

“all human work (especially excellent work), done by all people, as a channel of God’s love for his world. They will be able to appreciate and rejoice in their own work, whether it is prestigious or not, as well as in the skillful work of all other people, whether they believe or not. So this biblical conception of work—as a vehicle for God’s loving provision for the world”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

“What is the Christian understanding of work?. . . [It] is that work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties . . . the medium in which he offers himself to God.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

“In short, work—and lots of it—is an indispensable component in a meaningful human life. It is a supreme gift from God and one of the main things that gives our lives purpose. But it must play its proper role, subservient to God. It must regularly give way not just to work stoppage for bodily repair but also to joyful reception of the world and of ordinary life.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

“We are called to stand in for God here in the world, exercising stewardship over the rest of creation in his place as his vice regents. We share in doing the things that God has done in creation—bringing order out of chaos, creatively building a civilization out of the material of physical and human nature, caring for all that God has made. This is a major part of what we were created to be. . . . Work has dignity because it is something that God does and because we do it in God’s place, as his representatives.”
― Timothy J. Keller , Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World

“Becoming a Christian is a lot like moving to a new country; only it is more profound, because it gives us a new perspective on every culture, every worldview, and every field of work. In the long run, the gospel helps us see everything in a new light, but it takes time to grasp and incorporate this new information into how we live and pursue our vocations. And we can be sure that this ultimate learning experience will never truly end; we are told the angels themselves never tire of looking into the gospel to see new wonders (1 Peter 1:10–12).”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavour: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World

“Why do the Ten Commandments begin with a prohibition of idolatry? It is, Luther argued, because we never break the other commandments without breaking the first.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

“work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties . . . the medium in which he offers himself to God.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

“In her book Creed or Chaos?, Sayers addresses the traditional seven deadly sins, including acedia, which is often translated as “sloth.” But as Sayers explains it, that is a misnomer, because laziness (the way we normally define sloth) is not the real nature of this condition. Acedia, she says, means a life driven by mere cost-benefit analysis of “what’s in it for me.” She writes, “Acedia is the sin which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing and only remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

“Every artifact of human culture is a positive response to God's general revelation and simultaneously a rebellious assertion against His sovereign rule over us.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World

“Work done by non-Christians always contain some degree of God's common grace as well as the distortions of sin. Work done by Christians, even if it overtly names the name of Jesus is also to a significant degree distorted by sin.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World

“Work is so foundational to our makeup that it is one of the few things we can take in significant doses without harm. Indeed, the Bible does not say we should work one day and rest six or that work and rest should be balanced evenly but directs us to the opposite ratio. Leisure and pleasure are great goods, but we can take only so much of them.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World

“Freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, those that fit with the realities of our own nature and those of the world.32 So the commandments of God in the Bible”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

“Work is a major instrument of God’s providence; it is how he sustains the human world.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

“Nonetheless, Christians are equipped with an ethical compass and power of the gospel that can set us apart—sometimes sharply, sometimes subtly—from those around us. This is because biblical Christian faith gives us significant resources not present in other worldviews, which, if lived out, will differentiate believers in the workplace.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

“The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than alien intrusion of sin, as the villain.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World

“Work is not all there is to life. You will not have a meaningful life without work, but you cannot say that your work is the meaning of your life. If you make any work the purpose of your life—even if that work is church ministry—you create an idol that rivals God. Your relationship with God is the most important foundation for your life, and indeed it keeps all the other factors—work, friendships and family, leisure and pleasure—from becoming so important to you that they become addicting and distorted.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

“The foolish heart—blinded from reality because of its idols—does not learn from experience.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work