God’s Vision for Work
I want to begin tonight by being transparent with you guys. I am not an authority on work. I do not have it all figured out. I want to start by echoing what the Apostle Paul says in Philippians 3,
“Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect…”
What we talk about tonight is not something I have in full that I’m offering to you.
“…but I press on to make it my own…”
But I want it, that is God’s vision for my work as a redeemed human in this life.
“…because Christ Jesus has made me his own…”
This is the great “because” — because of Jesus, because he is real, and because he has made us his very own, called us his brothers and sisters, called us his friends, invited us into his grand redemptive work in the universe, we have strength and power to carry on. When we stumble and fall, he holds our hand. When we grow weary, he encourages us onward.
“Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own…”
Back to these concepts we’ll talk about tonight, again, I have not fully applied all of the gospel implications of work to every corner of my heart.
“…but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead…”
Not being enslaved to the mistakes and failures of my past that have been confessed and forgiven by our King.
“I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”
The upward call of God in Christ Jesus. That’s an important line. The call of God. Has anyone heard of work being described as a “calling?” We’ll talk tonight about what God’s calling on our lives means in regards to our work, and what He is calling us into. We are going on this journey together. And like pastor Jonathan reminded us a couple weeks ago in his sermon on that passage: We aren’t there yet. We keep pressing on. And we were made for this.
We’ll start tonight with how God created and intended work for us as humans, then we’ll zoom in on what God’s calling means for us as individuals, and finish by fleshing out how we can glorify God in our daily realities at work today. But first, perhaps it will be helpful to give you a bit of context on my work career so you understand where I’m coming from.
My day job for the past 15 or so years has been in the secular world.
My dad was in sales for 30 years, I never thought I’d do the same thing as him but lo and behold I loved my business classes in college. I majored in marketing at the University of Minnesota, interned at Target in 2009, and started at the corporate office in 2010. My first role there was slinging purchase orders and allocating inventory across the 26 distribution centers and 1800 stores for sunscreen and body lotion. Dream job! I moved around at Target, eventually hitting Toilet Paper, Produce, and Grocery in general. I got recruited by some former colleagues that had joined a startup out in Los Angeles, and I made the jump to selling to Target, Walmart, and Amazon. That was a wild ride, but the Lord led me to meet my current boss — a believer and small business owner who runs an agency that helps brands get into Target and Amazon. And that’s what I’m doing today.
In addition to Scripture, tonight I’ll be drawing on a few of my favorite guides on this journey of work:
First, Tim Keller in his excellent book, “Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work.” I would highly, highly recommend it.
Second, Os Guinness (the great-great-great-grandson of the Dublin brewer Arthur Guinness) is an English author and theologian who wrote a helpful book on calling and vocation titled simply “The Call.”
And finally, one of my favorite John Piper books, “Don’t Waste Your Life” — especially chapter 8, “Making Much of Christ from 8 to 5.” We’ll reference these as we move through tonight. But first, let’s go to the Bible.
The Origins of Work
Let’s start tonight going back to the beginning. We see work come into God’s plan in the very first chapters of the very first book of the Bible. Genesis chapter 2:1-3,
“Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.”
This is a big deal. The very creation of the universe by God himself is described as his work. God initiates the story of the world through his word, in his work. Keller says it like this:
“In the beginning then, God worked. Work was not a necessary evil that came into the picture later, or something human beings were created to do but that was beneath the great God himself. No, God worked for the sheer joy of it. Work could not have a more exalted inauguration.”
While we have our share of issues with work now, it is critical to remember this grand storyline of Scripture and where it begins. But God doesn’t just create the world and stop working. There are three major categories of God’s work that we see in the first few chapters of Genesis:
He creates.
He cares for his creation.
He commissions us as humans to continue his work.
We’ve covered how Scripture talks about creation as God’s work. But moving on in chapter 2, verse 7,
“then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. 8 And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.”
So God continues his work by caring for his creation. After forming him, God breathes into Adam’s lungs the breath of life, giving him life and keeping him alive. And then he plants him a garden. And just a few verses later, we see God provide a wife, a great helper, for Adam. But to help him do what?
That brings us to the third form of God’s work we see early on here. He commissions us as humans to carry on his work. In Genesis 2:15, we read,
“The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”
In the very beginning, God calls Adam to work and keep the garden.
He was to enter into the work that God had began in creating, cultivating, and keeping. And God makes the commission even broader, giving what is called the cultural mandate to both Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28:
“And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”
So God calls humanity to do two things: fill the earth, and subdue it. Filling the earth is not simply about multiplication and procreation but civilization, developing and building a society. God gives a different charge to humanity than he does to the animals. He simply says “let them multiply.” But humanity is to fill the earth with purpose, with intention. But God also calls us to subdue the earth. Another word for this would be “rule” the earth, as God’s image bearers. Keller says,
“God owns the world, but he has put it under our care to cultivate it. The word subdue indicates that even in its original unfilled form, God made the world to need work.”
I want to read an extended quote from Keller here, because I think it is incredibly helpful in regards to what this commissioning towards cultivation looks like on the ground. Keller says,
If we are to be God’s image-bearers with regard to creation, then we will carry on his pattern of work. His world is not hostile, so that it needs to be beaten down like an enemy. Rather, its potential is undeveloped, so it needs to be cultivated like a garden. … we are to be gardeners who take an active stance toward their charge. They do not leave the land as it is. … They dig up the ground and rearrange it with a goal in mind: to rearrange the raw material of the garden so that it produces food, flowers, and beauty. And that is the pattern for all work. It is creative and assertive. It 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.
This pattern is found in all kinds of work… 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.”
Building upon that, I want you to think about your own work. Can you identify the seeds of God’s cultural mandate in forming, filling, and subduing in your tasks and objectives? How are you joining in God’s pattern for work?
Let me give you an example. For the past five years, my primary work has been helping companies sell products on Amazon. There are a couple angles I can look at my work through the lens of God’s mandate for creative cultivation. We have the raw materials of a particular product, let’s say a spin mop or an above-ground pool or a ceramic box cutter. We have the product itself, perhaps some pictures of it, and some words that describe it. Our job is to take those raw materials and rearrange and emphasize them and upload it on Amazon’s site in order to provide the best and most accurate description of it so that people that need a particular product to solve a problem or satisfy a need can find it and fully understand what they are buying. And we do the daily farming of planting new seeds, launching new items, and helping them grow. But there’s also the question of how that work gets done, which is the second angle through which I can look at my job. And that angle is the people — my team! We have 12 people that work at our small company, and perhaps the most important part of my work is how I organize, coach, and arrange our people so that they are in the best possible role that fits their God-given skills and talents so that they can flourish as they complete the work.
So we’ve tasted some of the broad vision for God’s sweeping plan for work for humanity before the fall. But we can also zoom in further, elsewhere in Scripture, to see God’s plan for us as individuals in relation to our work and think more specifically about the concept of calling.
God’s Calling in Our Work
Let’s go to the New Testament.
1 Corinthians 7:17,
“Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him. This is my rule in all the churches… so, brothers, in whatever condition each was called, there let him remain with God.”
In this chapter, Paul is encouraging the believers at the church in Corinth that they do not have to leave whatever situation they found themselves in prior to becoming a believer — whether in marriage, in their vocation, or their social status — in order to glorify God.
In this text, Paul is not referring only to ministry jobs, but “common social and economic tasks, and naming them God’s callings and assignments.” This is a profound truth. Most importantly, God calls us out of the darkness of sin and death and into his marvelous light of forgiveness and freedom in the gospel of his beloved Son. But then we see that even in our seemingly ordinary vocations, Paul can say,
“let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him.”
Let each person — this is an individual, unique story that God has crafted for each of us. It reminds me of Ephesians 2:10 where Paul says,
“we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
God is the ultimate author and worker, but he creates us anew in Jesus to continue in these good works, and he prepared specific ones for each of us beforehand to lead the life that the Lord has assigned to us specifically. It’s a profound thing for us to remember, on our Monday mornings or Thursday afternoons, that God has assigned us and called us to our vocation. That doesn’t mean we can never change jobs or careers (remember Jesus calling his disciples, hard at work at their vocations as fishermen or tax collectors, to leave and follow him), but that we should view them as much more than simply a career choice on our part.
Os Guinness talks about how different this view of calling is from the typical ways that people define their personal identity and purpose in our culture today. There are four primary categories that modern people use to attempt to define personal identity. Each of them start with ‘C.’
The first is what Guinness calls “constrained to be” where we explain human individuality in general terms (personality profiles, generational stereotypes, regional caricatures, etc). We put ourselves in a box. I’m an ENTP, I’m a Midwesterner, a Millenial, my dad was a salesman, etc. Your vocation is determined and limited by the expectations placed upon you.
But second, you have the opposite trend, which seems to be far more popular and gaining steam. This could be termed, “courage to be.” In this view, you can be anything you want to be. You buck against all stereotypes or definitions. A proponent of this philosophy, Freidrich Neitzche would say “we start from the abyss of a world without meaning, and by sheer will power, create our own meaning out of nothing.” Many of you have likely seen the folly of this perspective if you’ve ever tried to play it out completely. You eventually find that we cannot be literally anything we want. As much as I may want, I cannot play center in the NBA. I can’t be a world-class painter. As much as Chewbacca may want to be a news anchor, he’s just going to be really hard to understand.
Third, we have the view that our purpose is “constituted to be.” Pablo Picasso said, “Everyone’s nature is determined in advance.” This view values highly the themes of Fate and Destiny, and is common in New Age thinking. What will be, will be, and our agency is removed.
But wandering through the wilderness of secular definitions on our purpose, we arrive at the oasis of being “called to be.” As it says in Isaiah 43,
Now thus says the Lord, he who created you [think: constituted], he who formed you [hear: constrained, shaped], O Israel: “Fear not [have courage!], for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine [you have been uniquely called by the King of the Universe!].
Regarding the concept of biblical calling, Keller says
“We can recover the idea that work is a vocation or calling, a contribution to the good of all and not merely a means to one’s own advancement, to one’s self-fulfillment and power. Remember that something can be a vocation or calling only if some other party calls you to it, and you do it for their sake rather than for your own. Our daily work can be a calling only if it is reconciled as God’s assignment to serve others. And that is exactly how the Bible teaches us to view work.”
That gives us another question to ponder. What changes could you expect to see in your daily work if you began to consider it more and more as God’s assignment to serve others?
About two years into my working career, I found myself as the Inventory Planning Analyst for Toilet Paper & Paper Towels at Target. It was one of the more stressful jobs I’ve been in because pretty much every week someone was mad at me. Either I had not ordered enough Charmin or Cottonelle across all the Target stores, and there were empty shelves and perhaps poopy butts, or I had ordered a bit too much and the distribution centers were swimming in pallets stacked to the ceiling, completely overflowing. My job was measured precisely: keep the stores in stock 99% of the time (they called that being green), but don’t spend more than your purchasing budget for the month. I remember I used to literally wake up at night thinking about what color my in stock metric would be on Monday morning, because it would change my whole week. In those days, it was very easy for me to forget what my true calling was in that role. My boss would essentially tell me my calling was to hit the numbers, and forget the rest. But God called me to love and serve others through my work. On the days I was able to re-frame and re-orient my heart to remember that Jesus had placed me there, on purpose, to love and help my coworkers with what they needed, and that my goal was to make sure people could simply buy toilet paper when they needed it from Target, I experienced peace and joy in my work. And not surprisingly, I could do much better work when operating from a place of responding to God’s calling versus a frantic people-pleasing or success-chasing mindset.
So we’ve talked about the biblical origins of work and God’s calling in our specific work. Now I want to close tonight by asking practically, how can we glorify God on the ground in our daily work? For help here, I want to draw out four very helpful truths that John Piper identifies in Scripture in his book “Don’t Waste Your Life.”
1. We can make much of Jesus in our work through the fellowship that we enjoy with him throughout the day in all our work.
Let me also state this negatively. I fail to make much of Jesus in my job when I rely on my own strength and understanding for each task or obstacle, and forget his promises to me.
Back in 1 Corinthians 7, down in verse 24, Paul encourages us,
“in whatever condition each was called, there let him remain with God,”
We can go to work with God, in fellowship with Him, in dependence on Him. Jesus is real, and He is with us. As Piper says,
“we enjoy God’s being there for us as we listen to his voice, and talk to him, and cast all our burdens on him, and experience his guidance and care.”
One great way to apply this is to bring specific promises with you to work, either written down or memorized, that you can refer to throughout the day and hear the Lord speak to you.
Maybe you need encouragement:
“Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand” (Isa. 41:10).
Perhaps you need the reminder that the challenges of the afternoon are not too hard for him to manage:
“Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh. Is anything too hard for me?” (Jer. 32:27).
Maybe you need guidance:
“I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you” (Ps. 32:8).
God delights in being trusted in and valued, and so we cannot waste a workday that we approach in this way.
2. We make much of Jesus in our work when it confirms and enhances the portrait of Jesus’ glory that people hear in the spoken gospel.
Said negatively, I fail to make much of Jesus in my work when it detracts from or confuses the portrait of Christ’s glory that people hear in the spoken gospel.
In Titus 2, Paul is talking about the way bondservants do their work. He calls them “to be well-pleasing, not argumentative, not pilfering, but showing all good faith, so that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior” (Titus 2:9–10).
This is a concept worth thinking about. The way that we do our work can “adorn” the gospel. Surely, it is not the gospel. No one will be saved by us doing good work. But, when coupled with others knowing that we are Christians and what we believe, doing excellent work in the right way (showing good faith, seeking to serve and love others, not being overly argumentative, not stealing, working hard) can adorn the gospel. It removes stumbling blocks and barriers for others to believe. If our work is adorning the gospel, the last thing we want is for people to associate Jesus with a lazy or half-hearted worker.
3. We make much of Jesus in our work by earning money with the desire to use our money generously to make others joyful in Jesus.
Or negatively, I fail to make much of Christ in my work when I seek to earn money to make myself more comfortable or feel more important.
In Ephesians 4:28, Paul says,
“Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.”
Piper says there are three options here:
“You can steal to have. Or you can work to have. Or you can work to have to give. When the third option comes from joy in God’s goodness, it makes him look great in the world.”
4. We make much of Jesus in our work by treating the web of relationships it creates as a gift of God to be loved by sharing the gospel and by practical deeds of help.
And negatively, I fail to make much of Christ in my work when I treat the relationships it creates as tools to be used or distractions to be avoided.
“You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pet. 2:9).
It is overly reductionistic to say that the only way we can glorify God in our work is through sharing the gospel. But we dare not make the opposite error and forget that we have an incredible opportunity in the network of relationships that God gives us through our work to actually speak the gospel. As 1 Peter says, this is part of our core identity now as God’s people: “that we may proclaim the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness and into his marvelous light.” That brings us to another question: Who is close to you [through your work] but far from God that you could be praying for, investing in, and inviting into your life?
I have failed in this countless times, but let me close with a story. When I worked at Target several years ago, I was tasked with training in a new guy on the team, Alex. He was really struggling, rubbing people the wrong way, and frustrated. I had to give him very honest direct feedback. I found out one of his best friends from high school had committed suicide, bringing up thoughts about death. I shared my testimony with him… I told him about how Jesus had changed my life. He said “that sounds really good. Can we talk more about that?” So we studied John together for several weeks and he started coming to church with me.
It doesn’t always happen like that, but God is at work in our work in a thousand ways. Let’s remember where we began tonight. Because Christ Jesus has made me his own, in that acceptance we can press on for the upward call of God on our lives. We can join in God’s pattern for work and remember that God worked for the sheer joy of it in creation, and He is still working. We can respond to God’s calling in our vocations, embracing His assignment to love and serve others. And we can make much of Jesus in our work in several practical ways. We are not there yet. But we keep pressing on. Because we were made for this.
Let’s pray.
God, I thank you for these brothers and sisters here tonight. I thank you for the skills and abilities and opportunities you have given them. We thank you for the good gift of work. And we praise you that we truly are your workmanship — that you are working on us, in us, and through us in our vocations. And I pray, Father, that you make us worthy of your calling and fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by your power so that the name of Jesus would be glorified. We humbly ask despite our failings and stumbling, that you would do much good in these Twin Cities and beyond through the vocations of those in this room tonight. We need you. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, Amen.
