Every Good Endeavour

Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World

Timothy Keller

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781444745122
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In today's increasingly competitive and insecure economic environment, we often question the reason for work: why am I doing this? Why is it so hard? And what can I do about it? Work may seem just a means to an end: we do it to earn the money to enjoy life outside the workplace. Here, Timothy Keller argues that God's plan is radically more ambitious: he actually created us to work. We are to work together to make the world a better place, to help each other, and so to find purpose for our lives. Our faith should enhance our work, and our work should develop our faith.With deep insight, Timothy Keller draws on essential and relevant biblical wisdom to address our questions about work. There is grace available if we have taken the wrong attitude, idolising money and using our careers to glorify ourselves rather than God. This book provides the foundations for a work-life balance where we can thrive both personally and professionally. Keller shows how through excellence, integrity, discipline, creativity and passion in the workplace we can impact society for good.Developing a better attitude to work releases us to serve others humbly, to worship God everyday, and leaves us deeply fulfilled.

PART ONE

God’s Plan for Work

ONE

The Design of Work

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 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. 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…. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

Genesis 2:1–3, 15 (ESV)

In the Beginning, There Was Work

The Bible begins talking about work as soon as it begins talking about anything—that is how important and basic it is. The author of the book of Genesis describes God’s creation of the world as work.²⁰ In fact, he depicts the magnificent project of cosmos invention within a regular workweek of seven days.²¹ And then he shows us human beings working in paradise. This view of work—connected with divine, orderly creation and human purpose—is distinct among the great faiths and belief systems of the world.

The creation narrative in the book of Genesis is unique among ancient accounts of origins. Many cultures had stories that depicted the beginning of the world and human history as the result of a struggle between warring cosmic forces. In the Babylonian creation story the Enuma Elish, the god Marduk overcomes the goddess Tiamat and forges the world out of her remains. In this and similar accounts, the visible universe was an uneasy balance of powers in tension with one another.²² In the Bible, however, creation is not the result of a conflict, for God has no rivals. Indeed, all the powers and beings of heaven and earth are created by him and dependent on him.²³ Creation, then, is not the aftermath of a battle but the plan of a craftsman. God made the world not as a warrior digs a trench but as an artist makes a masterpiece.

The Greeks’ account of creation includes the idea of successive “ages of mankind” beginning with a golden age. During this age human beings and gods lived on the earth together in harmony. This sounds at first vaguely like the story of the garden of Eden, but one dissimilarity is very telling. The poet Hesiod tells us that neither humans nor gods in the golden age had to do any work. In that original paradise the earth simply provided food in abundance.²⁴ The book of Genesis could not have been more different. Repeatedly the first chapters of the book of Genesis describe God at “work,” using the Hebrew mlkh, the word for ordinary human work. As one scholar put it, it is wholly “unexpected that the extraordinary divine activity involved in creating heaven and earth should be so described.”²⁵

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.

The Forms of God’s Work

It is remarkable that in Chapter 1 of the book of Genesis, God not only works but finds delight in it. “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good … the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array” (Genesis 1:31; 2:1). God finds what he has done beautiful. He stands back, takes in “all that he has made,” and says, in effect, “That’s good!” Like all good and satisfying work, the worker sees himself in it. “The harmony and perfection of the completed heavens and earth express more adequately the character of their creator than any of the separate components can.”²⁶

The second chapter of Genesis goes on to show that God works not only to create but also to care for his creation. This is what theologians call the work of “providence.” God creates human beings and then works for them as their Provider. He forms a man (Genesis 2:7), plants a garden for him and waters it (Genesis 2:6, 8), and fashions a wife for him (Genesis 2:21–22). The rest of the Bible tells us that God continues this work as Provider, caring for the world by watering and cultivating the ground (Psalm 104:10–22), giving food to all he has made, giving help to all who suffer, and caring for the needs of every living thing (Psalm 145:14–16).

Finally, we see God not only working, but commissioning workers to carry on his work. In Genesis chapter 1, verse 28 he tells human beings to “fill the earth and subdue it.” The word “subdue” indicates that, though all God had made was good, it was still to a great degree undeveloped. God left creation with deep untapped potential for cultivation that people were to unlock through their labor.²⁷ In Genesis chapter 2, verse 15 (ESV) he puts human beings into the garden to “work it and keep it.” The implication is that, while God works for us as our Provider, we also work for him. Indeed, he works through us. Psalm 127, verse 1—“Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain”—indicates that God is building the house (providing for us) through the builders. As Martin Luther argued, Psalm 145 says that God feeds every living thing, meaning he is feeding us through the labor of farmers and others.²⁸

The Goodness of Our Work

The book of Genesis leaves us with a striking truth—work was part of paradise. One biblical scholar summed it up: “It is perfectly clear that God’s good plan always included human beings working, or, more specifically, living in the constant cycle of work and rest.”²⁹ Again, the contrast with other religions and cultures could not be sharper. Work did not come in after a golden age of leisure. It was part of God’s perfect design for human life, because we were made in God’s image, and part of his glory and happiness is that he works, as does the Son of God, who said, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working” (John 5:17).

The fact that God put work in paradise is startling to us because we so often think of work as a necessary evil or even punishment. Yet we do not see work brought into our human story after the fall of Adam, as part of the resulting brokenness and curse; it is part of the blessedness of the garden of God. Work is as much a basic human need as food, beauty, rest, friendship, prayer, and sexuality; it is not simply medicine but food for our soul. Without meaningful work we sense significant inner loss and emptiness. People who are cut off from work because of physical or other reasons quickly discover how much they need work to thrive emotionally, physically, and spiritually.

Our friends Jay and Barbara Belding, entrepreneurs in suburban Philadelphia, recognized this need even among developmentally disabled adults. While working as a special education teacher, Jay was disconcerted by the vocational prospects of his students once they completed school. Traditional vocational training and employment programs often had insufficient work and therefore extensive downtime with no wages. In 1977 Jay and Barbara established Associated Production Services, an enterprise providing quality training and employment for this population. Today the company trains 480 people who are engaged in a variety of labor-intensive packaging and assembly work for a number of consumer products companies at four facilities. Jay focuses on providing tools and systems that ensure quality and increase efficiencies and output; this helps create a culture of success for the company and the people they serve. The Beldings are thrilled and grateful to have found a practical, sustainable way to meet their employees’ intrinsic need to be productive: “Our people want to participate in the ‘work-a-day’ world; to feel positive about themselves; and to help pay their own way.” Their employees are finally able to respond fully to a vital aspect of their design as workers and creators.

Work is so foundational to our makeup, in fact, 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. If you ask people in nursing homes or hospitals how they are doing, you will often hear that their main regret is that they wish they had something to do, some way to be useful to others. They feel they have too much leisure and not enough work. The loss of work is deeply disturbing because we were designed for it. This realization injects a deeper and far more positive meaning into the common view that people work in order to survive. According to the Bible, we don’t merely need the money from work to survive; we need the work itself to survive and live fully human lives.

The reasons for this are developed more fully in later chapters, but they include the fact that work is one of the ways we make ourselves useful to others, rather than just living a life for ourselves. Also, work is also one of the ways we discover who we are, because it is through work that we come to understand our distinct abilities and gifts, a major component in our identities.³⁰ So author Dorothy Sayers could write, “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.”³¹

The Freedom of Our Work

To see work in our “DNA,” our design, is part of what it means to grasp the distinct Christian understanding of freedom. Modern people like to see freedom as the complete absence of any constraints. But think of a fish. Because a fish absorbs oxygen from water, not air, it is free only if it is restricted to water. If a fish is “freed” from the river and put out on the grass to explore, its freedom to move and soon even to live is destroyed. The fish is not more free, but less free, if it cannot honor the reality of its nature. The same is true with airplanes and birds. If they violate the laws of aerodynamics, they will crash into the ground. But if they follow them, they will ascend and soar. The same is true in many areas of life: 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 are a means of liberation, because through them God calls us to be what he built us to be. Cars work well when you follow the owner’s manual and honor the design of the car. If you fail to change the oil, no one will fine you or take you to jail; your car will simply break down because you violated its nature. You suffer a natural consequence. In the same way, human life works properly only when it is conducted in line with the “owner’s manual,” the commandments of God. If you disobey the commands, not only do you grieve and dishonor God, you are actually acting against your own nature as God designed you. When God speaks to disobedient Israel in Isaiah chapter 48, he says, “I am the Lord your God, who teaches you what is best for you, who directs you in the way you should go. If only you had paid attention to my commands, your peace would have been like a river, your well-being like the waves of the sea” (Isaiah 48:17–18).

And so it is with work, which (in rhythm with rest) is one of the Ten Commandments. “Six days you shall labor and do all your work” (Exodus 20:9). In the beginning God created us to work, and now he calls us and directs us unambiguously to live out that part of our design. This is not a burdensome command; it is an invitation to freedom.

The Limits of All Work

Nevertheless, it is meaningful that God himself rested after work (Genesis 2:2). Many people make the mistake of thinking that work is a curse and that something else (leisure, family, or even “spiritual” pursuits) is the only way to find meaning in life. The Bible, as we have seen and will see, exposes the lie of this idea. But it also keeps us from falling into the opposite mistake, namely, that work is the only important human activity and that rest is a necessary evil—something we do strictly to “recharge our batteries” in order to continue to work. We look to what we know about God to make this case. He did not need any restoration of his strength—and yet he rested on the seventh day (Genesis 2:1–3). As beings made in his image, then we can assume that rest, and the things you do as you rest, are good and life-giving in and of themselves. 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.

Josef Pieper, a twentieth-century German Catholic philosopher, wrote a famous essay called “Leisure, the Basis of Culture.” Pieper argues that leisure is not the mere absence of work, but an attitude of mind or soul in which you are able to contemplate and enjoy things as they are in themselves, without regard to their value or their immediate utility. The work-obsessed mind—as in our Western culture—tends to look at everything in terms of efficiency, value, and speed. But there must also be an ability to enjoy the most simple and ordinary aspects of life, even ones that are not strictly useful, but just delightful. Surprisingly, even the reputedly dour Reformer John Calvin agrees. In his treatment of the Christian life, he warns against valuing things only for their utility:

Did God create food only to provide for necessity [nutrition] and not also for delight and good cheer? So too the purpose of clothing apart from necessity [protection] was comeliness and decency. In grasses, trees, and fruits, apart from their various uses, there is beauty of appearance and pleasantness of fragrance…. Did he not, in short, render many things attractive to us, apart from their necessary use?³³

In other words, we are to look at everything and say something like:

All things bright and beautiful; all creatures great and small

All things wise and wonderful—the Lord God made them all.³⁴

Unless we regularly stop work and take time to worship (which Pieper considers one of the chief activities within “leisure”) and ...