How Then Should We Work?

Chapter 1. The arena was packed with over 5,000 business people attending a one-day motivational conference. They would listen to some of today’s greatest inspirational speakers including General Colin Powell, Dick Vitale and Tony Robbins. One of the speakers asked the assembled business leaders this question: “If you went home tonight and found that a long lost relative had died and left you ten million dollars, would you be at work tomorrow?” From all over the arena came a resounding “NO!” The audience’s response is no surprise. A recent Gallup poll found that 77% of Americans hate their jobs. Another poll found that Americans hate their jobs more today than in the past 20 years; fewer than half say they are satisfied with their current job.1 With 50-hour-plus work weeks and long commutes, workers are spending more and more of their lives at work; yet many of them are unfulfilled and frustrated with their jobs. Even for many Christians, work is often only a means to an end. Many Christians today have bought into the pagan notion that leisure is good and work is bad. They have also been misled by the sacred/secular distinction, which teaches that working in the church is the only “real” fulltime Christian service. Such an artificial division between sacred and secular has not always prevailed. The Reformers taught that all labor is noble if it is accepted as a calling and performed “as unto the Lord.” This truth has slipped dramatically in both today’s church and contemporary culture. Paul Helm in his book The Callings: The Gospel in the World says that “Work is part of a Christian’s calling. . . . this Biblical idea has had a profound influence in Europe and North America since the Reformation but has largely been forgotten, due to the eclipse of the influence of the Christian gospel from national life.”2 As followers of Christ, we must address our failure to live as His followers in the workplace and to think theologically about how we integrate our faith and our work. We must learn not just to work to live, but to live to work for the glory of God. The doctrine of calling has fallen on hard times in the contemporary postmodern world. Even people in the church speak of their “religious preferences” and “spiritual lifestyles” instead of their God-ordained duties, responsibilities, and privileges. All evangelical Christians would acknowledge that all of life is to be lived under the comprehensive Lordship of Christ (Matthew 28:18). Few, however, understand that even in our everyday work, the Scripture teaches no separation between the secular and the sacred. No church-related work or mission is more spiritual than any other profession such as law, business, education, journalism, or politics. All of our actions should be unified in obedience to God and for God’s glory (1 Corinthians 10:31; Colossians 3:17). The Kingdom of God bears on every dimension of life, and agents of the Kingdom serve as salt and light (Matthew 5:13-16) wherever the Spirit leads them. As we Christians live out our worldview in public life, we help reverse the erosion of truth in a number of different ways. In the midst of the fragmentation of postmodern pluralism, Christians should see all things as unified in God’s over-arching plan for the universe, summed up in the supremacy of Christ and His full calling on our lives. In this regard Abraham Kuyper, the great Dutch statesman, theologian, and journalist, made the famous statement, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’“3 Dorothy Sayers wrote extensively about the problem of work in England after the First World War. In light of where we are in the church today, her writing is prophetic: In nothing has the Church so lost Her hold on reality as in Her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and is astonished to find that, as a result, the secular work is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, and that the greater part of the world’s intelligent workers have become irreligious, or at least, uninterested in religion. But is it astonishing? How can anyone remain interested in a religion that seems to have no concern with nine tenths of his life? The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.4 Michael P. Schutt in his book Redeeming Law recalls his own experience as a young Christian lawyer trying to understand how to integrate his faith and his work. “We wanted to be more than Christians muddling through the law. We wanted to be Christian lawyers, our faith integrated with our calling. We found little guidance in the classroom, from our texts, or from practicing lawyers and professors. Or from our pastors and priests.”5 Our call to be salt and light in the world requires us to understand not only the dominant cultural forces shaping our environment but also how to use both our primary and secondary callings to positively promote God’s Kingdom. The church needs to be teaching lawyers, doctors, construction workers, and mothers homeschooling their children how to carry out their vocational calling from a truly Christian perspective. The purpose of this book is to explore the Biblical intersection of faith and work, attempting to understand the differences between work, calling, and vocation and how they should be Biblically applied in our daily lives. Os Guinness in his book The Call identifies calling as “the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do and everything we have is invested with a special devotion and dynamism lived out as a response to his summons and service.”8 Guinness differentiates between our primary and our secondary callings: “Our primary calling as followers of Christ is by Him, to Him, and for Him. . . . Our secondary calling, considering who God is as sovereign, is that everyone, everywhere, and in everything should think, speak, live, and act entirely for Him.” Our primary calling should lead without fail to a number of secondary callings. We discern the difference between our primary calling “to be” and our secondary callings “to do” when we fully integrate God’s call into all areas of life. For followers of Christ, these secondary callings should lead us to find our unique life purpose, in order to use our particular gifts and abilities to their utmost for God’s glory. While as Guinness suggests there are a number of secondary callings that flow out of our primary call to become a disciple of Christ, this book will focus on only one: our vocational calling. Unfortunately the Biblical understanding of vocational calling has been lost by the church in the 21st century. When properly understood, this Biblical doctrine of work can give great insight and purpose to our daily work. In this book we will examine four areas related to the Biblical doctrine of work. First, it will examine the Biblical understanding of work as outlined in the Old and New Testaments. Second, it will look at the history of the doctrine of work as experienced by the church during the last 2000 years in an attempt to understand how the church has wandered so far from the Biblical truth about work. Third, the book will define the Biblical principle of all work as calling and how we are to live our lives in the light of that truth. Finally, this book will look to the future and offer some direction for rediscovering this lost Biblical doctrine of work and understanding how, if properly understood, our vocational calling can help Christians impact our communities, our cities, and our world by helping restore the culture to the glory of God.