Author Tom Nelson helps us think about our calling and vocation in his new book Work Matters: Connecting Sunday Worship to Monday Work.
You can sample a free chapter, The Transforming Power of Work.
Nelson also has a great (free) audio series on this same topic:
Is God opposed to prosperity? Where is the line between being grateful for the gifts he’s given us and idolatry?
Sometimes God offers prosperity as a blessing for faithfulness (remember Solomon?), and often it comes as a result of hard, honest work. It is certainly not wrong to provide nice things for your family, and laziness is far from condoned in Scripture.
However, our pursuit of prosperity can turn into idolatry if we are not careful. It’s easy to keep our eyes a little too focused on the prize, putting the gift above the Giver. On the other hand, if we shun prosperity for fear of idolatry, we run the risk of being ungrateful. How do we find the balance between prosperity and idolatry?
First of all, it is important to be a good steward of your gifts. Every believer is gifted in special ways, and we need to discover our gifts and use them for God’s glory. This may seem simple, but there is a deeper truth here. If we do our job because God gifted us in that area, we’re being stewards. If we do our job because there is money to be had, we’re on our way to idolatry. If one goes into medicine because he has been blessed with a scientific mind and a desire to heal the sick, wonderful. If he goes into medicine because it is the most lucrative profession he can think of, that is a different issue.
We must also prosper as God allows. Be the best you can be at whatever profession God has called you to, be it law or farming. We must also prosper in ways that are pleasing to God. Work hard, don’t cheat your boss. On a different note, we might get a job offer that sparkles with a dazzling salary and benefits package, but is in a field that may tempt us to compromise or does not honor God. It would be better to take a more modest job in a God-pleasing environment.
In the busyness of making a living and working hard, many people sacrifice their families. Some fathers are on the road 180 days a year, “bringing home the bacon.” Neglecting your spouse and missing your kids’ childhood is simply not worth the extra salary. Your bank account is not an adequate substitute for your presence. Ultimately, when you look back, you will not regret spending more time with family instead of chasing the last dollar.
From Voddie Baucham’s Family Driven Faith. Learn more or see related posts below:
As human beings, we have been designed not only to rest and to play, but also to work. From the very beginning of Scripture we see that the one true God is not a couch potato God, nor did he create a couch potato world. As the Genesis storyline opens, we read, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Here we are immediately introduced to God as a thoughtful and creative worker. At first glance we observe the triune God as an active deity. The Spirit of God is hovering over the waters. God’s infinite creativity, omnipotence, and omniscience are unleashed, and he is intimately engaged in his good creation.
Scripture tells us that the most bedrock answer to the question of why we work is that we were created with work in mind. Being made in God’s image, we have been designed to work, to be fellow workers with God. To be an image-bearer is to be a worker. In our work we are to show off God’s excellence, creativity, and glory to the world. We work because we bear the image of One who works. This is why the apostle Paul writes to a group of first-century followers of Jesus who have embraced the gospel, “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat” (2 Thess. 3:10). At first blush, Paul’s rather blunt words seem cold and lacking Christian compassion, but upon further theological reflection, Paul’s words convey to us some needed insight. Paul does not rebuke those who, for various legitimate reasons, cannot work, but he does say that an unwillingness to work is no trivial thing. For anyone to refuse to work is a fundamental violation of God’s creation design for humankind.
When we grasp what God intended for his image-bearers, it is not surprising that throughout the book of Proverbs the wise are praised for their diligence and the foolish are rebuked for their laziness. When we hear the word fool, we often think of someone who is mentally deficient. However, a foolish person in Scripture is not necessarily one who lacks intelligence but rather one who lives as if God does not exist. The psalmist puts it this way: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Ps. 14:1). A fool is one who rejects not only the Creator but also creation design, including the design to work. Throughout Scripture slothfulness is rightly viewed in a negative light. A slothful Christian is a contradiction in terms. We should not be shocked to see that the Christian church throughout history has reflected negative sentiments about slothfulness. Sloth finds a prominent place in Pope Gregory the Great’s listing of the seven deadly sins. The Protestant Reformers spoke of the poverty of slothfulness and laziness. Consistently they made the connection that those who spend their time in idleness and ease should rightly doubt the sincerity of their Christian commitment.
God could have placed Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden and made it much like the world of humans in WALL-E, where they could sit around with food coming to them, sipping their life-giving nutrients out of giant cups. This was not God’s desire or his design for his good world. Because God himself is a worker, and because we are his image-bearers, we were designed to reflect who God is in, through, and by our work. The work we are called to do every day is an important part of our image-bearing nature and stewardship. As human beings we were created to do things. In this sense we are not only human beings, we are also human doings. We have been created to contribute to God’s good world.
From Work Matters by Tom Nelson
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Reading Mark 6:3, I began to reflect on the significance of Jesus spending so much of his time on earth working with his hands in a carpentry shop. Here was the Son of God sent to earth on a redemptive mission of seeking and saving the lost, of proclaiming the gospel, yet he spent the vast majority of his years on earth making things in an obscure carpentry shop. We know from Luke’s Gospel that even at the age of twelve, Jesus was demonstrating his amazing rabbinical brilliance to the brightest and best in Jerusalem (Luke 2:47). How did Jesus’s brilliance fit in with a carpentry career? At first glance this doesn’t seem to be a very strategic use of the Son of God’s extraordinary gifts or his important messianic mission. Why was it the Father’s will for Jesus to spend so much time in the carpentry shop instead of gracing the Palestinian countryside, proclaiming the gospel and healing the multitudes?
The New Testament records Jesus spending only about three years in itinerant ministry, what we might refer to as full-time vocational ministry. But for the many years before that, Jesus worked as a carpenter.
When we contemplate who Jesus really is, his joyful contentment to work with his hands day after day constructing things, making useful farm implements and household furniture in an obscure Nazareth carpentry shop, we find him truly stunning. Jesus’s work life tells us that he did not think being a carpenter was somehow below him or a poor use of his many gifts.
It is all too easy for us to overlook the fact that Jesus knew what it meant to get up and go to work every day.
Modified from Work Matters by Tom Nelson
Last August Ajith Fernando wrote To Serve is to Suffer in Christianity Today, an article that recently received an EPA Higher Goals Award. This is a great read for anyone in ministry, missions, or thinking about going into those fields. Fernando addresses vocational ministry and its elements of frustrations and fulfillment, commitment and community, our drivenness and servanthood, and the glory of the gospel.
Here are a few highlights:
Read the full article or check out Fernando’s book, The Call to Joy and Pain.
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