Gifts for Moms, Dads, and Grads
Gifts for Moms
Tim Keller’s Advice for Choosing (or Sticking with) a Career
Where (and How) Should I Work?
When it comes to choosing a career, Keller points out there are at least two kinds of motivating questions: (1) What will make me the most money and give me the most status? or (2) How, with my existing abilities and opportunities, can I be of greatest service to others, knowing what I do of God’s will and human need?1 Notice something counterintuitive, though, about these two questions:
It is the latter that will lead [to] a more sustainable motivation for discipline and excellence at work. If the point of work is to serve and exalt ourselves, then our work inevitably becomes less about the work and more about us. Our aggressiveness will eventually become abuse, our drive will become burnout, and our self-sufficiency will become self-loathing. But if the purpose of work is to serve and exalt something beyond ourselves, then we actually have a better reason to deploy our talent, ambition, and entrepreneurial vigor—and we are more likely to be successful in the long run, even by the world’s definition.2
Assuming that the profession is morally permissible, there is no one-size-fits-all way to choose a career. Adapting categories from John Newton, Keller identifies three factors that often constitute a “call”:3
- Affinity: Do you enjoy it?
- Ability: Do others think you can do the job well?
- Opportunity: Is there an open door?
Tim Keller on the Christian Life
Matt Smethurst
Matt Smethurst distills over 40 years of Tim Keller’s teaching topic by topic—drawing from popular books to lesser-known conference talks, interviews, and sermons—to present practical insight for generations of readers eager to grow in their walk with Christ.
Ideally all three are present; in some vocations, they really must be.4 But in a culture that encourages us to look within and “discover ourselves,” we should be careful not to overestimate the importance of passion for a particular vocation. It’s a bit like marriage, Keller suggests: The passion ebbs and flows. It’s not what keeps you going. What keeps you going is commitment and hope.5 Elsewhere Keller reflects,
As products of the Depression and two world wars, my parents’ and grandparents’ generations were grateful to have work of any kind because it helped them and their family survive. But members of my children’s generation are utterly dissimilar. They insist that work be fulfilling and fruitful, that it fully fit their talents and their dreams, and that it “do something amazing for the world,” as one Google executive described his company’s mission. . . . While the circumstances shaping my parents’ generation perhaps gave them a lower view of work than the one found in the Bible’s description of creation, so my children’s generation has a more naïve and utopian view of work than [the Bible’s] description of [this fallen world].6
Nevertheless, God does wire us in certain ways and entrust us with certain skills. One of Keller’s favorite examples of this comes from the film Chariots of Fire, based on the true story of Olympic runner Eric Liddell.7 In one scene, Liddell has a confrontation with his sister, Jennie. She’s concerned because she believes his hard work and striving after athletic prowess is getting in the way of his preparation for the mission field, since he was preparing to be a missionary to China. Finally, he says, “Jennie . . . I believe that God made me for . . . China. But he also made me fast, and when I run, I feel his pleasure.”
Meanwhile, another runner, Harold Abrahams, remarks to his trainer, “I’m twenty-four and I’ve never known [contentment]. I’m forever in pursuit, and I don’t even know what I am chasing.”
Do you see the contrast? Abrahams is enslaved to deriving satisfaction and life from a running track. No wonder he remarks to his coach, shortly before the hundred-yard dash, “I have ten seconds to justify my existence.” But Liddell is free. He’s not enslaved to the sport—as evidenced by his willingness to miss a likely gold medal due to his conviction that he shouldn’t run on Sundays.
Both characters are strikingly similar—same passion, same sport, same event, same training, same opportunity—yet with a profound difference: Abrahams had to win. His sense of worth was riding on it. Liddell, meanwhile, could miss the race altogether if conscience demanded it. To the cheering crowds they looked so similar, but for Abrahams it was a sprint for salvation; for Liddell it was an act of worship. As Keller puts it, “Abrahams was weary even when he rested. Liddell was rested even when he [ran].”8
Again, apart from a biblical perspective on our jobs, we will be tempted either to underwork, reducing it to mere drudgery, or to overwork, elevating it to an identity. The danger in both cases is that our jobs become all about us. Like Harold Abrahams, we become enslaved to what Keller calls the “work under the work”—whether it’s the exhausting scramble to eke out a sense of self-worth or the fight against disenchantment and despair. Ultimately, the solution to the “work under the work” is a quality of rest that no number of vacations can provide, for only in Jesus do we find “rest under the rest”:9
He is the only boss who will not drive you into the ground, the only audience that does not need your best performance in order to be satisfied with you. Why is this? Because his work for you is finished. In fact, the very definition of a Christian is someone who not only admires Jesus, emulates Jesus, and obeys Jesus, but who “rests in the finished work of Christ” instead of his or her own. Remember, God was able to rest [Gen. 2:1–3] only because his creative work was finished. And a Christian is able to rest only because God’s redemptive work is likewise finished in Christ.10
God deploys people into all kinds of jobs for the good of the world.
So when choosing a vocation, don’t make passion the ultimate factor—but don’t assume it’s unimportant either. What experiences and skills have you been given? What kind of work will bring benefit to others? What will enable you to feel God’s pleasure? Keller advises,
If you have to choose between work that benefits more people and work that pays you more, you should seriously consider the job that pays less and helps more—particularly if you can be great at it. . . . All jobs—not merely so-called helping professions—are fundamentally ways of loving your neighbor. Christians do not have to do direct ministry or nonprofit charitable work in order to love others through their jobs.11
Along these lines, Keller shares an illustration from one of his favorite British preachers, Dick Lucas:
If you were to go to a book table at a church and see a biography titled The Man God Uses or The Woman God Uses, you would think it must be the story of a missionary, minister, or specialist in some sort of spiritual work, wouldn’t you? That’s because the church conditioned you to think this way. But what you have [in the story of Joseph] is a highly successful secular leader. In fact, in some ways being a preacher, missionary, or Bible study leader is easier. There’s a certain spiritual glamour to it. But it’s much harder to get Christians to see that God is willing to greatly use men and women in every sphere of life—in medicine, in law, in business, in the arts. This is the great shortfall today.12
God deploys people into all kinds of jobs for the good of the world. Whether you’re thriving or struggling in a vocation—or trying to choose one—know that God is infinitely sovereign and wise. As the apostle Paul writes, “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” (1 Cor. 7:17).
Notes:
- Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Dutton, 2008), 23. Elsewhere he writes, “In earlier times, when suffering occurred, just because we couldn’t think within our own mind of good reasons for it didn’t mean there couldn’t be any. We were humbler about our ability to understand the world.” Keller, Walking with God, 55; cf. 97. Keller makes a key observation: “Modern discussions of the problem of suffering start with an abstract God—a God who, for the sake of argument, is all-powerful and all-good, but who is not glorious, majestic, infinitely wise, beginningless, and the creator and sustainer of all things. No wonder, then, that modern people are far more prone than their ancestors to conclude that, if they can see no good reason for a particular instance of suffering, God could not have any justifiable reasons for it either.” Keller, 87 (emphasis added).
- Keller, Walking with God, 285.
- Keller, Walking with God, 121–22. Keller also writes, “When one of my sons was around eight years old, he began to exert his will and resist his parents’ directions. One time I told him to do something and he said, ‘Dad, I’ll obey you and do this—but only if first you explain to me why I should do it.’ I responded something like this: ‘If you obey me only because it makes sense to you, then that’s not obedience; it’s just agreement. The problem is that you are too young to understand most of the reasons why I want you to do this. Do it because you are eight and I’m thirty-eight—because you are a child and I’m an adult and your father.’ We can easily see why children need to trust their parents even when they do not understand them. How much more, then, should we trust God even though we do not understand him.” Keller, 261–62 (emphasis added). For another bracing reflection on this theme, see the story about Elisabeth Elliot in Keller, 170–74.
- Tim Keller, “Tim Keller on God and Coronavirus,” Premier Christian News, April 9, 2020, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/.
- Edward Shillito, “Jesus of the Scars,” in Masterpieces of Religious Verse, ed. James Dalton Morrison (New York: Harper Brothers, 1958), 235. Keller first cited the poem in “How to Handle Trouble,” preached on September 26, 1993. On this theme, he also sometimes quoted John Stott: “I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the cross. . . . In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?” John Stott, Why I Am a Christian (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 63–64. See, for example, Keller, “The Sacrifice,” preached on March 20, 2005. Of course, it’s significant that Jesus graciously showed his scars to doubting Thomas (John 20:27).
- Keller, Walking with God, 5. He writes later in the book, “Average people in Western society have extremely unrealistic ideas of how much control they have over how their lives go. Suffering removes the blinders. It does not so much make us helpless and out of control as it shows us we have always been vulnerable and dependent on God. Suffering merely helps us wake up to that fact and live in accordance with it.” Keller, 190–91 (emphasis original).
- Keller, Walking with God, 5.
- Tim Keller, “Truth, Tears, Anger, and Grace,” preached on September 16, 2001. This was one of Keller’s favorite metaphors for handling grief. He first shared it with Redeemer in a 1990 sermon titled “Joy: Overcoming Boredom.” In that message he also likened the process to rubbing salt into a flesh wound: “Though it stings, [the salt] keeps [the wound] from [getting infected]. Christians rub their hope into their grief so it keeps it from going bad.”
- Keller, Walking with God, 123. Further, “Suffering tends to make you self-absorbed. If it is seen as mainly about you and your own growth, it will strangle you truly. Instead, we must look at suffering—whatever the proximate causes—as primarily a way to know God better, as an opening for serving, resembling, and drawing near to him as never before. It is only if we make God’s glory primary in suffering that it will achieve our own.” Keller, 188.
- Keller, Walking with God, 225, (emphasis added).
- Keller, Walking with God, 299 (emphasis added).
- Keller, Walking with God, 298.
This article is adapted from Tim Keller on the Christian Life: The Transforming Power of the Gospel by Matt Smethurst.
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