Book Review - Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

Is work a curse or a blessing? Keller says that when we understand God's design for work we can account for both. But until the gospel begins to change how we work, we will miss out on the ultimate design. 

Transcript

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What if your work was actually designed to bring the perfect life rather than something to get away from in order to get to the perfect life? That's what today's author, Timothy Keller, is going to talk to us about in Every Good Endeavor. I'm your host, Dr. Jason Lanker, and this is Connecting the Dots. This week's book is Every Good Endeavor by Timothy Keller. He was the pastor of Redeemer Church in New York City. He was also the co-founder of the Gospel Coalition. So he's got a few things in his pocket that he's done that have had a great impact. And he has a lot to say about connecting our work to God's work. And he wants to make that clear to a group of people who are maybe well-educated, curious thinkers who want to engage the Christian faith in an even-handed, integrated approach. So he's going to really push us to think outside the box. He's going to ask questions and present solutions that are not the norm. And it's a good thing because it helps us to really consider how do we really live the Christian life in our workday lives. To do this, he co-wrote the book with Catherine Alsdorf. She was a top-tier executive for several technology-based companies. And she also became the director of Redeemer's City to City initiative to bring theology and work into conversation together. So, with the two of them teaming up together, the book that we have in front of us is just something that really helps to put together a whole picture of what Christian work could look like and how we do that in a way that brings God the most glory and us the most joy. In organizing his book, Keller uses the standard Christian formulation of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. What he's attempting to do is to show how Scripture provides guidance from all the way at the beginning that God had a plan for his work, and that plan was interrupted by our rebellion. And that rebellion has brought problems to our work, but God has not left us there. He's brought his goodness, his good news, the gospel, and that gospel is about redemption. It's about making things right. And so Keller's going to walk us through this process in 12 chapters, broken up into these three sections. In the first, he says God has a design for work. And that design is unlike anything that's been proposed before. In the ancient world, the gods gave work to mankind because they didn't want to do it. It was toil, it was a curse, it was something to be given away. But for our story, for the Christian story, God enters into the work, he does it, and then he calls it not only good, but when he looks at the totality of it, he calls it very good. He then hands it over to us and says, Hey, here's the garden, this place of very goodness that is in the center of my creation. Take care of it, learn from it, see how I've designed it, and then take that out to the world around you. Learn, grow, become better at this process of work. It's not something you have to do perfectly in the moment. In fact, in God's creation, it's never called perfect, it's only called very good. It leaves room for improvement. And if we were to learn from that in God's design, we would give ourselves a little bit of freedom to not have to always reach perfection in everything we do. In fact, to regularly leave room for greater improvement, to leave room for perfection, so that we could make things more complete as we move along. The other thing that he says is that work is not supposed to be consistent. Workaholism is not a virtue. God works in a six to one ratio, and so should we. Many of us struggle with taking a break. If we don't work in a seven to nothing ratio, we'll sometimes work in a 21 to 3 ratio, or what's most common for us, a five to two ratio. We'll work really hard for five days from Monday to Friday and then completely veg out on Saturday and Sunday. But that misses what God's design is. Put work into your marriage, put work into your community, make those things better. Take what you've been learning and the gifts that you found there and bring them as blessings to the greater work of bringing order out of chaos in God's world. As we do, we're giving ourselves the place to truly enjoy the work that God's created for us. Otherwise, it really does become a toil. It just becomes something that we have to get done and something we can never get away from. It should instead bring us to a place of worship, a place where we're appreciative of the God who's given us the work that He's given us and has worked through us what He's worked through us. When we begin to engage work that way, Keller says it brings a dignity to our work because we begin to see our unique beings, that the best qualities of ourselves that bring us joy and that also bring him glory by doing the things that need to be done to make life livable. And Keller wants to encourage people that no matter what your work is, it has value. In fact, think about it. When God came to reveal himself, he came as a tecton, is the word that it's used in Greek there. That word tecton, oftentimes when we hear it in sermons or think about it, it's that Jesus is this woodworking master making tables and chairs that everyone around wants to buy. But if you know anything about Israel and you know anything about the ancient world, one, Israel has barely enough trees to make a fire. And in the ancient world, they sat on the floor. They didn't sit on at tables with chairs and everything else like we're accustomed to today. A tecton in the ancient world is best translated as a construction worker. And with stones as your primary construction tool in that world, then what Jesus was essentially was he was a stonemason. He was a bricklayer. He was a blue-collar worker. And what's so intriguing about that is that when God said, I want to show you how life is supposed to be, I want to redeem it, I want to, I want to make it ideal. He didn't come to take the most white-collar job or to be in charge of this worldwide industry. He came to be a simple day laborer who built houses for other people. And by doing so, he says to all workers, whatever your task, it has value. Find your gifts, use your gifts, and bring goodness to the people around you. And your work, when it is engaged that way, it is a work full of dignity. A work also that in the third chapter, he's going to say needs to be cultivated. God said to the man and the woman, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and rule over it. Take what you've learned in this garden and expand it. Make it better, refine and repackage it. Oftentimes in our business lives, we think that our ideal business life is to find the formula that puts it all together, that establishes our business so that we can walk away and never have to touch it and it will work perfectly for hundreds and thousands of years. No, our job is to take the order that we've found in the place that he has originally placed it, and it's to expand it. It's to take it further, it's to find new markets, it's to explore new products, it's to put ourselves, in essence, into harm's way. At the moment that we're finally comfortable, is to say, no, I've learned something, and I want to bring goodness to the world around me. And it's to do it also, as he explains in the creation narrative, that he said it's not good that the man is by himself. He needs a partner, he needs an ally that's oppositely corresponding to him. And that's where business really flourishes when we don't try to be the answer to every single problem in our world, but we purposefully go to find allies, to find partners that are good and exceptional at certain things that maybe our business and our model is not that great at, but we know that there's a need. We know there's something that could be out there that would be a greater use to our world. The Christian conception says if work is really going to meet its original design, we need to head down that road of cultivation. When we do, in his fourth chapter, he says that's when we begin to see work truly as service. As a former pastor, as a as a professor of Christian ministries, I want to stand on the rooftops and scream, Amen. I have interacted with so many business professionals that believe that the only service they provide is by teaching Sunday school to four-year-olds once a week. No, that your greatest service, if you understand the purpose of work, is done throughout your week as you use your talents and your gifts to bring good to the world in which we live, to work in partnership with each other, to see and value the product that you put together for the world in need. And that you do it with a balance that isn't driven to perfection, but is driven to be the best that it can be, to be able to say, we're very good, we could be better, but we appreciate that we're always learning, that there is always more, and that we do get to appreciate our product. When we can reach that point, Keller says, We've we've grasped kind of the big picture of what God made work for. But then he heads right into the doldrums of it. And he says, We've messed the whole thing up. We rebelled against our God, and by that rebellion, we now have a problem in our work. The first problem that we're gonna have is that our work is going to regularly feel fruitless. We are going to pour and pour, we're gonna give and give, and we're not going to find the results that we want to find. And we don't understand why it would be that way. We're doing everything right. When we forget that we live in a broken world full of broken people who have been breaking it at the same time they've been trying to remake it for millennia, that should give us the understanding that we are not going to make the perfect business today or tomorrow. We're going to be faithful in our places, we're going to give the best that we can. And for most of us, we're going to have work lives that regularly feel like they're not achieving all that they could achieve. Keller says, expect that. Expect that because of the amount of brokenness and pride that all of us have, and then turn that on yourself. When you sense the fruitlessness of your work, what is it that you're doing that are based on your designs to try to make it better? If we mess this whole thing up in the beginning by saying we will be God, we know the way to fix it, we know how this is supposed to be run. The way to turn back is to turn to Him and to say, What do you want us to do to make this fruitful? Help us to be faithful so that we can do this work. Otherwise, we move to the next point that we run into, which is work regularly becomes pointless. We don't understand the purpose of what we're doing. If it's not only fruitless, it now has no real essential meaning to us. We're trying to find the formula, we're trying to make the system that finally makes every customer happy. And the more that we try to do that, the more that we try to automize our business, the more we push out ourselves, and the more we actually push out our customer, is what Keller has to say. Humanity is found in the messiness, and business needs to be messy. It needs to be a place where we get our hands into the dirtiness of it, that we really wrestle with the problems instead of trying to silence the people who are giving us negative feedback or only listening to the ones who are singing our accolades. It's a both and. Being faithful, being connected to what he's called us to, and being willing to engage the goods and the bads, the messiness inherent within our business structures. That's where we're going to find the true Christian work ethic. And that Christian work ethic has to come from a place of service. It has to come from a place of care for others. Our natural tendency is to work towards selfishness. We work towards getting what we want out of our work lives. When we've achieved our objective, we're done. We're finished. We can move on. But we have to understand that work is a calling. It's something that God has given to each one of us. We've been made purposefully. And our job is not just to make our product and go home. Our job is to mediate, to become a bridge of goodness to the world around us. And when our work becomes something that we see the user in mind, when we see the person who receives the good of our labor, enjoying it, appreciating it. And if God graces them, worshiping him through our labor, that we would be glorifying him and bringing goodness to the world around us. That's a completely different take than most of our work lives that just care about the paycheck or what we get out of it. And in fact, what Keller says is work most regularly reveals our idols. It shows us the things we're working for. We're working for that vacation, we're working for that car, we're working for that house, we're working for, and you can fill in the blank of whatever it is we tend to find ourselves working for. And Keller says, you know what, those things we work for, they're not bad in and of themselves. The problem is that we take a good and we turn it into an ultimate good rather than realizing the thing that we're working for and the thing we're working towards is we're working towards relationship. We were made to work with God. We're like little children that got let up onto the bumper of the car with their father to be able to help fix it. The father is the one putting it all together. The father is the one who has all the designs. But now we get to be part of that labor. And when we can enjoy that work with him and see that our work from day to day, Monday to Saturday, are full of his instruction, his goodness, his grace, then that's when work really becomes what God has determined for work to be. When we move God out of our workplace, that's the moment that the only thing we have to work for are the things that fill us with goodness that are ultimately from Him but are not Him. And so our work lives need to be places that are filled with His being, with His instruction, and with His relationship. But the only way we're gonna get there, Keller says, is when the gospel really does come to work. It can't just stay in our own personal lives at home. It can't just stay in our devotions on Tuesday morning. The gospel has been made to invade all of God's creation and it's been made to invade our work lives as well. Jesus said, I came so that you would have life and have it overflowing. And work is the greatest portion of our lives. So he came to make life full. And when we begin to have a new story for our work, he says, that's when we can begin to see his grace regularly as part of our lives. And that grace has restored this relationship. The thing I wish Keller would have pushed a little bit further into here was what type of relationship he's restored us to. Because regularly people talk about, hey, I have a new relationship with Jesus Christ. If you take that new relationship with Jesus Christ and He's your friend into work, then you are going to interact with the God of this universe like he's your friend, like he's there just to get you your cup of water and to fulfill all of your needs and to laugh with you and to have fun. But that's not the relationship that was begun in the beginning. He is the creator of all things. We have been made by him and for him. We have been made to be under him. He's our boss. This is why Paul says that when we were slaves to sin, he set us free, not to just be free, but to now become slaves of righteousness. These slaves within the ancient world were people who were hired, most of them, for years and for decades to be able to work for a certain master. They were given a job and they were empowered by their master to do their job. When we enter into the workforce and we have a new relationship, a restored relationship with the God of this universe, what he's saying is he's not there to fulfill all our wishes about our work lives. He's there to actually become our boss, to tell us what to do, what not to do, when to listen, when to complete things, when to act in a certain way, that the system and all of the training just doesn't have an answer. He does because he knows the way work is supposed to be done. And that is just an incredible offer, an incredible opportunity that this God wants to create a new story of our work, one where we're in deep relationship with him, and he wants to see good in and through us. When that happens, he says it's going to bring us to a new conception of work. Work isn't going to be just something that we do just to kind of get by, to put a roof over our head. It's going to be something that takes over our lives. Unfortunately, Keller says, Christians have lost this conception of work in the last hundred years or so. And we lost it because of our conception of the gospel. Our gospel primarily is preached as a gospel of the hereafter. It's a gospel that cuts out the today, the here and now. The words of Jesus said, I've come to bring you life in the present, in the active, and to bring it to you in a way that's overflowing. Our daily prayer that his kingdom would come and his will would be done, and that all of our needs would be met in the present is something that we often forget about. We focus so much on. Leaving this life and being able to go to the glorious evermore, it takes us all the way back to the Greek conception of life: that work and toil and being in this world is a curse. It's something that we need to get away from. And until we reach the heavenly realm, then we're not really going to be able to experience life the way that God wants it to be experienced. When we go down that road, we forget that the whole story even ends with the heavens coming where? To the earth. So that the new Jerusalem sets down here and we live forever in this new heavens and new earth, this place where we work, we reign, we rule, we take care of his world the way that he made for it to be taken care of from the very beginning. When we can get that new conception of work, it's going to bring a new compass for our work. We're going to see that living truthfully, we're going to believe that living in love, we're going to act in ways that living with humility, that's the way God made for us to live. And even when we don't get the promotion because of living humbly, when we don't get the extra money in our paycheck by saying, no, you've actually already paid me already. Whenever we live in the way and the manner in which God has made for life to be lived in the here and now, it may not bring all the results and the goodness we think we would have, but it's going to create goodness in and through us. It really becomes the answer to our prayer. May your kingdom come, may your will be done here on earth. And it would be very practical to pray. May all of that come here through our work, our everyday lives, in our businesses, in the roles we have. May we have a new compass and a new direction. And that direction is centered in our relationship with you, our boss, to do whatever it is you want to do here today and for all of eternity. As the heavens become united with the earth, when your kingdom and your reign rules over anyone who wants to be under your control, you will do good in and through them. Do it in and through our work. If that could be something that we really engaged and entered into, Keller says, we would find a new power for our work that we couldn't even imagine. It would move us past laziness. Now we think I'm not lazy at work, but one of the deepest Christian teachings from our earth from the early church was that we as people struggle struggle with this concept of asedia. Once I've received what I need, once I've gotten out of this what I want, then I'm done. I have nothing left that I need to put into that. I got it done in three days, I'm finished. No, he's called you to a six-to-one relationship. You know what? I'm not working with the people that I want to be working with. No, he's called you to work in partnership and to step outside of some of those relationships that you've had before and to find new ways to be able to make it work with people that you're not familiar with or that have language barriers or whatever the case may be. He's called you to work in a way that says, He's with me and he's for me. I don't need to work to get something over there. He will provide me enough pleasure and enough goodness and enough fulfillment in my day-to-day life of being faithful, even when it seems like I'm not being fruitful. He'll tell me what to do when I don't understand the point. He will rewrite my story and he'll give me a new conception that changes the way that I view work and that I view it for this moment and for years and decades and eternity to come. That power is filled by God's Holy Spirit, the one who Jesus said would guide us into all truth. This new power for our work ultimately, though, comes from the helper that God said that he would give to us: the Holy Spirit, the one who will empower us and guide us into all truth. We have the great Holy One with us in all places that we work. He's there to give us everything that we need in order to live our lives in holiness and to work before our master, our boss of all creation, to make work the best that it can be. When we live and work in this kind of way, we've entered into what Keller says is the ultimate good. It is our Sabbath rest, as the writer of Hebrews says, that Jesus has now become the way that we are set free from our toil to try to change our world, to try to make something good and great out of our business. He's just offered us the opportunity to join him in what he's already started. It brings us all the way back to the creation, and we get to rule and reign with him. We get to work daily with him, and we get to work for the good of all creation with him, both now and forevermore. That is the grand vision that Keller lays out for us in his book, Every Good Endeavor. And he calls us to that, to see that every endeavor has the opportunity to be a good endeavor when we understand the original purpose of work, that we understand, yes, it's tough sometimes. And it's because of our rebellion, it's because of the brokenness that has been brought upon our world for generations of people who've tried to solve it by their solutions rather than turning to the one who ultimately has the good news and says, I can fix it all, I can redirect you and make life and work all that you want it to be. Come to me, all of you who are weary and work to the point of exhaustion, and I will give you rest if you put your yoke upon me. If you connect yourself with me, if you work with me daily, you will see a completely new conception and an expectation and experience of work. That is Keller's thesis, and I think it is a glorious one. It's something we're thinking about, and hopefully something worth living into. After working our way through every good endeavor, I hope that you see how much God has work as central to our lives. It's not a curse, it's not toil. It's something that He made for us to be able to experience the fullness of what life is supposed to be. It's supposed to lead us into worship with him. By engaging work correctly, it's actually supposed to bring us rest and a dignity that what we do is of value. What we do, though, has to be cultivated. It has to grow, it has to expand. It's not enough to keep doing business as usual. As believers, we've been called to more. We've been called to push and to expand. Why? Because work at its core is an act of service. And those who serve are always willing to sacrifice. They're willing to take the extra step. And that's something that Keller, I think, explains incredibly well from the very beginning of our book. At the same time, I think he brings in a reality and a truth that work is hard. It is not as easy as we want it to be. It often seems very fruitless. We wonder what the point is, and we give up. And so we make it all about ourselves, all about the little toys and the things that we can get and that we can do. And he says, we need to be careful because they're good things, they're not bad things, but when we take good things and make them ultimate ends, we've missed the point and we've put a barrier between ourselves and the God who wants to work with us literally to remake his world. And that's, I think, the high point of where Keller takes us in every good endeavor is that work, the work that we live in today, isn't ideal. It has lots of frailty, it has lots of brokenness in it. But that's why we're here to remake our story, to bring goodness to a broken world, even through making widgets and taking care of computer systems. He has a plan to work through us in relationship because every job, in the end, is about working with and for people. And if he can begin to restore those working relationships, our conception of work can be changed. And we can see it as a grand communal effort to remake ourselves, to remake ourselves as the way God designed for us to be. People that are more truthful, more loving, more humble, more giving. If we can find that new compass for work, he promises us a power that we cannot even begin to fathom. That he will empower us by his grace, that his Holy Spirit will guide us into all truth, and that by working together with him, we really will see that every endeavor can be a good endeavor.