Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Work

by Timothy Keller

Tags: boundaries, responsibility, compulsive behavior

With deep insight and often surprising advice, Keller shows readers that biblical wisdom is immensely relevant to our questions about our work. In fact, the Christian view of work - that we work to serve others, not ourselves - can provide the foundation of a thriving professional and balanced personal life.

Chapters:

The Design of Work
The Dignity of Work
Work as Cultivation
Work as Service
Work Becomes Fruitless
Work Reveals Our Idols
A New Story for Work
A New Conception of Work
A New Compass for Work
A New Power for Work

Quotes:

The current economic era has given us fresh impulses and new ways to stigmatize work such as farming and caring for children - jobs that are supposedly not “knowledge” jobs and therefore do not pay very well. But in Genesis we see God as a gardener, and in the New Testament, we see him as a carpenter.

No task is too small a vessel to hold the immense dignity of work given by God. P. 49

Just because you cannot realize your highest aspirations in work does not mean that you have chosen wrongly, or are not called to your profession, or that you should spend your life looking for the perfect career that is devoid of frustration. You should expect to be regularly frustrated in your work even though you may be in exactly the right vocation.

Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff observes that modern culture defines the happy life as a life that is “going well” - full of experiential pleasure-while to the ancients, the happy life meant the life that is lived well, with character, courage, humility, love, and justice.

Without something bigger than yourself to work for, then all of your work energy is actually fueled by one of the other six deadly sins. You may work exceptionally hard because of envy to get ahead of somebody, or because of pride to prove yourself, or because of greed or even gluttony for pleasure.