Layman blog
“Every Good Endeavor”: Tim Keller authors book on work and faith
Carmen Fowler LaBerge with Scott Lamb, The Layman, December 13, 2012
New York Times bestselling author and Presbyterian Pastor Timothy Keller (Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, PCA) has written a new book on the integration of faith and work that will serve the church well in thinking deeply about how to “connect your work to God’s work.”
Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work is available in hardcover and Kindle.
We all recognize that secular thinking about work leads people down individualistic dead-end roads. “Thinking of work mainly as a means of self-fulfillment and self-realization,” Keller writes, “slowly crushes a person…, and undermines society itself.”
The church, however, has not always been able to articulate a singular vision for how to integrate faith and work. Keller lays out the various streams of thought about the relationship of faith and work that exist within classic and contemporary evangelical theology, and concludes:
“There is a tendency for churches and organizations emphasizing faith and work to be somewhat unbalanced, emphasizing one or two of these story lines to the exclusion of the others. Yet simply combining all the emphases – and hoping they add up to something coherent – is not the solution.”
So, Keller turns the reader directly to the Scriptures and shows that the Bible is far from silent on the topic. Keller writes, “The Bible begins talking about work as soon as it begins talking about anything – that is how important and basic it is.”
Keller and co-author Katherine Leary Alsdorf show readers “God’s Plan for Work,” then turn to “Our Problems with Work,” before the concluding section on “The Gospel and Work.” That is to say, they follow a Creation-Fall-Redemption paradigm for understanding a biblical theology of work.
Here is a quote that really “worked” for me: “According to the Bible, we don’t merely need the money from work to survive; we need the work itself to survive and live fully human lives.”
Pick up a copy of this book and provide your vocatio a more biblically-grounded and God-glorifying foundation – and more personally satisfying too.
To read more about this book, click here. To listen to an interview of Tim Keller about the book, click here.