“But in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.”
(1 Peter 3:15).
Peter assumes that nonbelievers will be fascinated by the way we live, that they’ll be drawn by our love and enticed by our unfaltering anticipation. Curious, and maybe envious too, they’ll press to know more about us.
But for many of us, those questions rarely come. Our lives don’t stir a lot of intrigue, and hardly anyone is mesmerized by our infectious expectation. Clearly, we’re missing something that was plain to Peter, and it’s likely this: Peter, along with his earliest readers, were on the lookout. They lived in a constant state of eagerness, believing Jesus might return today, tomorrow, or a week from next Tuesday. Naturally their hope was impossible to contain.
We’re now deep into the 21st century, and nobody’s standing on tiptoe anymore. Today, most of us go to work Monday morning and, like our nonbelieving friends, we spend eight to 10 hours a day revealing a hope that doesn’t stretch farther than the coming Friday. We go to meetings, write proposals, or change diapers — and rarely make a connection between our ordinary lives and our hope for the world’s redemption.
It might help then to ask again about the hope that’s to brim within us: What is it? Why should it be contagious? How is it to be explained?
Covenant Seminary professor Michael Williams, in his book “Far as the Curse Is Found,” points out that because we’re human we instinctively live with one eye fixed on a hoped-for future. In school, we choose a particular field, sensing that our destiny lies in business, science, or the arts. We save money for a home, with the hope of a growing family. We seek better jobs because the future beckons with enticing challenges and greater responsibilities. Later, we keep an eye on our 401(k)s, looking ahead to a financially secure future.
Every day we make decisions about finances, family, and career in order to get where we long to go. Because we’re human, Williams says, we are forever fixed on a better, brighter future.
Ordinary Life Is Never a Distraction
At the same time, God has providentially called all but a handful of people to some form of worldly enterprise. He hasn’t called them to the mission field, the pastorate, or to “Christian” work of any kind. Instead, He’s called them into profit-driven business. He’s placed them in moneymaking law firms and dog-eat-dog politics and the countless classrooms of our public schools. He’s called a few into journalism, a few more into science, and a handful into the entertainment industry.
It seems strange, given that business is essentially acquisitive. Every day, it seems, we read about “big tech” — companies such as Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook —swallowing up smaller competitors as their stock prices continue to soar. This is raw ambition, and it makes business an awkward setting for humble souls who “consider others better than themselves” (Philippians 2:3).
We relish the fact that our work isn’t primarily about money, power, and prestige; that it is, instead, the vehicle through which we project His image into the world.
God has called His people to serve in government, where we easily spot man’s unvarnished pursuit of power. Almost daily we hear politicians — desperate to sway a handful of uninformed voters — distort their opponents’ views. We hear them change positions, tell outright lies, and make reckless promises in their thinly veiled quest for the upper hand.
In education, we’ve seen cheating scandals, not among students but among teachers, administrators, and parents. In the past decade hundreds of educators have surrendered their integrity and forsaken students — the young people who embody the promise of their communities — in pursuit of bonuses, government funding, and the approval of men.
God has called His people to these ambitious, power-grabbing organizations and made it clear that we’re to do nothing out of selfish ambition. He’s called millions of His people into profit-hungry enterprises and told us that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil (1 Timothy 6:10).
God has called His people into politics, education, and law and told them to “set their minds on things above, not on earthly things” (Colossians 3:2). He has called us into every sphere and commanded us “not to conform any longer to the pattern of this world” (Romans 12:2).
Serving God’s Purpose
So how are we to live godly lives? How do we ask God to keep us from temptation while we deliberately spend most of our time in such worldly settings? How, engaged in this work, do we live the magnetic lives Peter envisioned?
We embrace the truth that God has placed us where we best serve His purposes. We relish the fact that our work isn’t primarily about money, power, and prestige; that it is, instead, the vehicle through which we project His image into the world.
We recognize that our workplaces, homes, and communities are the battlegrounds where spiritual warfare is waged, and that every day, in every setting, God’s people wrestle with the powers and authorities that strive to lead us and our neighbors astray.
Our ordinary life is where we offer hope and wealth to the poor. Our ruts and routines are where we join Christ in His work to “renew all things.” This is where our lives become an open invitation, where we draw people toward the kingdom that has come and is yet on the way.
We’re well aware that we live and work in a cursed world populated by fallen people. We’re mindful of systemic problems: overwork, exploitation, ambition, greed, envy, and covetousness, to name a few. But, invigorated by the hope of what Christ has in store, we rub our hands in eager expectation, knowing these aren’t excuses to avoid the world; they’re the reasons we plunge into it.
Yearning for More — for Good Reason
Despite our economic ups and downs, we live in a place and time of extraordinary blessing. We are safer, healthier, and more comfortable than any people have ever been. As a result, we’ve become one thing more: acutely aware of what money can’t buy.
With the ubiquitous presence of iPhones and iPads, with cable television and streaming services, satellite radio, and constant connectivity, we find ourselves yearning for more than the next new gadget. Because we’re not panicked about finding food and shelter, we face each day in search of something that satisfies and gives life meaning.
In 2003, author and professor Richard Florida, in research for his book “The Rise of the Creative Class,” discovered that 21st-century workers — blue-collar and white-collar both — viewed themselves as “not materialistic.” As Florida explored workers’ attitudes he found that people care more about their quality of life and less about money. They care about self-expression, he concluded, and “subjective well-being.”
Social researcher Robert Fogel came to a similar conclusion. In his book “The Fourth Great Awakening and The Future of Egalitarianism,” Fogel found that money doesn’t have the hold on workers that it once did. In an age of abundance, when food and shelter are no longer life’s most pressing needs, people are in search of something more. In our era, Fogel said, we want to become who we were meant to be. We want to create something new and make an impact on society. We want our lives to have lasting value. It won’t be long, the author predicted, before “social impact” becomes our primary motivation.
We are, said Eric Raymond, in “The Cathedral & the Bazaar,” now motivated by passion. Which begs the question: A passion for what?
More to Life Than Bread
In “The Rise of the Creative Class,” Florida offered a revealing illustration. He tells the story of a technology officer at a Seattle-based software startup. The man had given up a successful career in academia, tossed the security aside for “the high-risk world of a startup.” The reason: He wanted to see his ideas change the world. “It’s not enough to publish papers and advance theory,” he told the researcher. “Your work needs to make a difference in people’s lives.”
The French philosopher-theologian Jacques Maritain envisioned this very thing in the middle of the last century. In the 1940s, Maritain argued that the Bible’s warnings about wealth had been made in an age of scarcity. They were written and first read when few people took food and shelter for granted, and when dreams of a full cupboard seduced like no other idol. As affluence grew, Maritain forecast, attitudes would change; they’d be recast by the firsthand knowledge of what wealth could actually buy.
Maritain had foreseen that “the aftertaste of affluence is boredom.” Wealth would one day lose its luster, he predicted, and humans would be lured by grander dreams. They’d be drawn by things of the spirit, he said, for which “their hungers are infinite and in no danger of being sated.” More recently, the late theologian Michael Novak observed that, “Those who have eaten awhile of material success know that there is more to life than bread.”
This explains the story we’ve heard countless times — about those who’ve earned more fame, fortune, and power than they ever dreamed of and yet find themselves wanting; who, despite their conspicuous success, feel cheated as though the thing they most crave still eludes them; who have discovered that success, like all idols, doesn’t satisfy.
We long for our lives to matter, and this yearning, along with our talents and gifts, is inborn. As Novak points out, it comes from a place beyond ourselves and is why, when we see that our work satisfies another’s need, something inside assures us: This is why we were made.
If that internal voice is true, and if the church’s early confessions are also true, that our purpose is to know and worship God, then our work — in the home or at the office — must be a form of devotion. Author Michael Wittmer points out in his book “Heaven Is a Place on Earth,” that our work isn’t a means to our ends or a path to self-discovery; our work isn’t some expansive terrain where we set out to “find ourselves.” Our work, Wittmer says — as waiters, citizens, lawyers, and teachers — is where we’re to lose ourselves for Christ’s sake, and discover the meaning we so urgently crave (Matthew 10:39).
When we see that our work satisfies another’s need, something inside assures us: This is why we were made.
This tension presses on every human. Regardless of what one believes about God, the fact remains that we are created to live and work in this world, and yet it never completely satisfies. We are tailor-made for the earth, and yet we long for something more. We are natural creatures, Wittmer tell us, but we have this nagging sense that we were made for a supernatural purpose.
What so many of our colleagues don’t understand, and what the economists and social scientists can’t explain, is that we yearn for more because there is more. There is something infinitely beyond the busyness, money, pleasure, and stuff, Wittmer says. And that nagging voice inside implores us to find it. It tells us that our work is about more than paying bills. It declares that the value of what we do is worth incalculably more than numbers on our paycheck. It tells us that work fits us and satisfies us for a reason, and that it is inextricably tied to the purpose of our existence.
Work, and What It Means to Be Human
Most people long for significance and yet, at the same time, believe they’re nothing more the product of arbitrary biological mutations. Almost everyone wants life to matter, and yet most have concluded that they — with their personalities, gifts, and delightful talents — are merely the byproduct of mindless causes and senseless effects, part of a haphazard process that began 4 billion years with a pointless gigantic bang. They want to have a long-lasting impact, says Wittmer, even though they’re certain that when they die, they’ll be left to rot in a six-foot hole, their bodies less permanent than the nameplate that marks their grave.
Our non-Christian neighbors believe they began as a pointless fluke and that they’re destined for oblivion. And yet they cling to the hope that the interim few years matter. The world’s best scholars insist that to find significance we need to know who we are, but that’s the riddle they can’t solve. Their sources don’t reveal life’s linchpin truths that human beings are the image of God, the visible presence of the invisible Creator, and the primary means by which He carries out His work in the world. They don’t know, and therefore can never explain, that it is in that identity that we find our meaning.
It follows then, says theologian Albert Wolters, that God’s will is done on earth one of two ways: directly by God or indirectly by His image bearers. We see God’s handiwork in the magnitude and intricacy of the universe. God created the solar system. He placed and maintains each planet in its precise orbit. He causes spring to follow winter and brings fruits and flowers from tiny seeds.
Other tasks, Wolters says, particularly those that affect the direction and purpose of society, are ours. It’s our responsibility to create businesses and economies. God expects us to form governments and legal systems. We’re to create educational institutions, design and construct buildings, and produce books, art, and music. God put us here to create the policies, practices, and structures that cause life and creation to thrive. He put us here to develop the customs, habits, and traditions that give life meaning.
We’re God’s image, even as we’re citizens, neighbors, and taxpayers. We’re His image when we’re entrepreneurs, managers, and employees. We’re the visible presence of God on earth when we are judges, lawyers, and jurors.
We live with the understanding that God directly rules the things that are beyond our reach, says Wolters, and that He rules indirectly, through us, in culture and society. We live, knowing that in the beginning He created all things, and that at this moment He’s “hold[ing] all things together” (Colossians 1:16-17). We trust that as we make sales, teach math, write laws, and fold laundry, God is sustaining all things by His powerful Word (Hebrews 1:2-3). We have confidence that He’s present in all we do and that He’s working through us to accomplish His will on earth, just as it is in heaven.
When we ponder the world God made, we have to marvel: The sun rises and sets right on time, the tides advance and withdraw according to schedule, and summer gives way to fall with perfect precision. God built the universe to a set of exacting standards, Wolters explains, so that it — and we — would thrive.
Likewise, he continues, God created the world so that our social institutions — business, education, law, and government — also thrive when they conform to certain, intrinsic realities. Businesspeople, scientists, and artists — in fact, those in every field — recognize that certain standards apply to their work. That’s how we know that Leonardo da Vinci was a masterful painter, that Isaac Newton was a brilliant scientist, that Steve Jobs was an entrepreneurial genius, and Marilynne Robinson is a gifted writer. We understand that each discipline has a unique purpose: Business meets one objective; science serves another. Art makes one kind of cultural contribution, while government exists for altogether different reasons. We approach our own work with the understanding that everything fits together; our work (and our neighbors’) is a component part of this vast interconnected system.
By God’s design, the world works in particular ways, and He’s given us, His image bearers, the capacity to know them. He has created us to understand what works and what doesn’t and to understand what’s right, good, and wise. As a result, our lives and His world can flourish.
And it’s then that the questions will come.
RICHARD DOSTER is the editor of byFaith.
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