What's Best Next

  • Newsletter
  • Our Mission
  • Contact
  • Resources
    • Productivity
    • Leadership
    • Management
    • Web Strategy
    • Book Extras
  • Consulting & Training
  • Store
    • Online Store
    • Cart
    • My Account
  • About
    • Our Mission
    • Our Core Values
    • Our Approach to Productivity
    • Our Team
    • Contact
You are here: Home / 1 - Productivity / a Productivity Philosophy / Excellence / Jesus Made Good Tables!

Jesus Made Good Tables!

October 1, 2014 by Matt Perman

God does everything he does with excellence, and Jesus surely never engaged in shoddy work in his time of working as a carpenter before his public ministry. Therefore, we should not settle for shoddy work in our occupations, either.

Yet, because much Christian teaching on work is still thin and compartmentalized, this often happens. We need to correct this by affirming that we are not to compartmentalize our work and our faith, as though God’s call on us applies only in the area of church and our personal lives. Further, if we were able to recapture the compelling biblical vision of work in the church, it would do wonders for the effectiveness of our testimony to the gospel before the world.

I love how Dorothy Sayers makes these points in Why Work:

How can any one remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of life?

The church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays.

What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly — but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? [Great point! Shoddy and careless workmanship is an insult to God because it misrepresents his nature and pervasive concern for all areas of life.]

No crooked table-legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could any one believe that they were made by the same hand that made heaven and earth. No piety in the worker will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own technique is a living lie.

Yet in her own buildings, in her own ecclesiastical art and music, in her hymns and prayers, in her sermons and in her little books of devotion, the church will tolerate, or permit a pious intention to excuse, work so ugly, so pretentious, so tawdry and twaddling, so insincere and insipid, so bad as to shock and horrify any decent craftsman.

And why? Simply because she has lost all sense of the fact that the living and eternal truth is expressed in work only so far as the work is true in itself, to itself, to the standards of its own technique. She has forgotten that the secular vocation is sacred.

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Google+
  • LinkedIn
  • Evernote

Filed Under: Excellence, Work

Feedback to the Editor

About

What’s Best Next exists to help you achieve greater impact with your time and energy — and in a gospel-centered way.

We help you do work that changes the world. We believe this is possible when you reflect the gospel in your work. So here you’ll find resources and training to help you lead, create, and get things done. To do work that matters, and do it better — for the glory of God and flourishing of society.

We call it gospel-driven productivity, and it’s the path to finding the deepest possible meaning in your work and the path to greatest effectiveness.

Learn More

About Matt Perman

Matt Perman started What’s Best Next in 2008 as a blog on God-centered productivity. It has now become an organization dedicated to helping you do work that matters.

Matt is the author of What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done and a frequent speaker on leadership and productivity from a gospel-driven perspective. He has led the website teams at Desiring God and Made to Flourish, and is now director of career development at The King’s College NYC. He lives in Manhattan.

Learn more about Matt

Newsletter

Subscribe for exclusive updates, productivity tips, and free resources right in your inbox.

The Book


Get What’s Best Next
Browse the Free Toolkit
See the Reviews and Interviews

The Video Study and Online Course


Get the video study as a DVD from Amazon or take the online course through Zondervan.

The Study Guide


Get the Study Guide.

Other Books

Webinars

Follow

Follow What's Best next on Twitter or Facebook
Follow Matt on Twitter or Facebook

Foundational Posts

3 Questions on Productivity
How to Get Your Email Inbox to Zero Every Day
Productivity is Really About Good Works
Management in Light of the Supremacy of God
The Resolutions of Jonathan Edwards in Categories
Business: A Sequel to the Parable of the Good Samaritan
How Do You Love Your Neighbor at Work?

Recent Posts

  • How to Learn Anything…Fast
  • Job Searching During the Coronavirus Economy
  • Ministry Roundtable Discussion on the Pandemic with Challies, Heerema, Cosper, Thacker, and Schumacher
  • Is Calling Some Jobs Essential a Helpful Way of Speaking?
  • An Interview on Coronavirus and Productivity

Sponsors

Useful Group

Posts by Date

Posts by Topic

Search Whatsbestnext.com

Copyright © 2025 - What's Best Next. All Rights Reserved. Contact Us.