More and more people are asking today the important question, “How does the gospel relate to my work?”
There is a lot that can be said on this, and for the best treatment out there I recommend Tim Keller’s excellent book Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work.
But for immediate application, if you are looking for a few simple ways to begin letting the gospel impact your work right now, here are two things that go to the heart of it:
- Do your work from acceptance with God, not for acceptance with God. Realize you are fully accepted in Christ apart from anything you do, through faith alone. Hence, you do not have to fall into the grueling race of working to prove yourself or validate your worth.
- Do your work for the good of others. Because God accepts us apart from our works, we are free to truly do it for others. This is a simple but radical shift. It means seeing your work as a way of serving and benefitting people, not just a way to make money or accomplish your goals. Do your work truly from love, from a good will toward others, just as everything in the Christian life is to be done from love (1 Corinthians 16:14). This is what it means to be “rendering service with a good will” (Ephesians 6:7).