Yesterday I blogged on the vision of The Gospel Coalition because I had just received a newsletter from them that communicated it so well.

Turns out I also recently received a newsletter from The Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics (IFWE) which similarly lays out their vision extremely well. IFWE is also an excellent organization that is worth knowing about and following.

Here’s how Hugh Whelchel, executive director of IFWE, starts the newsletter:

“What does IFWE do?” is almost always the first question I am asked about our work at the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics.

Whether you read our articles every day or every week, you know that we provide perspective and practical insight on the integration of faith and work through our blog.

But did you know that IFWE also has campus programs, curriculum, and more books coming this year? To highlight some of the other resources we have developed for you, we have put together this Impact Report to share our story and the stories of those men and women who have been changed by our work.

He then links to their Impact Report, which is super helpful and worth taking a look at.

One thing worth highlighting from the report is the way they lay out their aim and distinctives in the early pages. It is very simple, and here it is:

Mission

IFWE’s mission is to inspire and educate Christians to live out a biblical theology that integrates faith, work, and economics.

Vision

IFWE’s vision is a free society characterized by greater creativity and increased human flourishing.

Core Values

• Freedom inspires creativity and enterprise. Freedom empowers us to thrive in our work and serve others. Freedom affirms our dignity and the dignity of others.
• Fulfillment comes when we use our God-given talents to pursue excellence in our work. Fulfillment is the mark of a life spent glorifying God, enriching others, and finding satisfaction in using our gifts as God intended.
• Flourishing is fullness of life, wholeness, and abundance. Flourishing is the natural outflow of freedom and fulfillment. When we flourish, we contribute to the fruitfulness of our communities, the thriving of our cities, and the peace and justice of our nations.

What We Do

IFWE conducts high level theological and economic research and translates it into practical resources to help Christians integrate their faith in the workplace and empower them to become better stewards of all their God-given talents and resources.

IFWE’s message is both theologically profound and extremely practical. A robust biblical view of work and economics is intensely relevant to Christians today.

Specifically, the resources IFWE produces to equip Christians include their blog, research papers on their website, videos, e-books, events, and student programs.

A few words on IFWE’s vision. First, teaching on how to integrate our faith and work as Christians is incredibly needed right now. I am so thankful that they are doing this, and doing it so well. We spend far more time at work than at church and, usually, in any other single activity. So it is crucial that we understand how this huge segment of life relates to our faith.

Second, it is absolutely essential to think of our work in connection to economics as well. This is because our work is always carried out in a larger ecosystem — the economic environment of our nation. Good economic policies contribute to the flourishing of work; bad economic policies hinder work and its ability to improve society. IFWE makes this connection and gets it, recognizing that freedom is at the heart of all good economic policy.

Third, I’m so glad that they are not afraid to use words like “fulfillment” and “flourishing.” Perhaps because of our fear of the prosperity gospel, theologically-minded evangelicals can sometimes shrink from affirming the importance of fulfillment and flourishing. We can almost be hesitant to talk about making things go well.

IFWE is careful to understand “fulfillment” and “flourishing” in holistic terms. Hence, central to their understanding of true fulfillment and flourishing is a relationship with God. True fulfillment, in other words, has God as its center. Further, when God so calls, this can co-exist with suffering and difficulty when that is the path of obedience to him.

Yet, our ultimate aim for others is not to let suffering be, but to enable people to be fulfilled and to flourish in a truly holistic sense — socially and economically as well as spiritually. This comes through a biblical understanding of work and economics, with our aim in all things being the good of others and glory of God.

Fourth, IFWE bases all that it does on sound research and evidence. They aren’t just espousing their own ideas. They are thoroughly grounded in the Scriptures and what the evidence shows to be a proper (and biblical) understanding of economics. This is what gives ideas their power — showing that they arise from sound evidence, rather than wishful thinking.

It is worth checking out their website to learn more about IFWE, and following their blog every day.

Sometimes in evangelicalism today, it can be looked down on when somebody works a lot, or works hard, or takes risks for the cause of the gospel. The first thought is not always “way to go,” but rather “you must be doing something wrong.”

The Bible does not share that perspective. Paul tells us that “his grace toward me was not in vain….I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (1 Corinthians 15:11) and “we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you, while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God” (1 Thessalonians 2:9). Perhaps most of all, he holds up to us Epaphroditus:

Receive him in the Lord with all joy, and honor such men, for he nearly died for the work of Christ, risking his life to complete what was lacking in your service to me (Philippians 2:29-30).

So if you find yourself working a lot, and working really hard, by all means do seek to work less and find the right balance in your life. I’ve even written a book to, in part, try to help you do that.

But, in the meantime, way to go — and, thanks.

Matt Heerema recently preached an excellent sermon on how the gospel affects our work. This is the first message in a series his church is doing on the doctrine of vocation.

Here’s a great section where Matt summarizes why it is so important to understand God’s design and purpose for our work:

If we don’t get this right then we will sense, as I’m guessing many of us do, a disconnect between our spiritual life and our work life, and we will fall into one of several traps.

If we consider our daily work as eternally meaningless then some of us might put zero thought and effort into a potential career in the marketplace that could very well be one or five or ten of the talents that our Heavenly Master is entrusting into our care!

Or some of us might buy into the World’s system of doing work, according to the world’s philosophies of how to conduct business and treat each-other, and if you are a believer this will likely cause you a great amount of guilt or confusion and distance from God.

Or perhaps you will simply resign yourself to the drudgery of a “meaningless” work life, gritting your teeth against the inherent worldliness and worthlessness of it all.

And in every case we will miss the joy, pleasure, and power we can experience when we realize our daily “mundane” and “secular” tasks can glorify God and expand His kingdom in real and ways. And I’m hoping that as a result of this series, we’ll learn to be encouraged that our daily work matters to Him and will count for something eternal.

And most of all, because of that, we’ll become equipped to live every moment or our life with a constant awareness of His presence, His help, His concern, and His pleasure with and for our work, and let us do all that we do for His Glory!

You can both read and listen to the sermon online.

A good article by Andy Crouch in Christianity Today on how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are taking a leap of faith to create technology that makes you more human.

It turns out that there are lots of Christians in Silicon Valley, and it is very encouraging to see how they are thinking about things and what they are doing.

Here’s a key part that gets at the essence of what Crouch has found:

Like the other Christians profiled in this story, Saber and Munro are not in the least interested in starting or running a “Christian company.” And also like the others, they relentlessly ask how their Christian faith shapes the company they have founded and run.

That’s a conjunction that I find very interesting. These Christians have a holistic perspective. They realize that the gospel matters for all of life, and yet also realize that the gospel calls us to avoid being spiritually weird (for example, promoting yourself as a Christian company while doing bad work, and not realizing the mismatch). The gospel is to shape the things we do in real ways, not artificial ways.

This is a much better testimony to the gospel than the guy who hands out tracts at the water cooler but who nobody wants on their team because he doesn’t realize that God wants him to actually care about his job.

Here’s another great quote:

We see business as a powerful instrument for aligning the human experience with its original design….Poverty, sickness, environmental degradation—we think God cares about these things and wants to be involved. So we believe he will be present when we ask.

Well said!

Justin Taylor gives a great answer to this question, which helps us all understand how any area of life or occupation we have — whether bus driver, marketing director, CEO, web designer, programmer, custodian, or anything else — relates to our faith.

Justin shows that the single question of whether there is a “Christian” way to do seemingly “secular” things actually breaks down into several questions. These are the questions he answers, using a bus driver as the example:

• Does the Bible teach how to be a bus driver?
• Does the Bible teach how to be a Christian bus driver?
• Can a non-Christian be a good bus driver?
• Can a non-Christian be a better bus driver than a Christian?
• Is there a distinctively Christian way to think about the particulars of each vocation?

Here’s what it comes down to: the gospel changes three chief things concerning the way we go about work that is chiefly in the arena of common grace:

1. Our motive
2. Our standards
3. Our foundation (source of strength)

That is a slightly different way of stating it than Justin, but it is based on the same principles and comes down to the same thing.

As Justin points out, the gospel does not chiefly change our methods. For example, the Christian bus driver doesn’t have to put on special glasses before hopping into the drivers seat, still stops at red lights rather than green lights (let’s hope), and turns left by steering the wheel to the left and not right.

Read the whole thing.

Jesus says “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (Matthew 6).

In the Middle Ages, before the Reformation, it was thought that life was divided into two areas — the “perfect life” and the “permissible life.” Those in “full time Christian service” lived the perfect life, and everyone else was relegated to second class — your life was acceptable, but not most important. If you wanted to live a truly important life, you had to be in “ministry” (which was also conceived of very differently then).

Jesus explodes this error.

He doesn’t do this by saying “the things of the world are as important as the things of God.” The teaching of the Bible is not that there are no priorities in life. Seeking the kingdom of God is the most important thing.

But the revolutionary teaching of Jesus and the Bible is that you don’t have to be a pastor or missionary or full-time Christian worker to do this.

Wherever you are, whatever your job, you can and must seek the kingdom of God first.

That’s the doctrine of vocation. The doctrine of vocation does not say that you don’t have to seek the kingdom of God first. Rather, it says that this life is open and available to everyone, regardless of your job or station in life. All of us, no matter where we are or what we do for a living, are equally able to seek the kingdom of God and put it first.

As Paul said, “if then you have been raised with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is” (Colossians 3:1ff.) And as he shows through the rest of the chapter, we do this not by retreating from the world to live like monks, but by obeying Jesus’ teaching in all areas of life.

You don’t have to leave the world or be a pastor to obey Jesus’ teaching. You just need to do all things for his glory and the good of others in all areas of life, and you can do this even if you have no control at all over your job (Colossians 3:22-25).

That’s the revolutionary doctrine of vocation. Not that the things of this world are as important as the things of God, but that you can seek the things of God from any station and calling in this world. This, then, transfigures all of life with the presence of God.

My friend Doug Wolter is a pastor at Oak Hill Baptist Church and is preaching through Colossians. He invited me down to preach on Colossians 3:22-4:1 yesterday, and I preached on what it means to do our work unto the Lord and for the good of others.

This also involved laying out a bit of a Christian doctrine of work from this text, since what the Bible has to say about our work is so often overlooked these days. You can listen to the message here.