We Are Makers — Lessons on Vocation from Dorothy Sayers
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | - Pastor John, I know you appreciate Dorothy Sayers
00:00:07.520 | and what she has to say about vocation.
00:00:09.860 | In the next few moments, would you share with us
00:00:11.560 | a little bit about what you have learned
00:00:13.060 | from her about work?
00:00:14.560 | - Dorothy Sayers died in 1957,
00:00:18.800 | and when I was a senior in college in 1968,
00:00:23.800 | I think it was February, I read her book,
00:00:28.960 | "Mind of the Maker," and was riveted by it.
00:00:33.960 | I had fallen in love with language and writing
00:00:38.440 | when I was in the 11th grade,
00:00:40.260 | and now I'm a senior in college,
00:00:43.280 | and I read this book about the connection
00:00:47.880 | between God's mind and God's Trinitarian nature
00:00:52.800 | and God's creativity in making the world
00:00:56.200 | and making us in his image,
00:00:57.560 | and then our being co-creators with him, makers.
00:01:02.560 | And the more I thought about it,
00:01:04.120 | and then just recently thinking about it again,
00:01:07.360 | the more amazing it is to me that we have been both made
00:01:12.360 | and remade in Christ to be makers.
00:01:18.120 | In other words, when God put Adam and Eve in the garden,
00:01:20.560 | he put them there to take what he had made,
00:01:23.980 | they don't create out of nothing,
00:01:25.700 | and then create something out of it,
00:01:27.280 | make something good and beautiful and useful out of it.
00:01:31.120 | And then we lost our capacities to serve righteousness
00:01:36.120 | and he's remaking us, and then you get to Ephesians 2,
00:01:40.000 | and we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus
00:01:44.640 | for good works.
00:01:47.840 | And then I did a little thinking and poking around
00:01:51.240 | and noticed that the Greek word for do
00:01:55.560 | is the same word as make,
00:01:57.360 | ploieo, from which we get the word poem,
00:01:59.480 | and God, we are his workmanship,
00:02:02.040 | is the word for poem or made one.
00:02:05.960 | And it just hit me that virtually everything we do in life
00:02:10.960 | is the making of something into something else.
00:02:16.280 | We make something happen or we make something last,
00:02:18.680 | or we make something into something else.
00:02:20.760 | We make a rocky field into a garden
00:02:23.360 | or a stick into a spear,
00:02:25.840 | or a rock into a hammer,
00:02:28.080 | or a room, an empty apartment into a home,
00:02:32.880 | we make a cow into a steak,
00:02:34.920 | and the list just goes on and on
00:02:37.240 | so that people, I think,
00:02:39.360 | just be really, really good for Christians
00:02:41.760 | to think of themselves as being made the first time
00:02:46.760 | and remade as people who are makers with God.
00:02:52.160 | They are called to take what God has made
00:02:55.720 | in all of its now present fallenness
00:02:58.800 | and remake it into something Godward and beautiful
00:03:03.720 | and Christ-honoring as a deep sense of fulfillment
00:03:07.920 | of who we are as created in the image of a maker.
00:03:12.920 | That was the gist behind Dorothy Sare's
00:03:16.040 | mind of the maker.
00:03:19.080 | And to this day, I'm very inspired.
00:03:21.000 | And even as I head into retirement time,
00:03:24.840 | which I hope isn't retirement,
00:03:27.200 | I'll be a more effective, aggressive,
00:03:30.920 | Christ-honoring maker than I ever have been.
00:03:34.320 | - Amen, thank you, Pastor John,
00:03:37.000 | and thank you for listening to this podcast.
00:03:38.800 | If you have a question for Pastor John,
00:03:39.900 | please send it to us via email
00:03:41.120 | at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.
00:03:43.440 | Please include your first name and your hometown.
00:03:45.220 | You can find thousands of other free resources
00:03:46.960 | from John Piper online at desiringgod.org.
00:03:49.480 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening.
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