(upbeat music) - Welcome back to the podcast. As I mentioned last time, Pastor John is in the middle of a very busy ministry month of January, and I would ask for your prayers on his behalf. He began the year preaching at the Cross Conference in Louisville, a little later at the G3 Conference in Atlanta he spoke, and now he prepares for the 2019 Bethlehem College and Seminary Pastors Conference on the theme of Christian joy.

Looking forward to that. That conference is here in Minneapolis. It begins on Monday and it ends on Wednesday. Again, your prayers would be appreciated. And one more time, with Pastor John out of the pocket, we are joined by Tim Keller over the phone from New York City to talk about vocation and work in his really helpful book, "Every Good Endeavor, "Connecting Your Work to God's Work." Tim, yesterday we talked about vocational misuse when we think of work only in terms of self-fulfillment, self-realization, and how it slowly crushes a person when they approach their vocation that way.

This is a huge topic for parents who are desiring to train their kids for this diligent labor in the future. In your book you write this, quote, "Work did not come into creation "after a golden age of leisure," end quote. That's a great point. Work did not come into creation after a golden age of leisure.

Human labor is deliberately embedded into creation from the start, as you know. I love this line. Speak to parents, though, building off of this. Tim, how do I as a dad teach and train my kids about the divine value of work? - Well, you have to get the basic doctrines of creation and fall and redemption, and you have to give it to children at every age, but you have to give it in a form that they can handle at that age.

But I think you have to say that work was put into the Garden of Eden. When God had everything absolutely perfect, there was work. And that must mean that even though in this life, work is often difficult. Our bodies break down, so work can actually wear us down. Our minds and our hearts aren't what they should be because of sin, and very often we have trouble paying attention to things.

But basically, in the end, we were made to work, and we're only happy if we do work. And you can even say people that don't have work or don't do work in the long run get depressed. And the reason why they do that is because we were made for it.

We were made to find fulfillment in working and being useful to others in that work. And I think there's a way of getting that across to 11-year-olds and seven-year-olds. The way I raise children, too. You say things, you're not sure they get it. You find out in question and answer to what degree they understood it and what degree they don't, and then you try to make it simpler until you feel like you've hit home.

- Yeah, absolutely, very true, good word. Okay, so the kid grows up. Fast forward to a young man or a woman now seriously contemplating a career path. One of the things you say in your book is that you find in New York City that a number of young college graduates select careers as a form of personal identity.

A career becomes something like a car, is a status marker. Explain that phenomenon, what do you see? - Well, there's been a lot of great books written recently on this idea that we live in a consumeristic age in which your identity is seen in the products you consume. I'm the kind of person that wears this kind of clothing, owns this kind of, these electronics, these are the accessories I use.

So you actually get your identity from the brands that you use. And I'm afraid that what's happened here is that jobs are like that too. And there's just no doubt, I see plenty of people taking jobs that really don't fit. A, it doesn't fit their talents very well. And B, very often the jobs don't necessarily fulfill them because the jobs aren't really maybe helping people very much, but the jobs are high status.

And because they're high status, people feel like I need to be in that job so I can feel good about myself. So it's an identity marker. So people are very often not choosing jobs on the basis of vocation, not saying what gifts do I have and how can I be useful to other people through my work?

But how do I take a job that gives me the same kind of sense of self-worth I get when I'm driving a particular kind of car? - Yeah, that's an important word. Okay, so let me press into vocation from the consumer's perspective and post you a little hypothetical scenario, if you will.

Let's say in ancient Babylon, there's a man who grows straw. He's good at it. He works hard. He serves his buyer well. He always delivers the product on time. He never overcharges. His straw then is purchased and is immediately used to create reinforced baked bricks that are stacked by other laborers into the Tower of Babel.

All of that to ask, at what point is the straw grower's vocation made virtuous or corrupt by the end product down the chain? How do you think through that? - Well, I mean, I think you have to be very directly collaborating with the evil before you start to try to get that.

See, the trouble with the purest impulse is this. If I make bread and I know that there are criminals in town eating that bread and staying alive because of my bread making, should I really get out of that? Should I say, okay, well, only a certain percent, well, only a certain percent.

I'm helping them live. I mean, if you actually, Luther would laugh at the idea that you in some pure way have to make sure that your work only furthers godly ends. He says, your job is there to, God feeds everything that has breath. Luther expounds the Psalms, especially Psalms 145 and 146, 147, where it talks about God feeds everything that has breath.

He loves everything that he's made. And Luther then says, okay, well, how does God feed everybody? Well, he feeds them through the farmer. He feeds them through the milkmaid, who's milking the cow. He feeds it through the truck driver who's bringing the things to market. That's really God's work then.

If you're just farming, you're doing God's work. It doesn't have to be a Christian farmer. You just do it and it's God's work. But then at a certain point, I do believe 'cause I'm Reformed and I believe in world view, importance of world view, that work also does need to have, it has to be done from a Christian perspective.

But I also think that Luther's got something to say, that all work is good work if it's done well. And that if you actually try to say, well, this work is actually helping someone who's furthering evil ends, at a certain point you'd be completely paralyzed. You couldn't do anything.

- Right, yeah. So apply Luther's logic a step further and apply it to that Christian brother or sister we talked about last time on Wednesday who feels trapped in a vocation that they don't like. - Luther's understanding of calling is that the farm girl who's milking the cows needs to, even if it's the only job available to her and she'd like to go somewhere else, she needs to see what she's doing is God's calling.

She needs to see that this isn't just milking cows, this is my way of participating in God's care for his creation. Because he has decided this is how I'm going to do it. - There's a place where Luther takes, I forget what Psalm, where he says, God strengthens the bars of the city gates.

In other words, he gives you security. And then Luther says, but how does God strengthen the bar of your city gates? He does it with good governors and good policemen and good soldiers. And what he's trying to get across is that all good work done well is God's calling.

And that aspect, see, I actually do think that the Calvinist understanding of calling, which is doing God's work from a Christian worldview and the Lutheran understanding of calling, which is simply caring for creation, being useful to other people through the work you do. I do think they're complimentary. I really do.

And I think it's a very big part of the book is to bring out the fact that I think they're complimentary. You've got to use them both. So seeing your work as a calling is not a problem if you're stuck in a job you don't like. You need to say that right now, it's still God's calling.

And that gives me a set, I think that gives you a lot of peace to say, hey, I can still answer God's calling in this job, even when I am looking for a job that I think fits my gifts better. - Really good. Thank you for your time, Dr.

Keller. I wish we had more time together and thank you for writing this really excellent, thoughtful, substantial, and approachable book on vocation, "We Needed It." - Thank you, Tony. I appreciate that. You are most welcome. That was Tim Keller from his office in New York City talking with us about his book, "Every Good Endeavor, Connecting Your Work to God's Work." And this was actually a phone interview I recorded with him a few years back, but never released in the APJ series.

So there you are. And speaking of years, in six years, we have generated over 1,300 episodes in this podcast. And all of them can be found at our online home at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn. Again, please be praying for Pastor John and for the Bethlehem College and Seminary Pastors Conference, which begins on Monday.

It could be live-streamed, maybe, maybe not. Honestly, I don't know if it is or not. Usually it is. In any case, I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)