(upbeat music) - Pastor John, I know you appreciate Dorothy Sayers and what she has to say about vocation. In the next few moments, would you share with us a little bit about what you have learned from her about work? - Dorothy Sayers died in 1957, and when I was a senior in college in 1968, I think it was February, I read her book, "Mind of the Maker," and was riveted by it.

I had fallen in love with language and writing when I was in the 11th grade, and now I'm a senior in college, and I read this book about the connection between God's mind and God's Trinitarian nature and God's creativity in making the world and making us in his image, and then our being co-creators with him, makers.

And the more I thought about it, and then just recently thinking about it again, the more amazing it is to me that we have been both made and remade in Christ to be makers. In other words, when God put Adam and Eve in the garden, he put them there to take what he had made, they don't create out of nothing, and then create something out of it, make something good and beautiful and useful out of it.

And then we lost our capacities to serve righteousness and he's remaking us, and then you get to Ephesians 2, and we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works. And then I did a little thinking and poking around and noticed that the Greek word for do is the same word as make, ploieo, from which we get the word poem, and God, we are his workmanship, is the word for poem or made one.

And it just hit me that virtually everything we do in life is the making of something into something else. We make something happen or we make something last, or we make something into something else. We make a rocky field into a garden or a stick into a spear, or a rock into a hammer, or a room, an empty apartment into a home, we make a cow into a steak, and the list just goes on and on so that people, I think, just be really, really good for Christians to think of themselves as being made the first time and remade as people who are makers with God.

They are called to take what God has made in all of its now present fallenness and remake it into something Godward and beautiful and Christ-honoring as a deep sense of fulfillment of who we are as created in the image of a maker. That was the gist behind Dorothy Sare's mind of the maker.

And to this day, I'm very inspired. And even as I head into retirement time, which I hope isn't retirement, I'll be a more effective, aggressive, Christ-honoring maker than I ever have been. - Amen, thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. If you have a question for Pastor John, please send it to us via email at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.

Please include your first name and your hometown. You can find thousands of other free resources from John Piper online at desiringgod.org. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)