(upbeat music) - Tim Keller is the founder of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, and he's the author of many helpful books, including one on work and vocation that has been very helpful to me. It's titled Every Good Endeavor, Connecting Your Work to God's Work. I talked with Dr.

Keller on the important topics of business, vocation, and calling, and along the way we talked to college graduates entering the workforce and to Christians who feel stuck in their jobs. I began by asking him why it seems that applying a biblical worldview to the workplace seems so slippery, so elusive.

- Well, I think it's probably because of the fact that the church doesn't have a uniform. There's not a consensus on how the church is supposed to relate to culture more generally. And actually, there's another book, this book Center Church, in which I try to tackle that. I don't tackle it in the Every Good Endeavor book.

But basically, you've got very different views on how the church should relate to the culture. It's based on very different views about common grace. It's based on somewhat different views about actually the role of the institutional church. And because of that, I think the doctrine of vocation, which everybody says, oh yeah, it's really important, really important, that all work is a calling from God, and that where work is important, and that God has to come, you need to bring your faith and God to bear on your work.

You have to have some important, but then the problem is that doctrine of vocation gets caught up in this controversy. So people come out, really, since there's no consensus on how to relate to the culture, there's no consensus on what vocation means. - Those are interesting entailments. You know, early in the book, you write two sentences that I think are really important to get at sort of what this book is about.

You write this quote, "A job is a vocation "only if someone else calls you to it "and you do it for them rather than for yourself. "Thinking of working mainly as a means of self-fulfillment "and self-realization slowly crushes the person "and undermines society itself." End quote, wow. Talk a little more about the corrosive influence of individualism in the workplace.

- Well, the basic idea, the basic secular idea is that there is no meaning in life. We're here by accident. There's no overarching, there's no moral absolutes. There's no, we weren't put here for a purpose. But then what most of the folks say, I've seen this in many forums, they say, "Well, of course there's no meaning in life.

"You have to create your own meaning." So I've seen a lot of secular people and atheists say, "Yes, of course there's no meaning to life, "but that doesn't mean that we can't live a fruitful life "and a happy life, you create your own meaning." Well, now, actually, somebody should drill down on that at some point, maybe I will, and say, "It's impossible to create your own meaning.

"If you create your own meaning, you don't have it." But basically what they mean is, you decide what is right or wrong for you, you decide what you think is important, and then you live according to that. But in that case, there's no calling. There's no sense that I am, there is something higher than me that's more important than me.

So you see, if you don't have that, then there's no such thing as sacrifice and servanthood. Everything you do is selfish. Everything you do is selfish. And there's also no real hope. There's no real hope for the future. You just basically are trying to create a little bit of happiness for yourself in this brief span of time that you have, but in the end, there's nothing but darkness.

So when you put those two things together, the idea of vocation, and the idea of hope, and the idea of servanthood, and the idea of sacrifice and unselfishness, it all actually depends on there being something more important than you, something that's already there, like God. So the whole idea of vocation's gone, and work is nothing but a way of getting ahead, and it is crushing us, I think.

- Yeah. So realities above and outside of us are crucial for love, or everything we do is selfish. Like you said, that's a really important point. So we do have a God over our work, and that means that love for others is really central to the idea of selflessness in our vocation.

I mean, this is a really practical question, but if a Christian shows up for work on Monday morning, and they're irritable towards others, and they're grumpy, what's wrong? - Well, in the book I talk about the fact that the gospel is brought to bear on our work in a couple of different ways.

One of them is the heart. One of them is the grumpiness, and the anger, and the only doing what I have to do to get by, and that means it's a lack of a gospel character. The gospel's supposed to make you grateful, supposed to make you humble, supposed to give you inner peace, it's supposed to make you generous in your spirit, and if you just don't show all those things at work, it means that the gospel hasn't really, you're not really letting the gospel change the heart the way it ought to.

And by the way, in the long run, a gospel-changed heart usually makes you a pretty good worker, makes people want to work with you, makes people want to be on your team, makes employers happy with your work. So in the long run, having a gospel-changed heart actually is pretty practical in the field of work.

I think the first time I heard the phrase God of options was from Mark Dever, he was talking about young pastors who take a pastorate in a local church, but they're always half in. You know, they're always eyeing a different church, always looking for a new church, a bigger church, a better church, a better position, and so they're not committed to their church and their position now.

They're sort of half in. Yet the Bible calls us to, you know, whatever we do, we are supposed to work heartily. And there seems to be a common thread with Christians in the workplace who are in their position as well. You know, they're sort of half in. They're sort of drawn to this, quote, God of options idea that they're never all in in one particular job.

Do you see this as a problem? - Yes. Actually, I'm being a little ironic, but what I'd say, just say yes, but your question was well stated, and I agree with it. I can just add this. People are looking for the more fulfilling thing. Very often they say, you know, I'd like something that is just a little bit, a job that's just a little more exciting to me.

This job's a little boring to me and better paying. I think the Christian understanding of vocation is if you produce a product, if you produce something that makes people's lives better, even if it's a rather boring process to do it, you're doing God's work. You're caring for God's creation.

You're serving people's needs. Why does it have to be so incredibly, why does the process have to be incredibly fulfilling when you know that you are doing something that helps people? And I do think that that's part of what I mean when I say that we've lost the idea of calling, and we are looking now at work as ways of fulfillment, and that actually in the end crushes you, so you're always half out.

- Yeah. I love what you wrote in your book. On page 36 is one of my favorite lines. Quote, work did not come into creation after a golden age of leisure. End quote. So your work is deeply embedded in creation. I mean, this is pre-fall stuff. It's glorious. It's according to God's good design.

So this is a parenting question for you, but I think it's one that's relevant to all of us. I mean, how do I as a dad teach and train my children, my boys I'm thinking of right now, age 11 and seven, that they were created to work, that it's part of their very humanness, that it is deeply embedded into them by their creator?

How do I do this as a parent? - 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. You say, 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, to what degree they don't, and then you try to make it simpler until you feel like you've hit home.

- That is so good. Thank you, Tim. We're gonna stop there and break today. We'll return tomorrow and I'll ask you about what we should do when we don't like our jobs. What next? And how, if any, is our work connected to the morality of a corporation and related questions when it comes to our jobs.

I'm your host, Tony Reinhart. I'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for listening. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)