Well, how does one climb the corporate ladder all for the sake of the gospel? Today's question comes from a podcast listener named Dan with a very good question. "Pastor John, thank you for the podcast. I recently heard the episode on work and how we glorify God at our jobs.

I want to glorify God in all things, and my question is more detailed. I know that I can glorify God in my work. I also know that work is my mission field. The question is really how do I balance my earthly work with eternal work? How do I balance climbing the corporate ladder at the same time pursuing relationships and caring for the lost?

As a Christian, do I simply say that God will take care of me and I don't need to focus on climbing the ladder at all? Or as a Christian, is it glorifying to God for me to be great at my job and to get promoted? Then how do I also not forget about reaching out to others?

How do I find balance in this tension, Pastor John?" In one sense, it's presumptuous of me to try to answer this question, because I've never had a long-term, full-time job other than teaching and preaching. There were summers when I worked full-time digging swimming pools one summer, bagging groceries one summer, working in the shipping department filling boxes one summer, working as a water safety instructor at a camp one summer, being a pole holder at a surveying company one summer.

But I never felt any sense of long-term calling to any of those, nor any hope of advancement. They just were filling the time, putting money in the bank so I could get married someday, maybe, and get myself through school. None of those jobs lasted longer than several months, so I'm just not experienced in Dan's situation, but I assume he knows that, since he's still asking me, asking the Bible guy for counsel.

So, all right, let's go for it. And you can decide whether what I'm saying is coming out of a spiritual ivory tower that has no use for real world, or whether it might be helpful. So it seems to me that the challenge Dan is facing, and that all of us face, is the challenge of how to live a fully integrated—and that's the key word—integrated Christ-honoring life.

So Dan poses the question in terms of balance. Balancing earthly work and eternal work. Balancing efforts to become excellent in the vocational tasks of climbing the ladder, and excellence in loving people, and evangelizing people, and caring about people. And really, what he's asking, I think, and what we all want, is a life that is so integrated with Christ as the agent of the integration that we don't feel pulled in separate directions, right?

So we're not standing between saying, "Oh, I feel both," but rather the whole thing feels cohesive, it feels whole, it feels like there's integrity to all the pieces of my life. That's what we're after. So let me suggest that the real challenge for Dan, and people in the work world like that, is probably asking the question of, "What is required in my specific vocational tasks that every unbeliever as well as believer has to do?" The challenge then is that these tasks can feel not very distinctly Christian, and therefore not fully integrated into a coherent life where tasks and relationships are just pulled apart from each other.

So that's what we want to try to move beyond. And the way I've tried to approach it is that there are questions to ask, or reflections, or ponderings on our specific vocational tasks that might begin to transform those, what he calls "earthly work," into something more coherent with the rest of our life.

So I'm going to name about ten of these. Just name them real quick. And maybe this will help Dan convert earthly work, so-called, into the obedience of faith and an honor to Jesus so that everything feels more coherent. So here we go. Number one, ponder the ultimate aim. And I'm going to emphasize the key word each time, it's a key word, "aim." Ponder the ultimate aim of the tasks and the less-than-ultimate aims and see if you can state those aims in terms of specifically Christian or Christ-exalting outcomes for the company.

Number two, ponder how the quality of your work relates to the nature of God and your calling as a Christian. Can you see the quality, the excellence of your work, not merely in a worldly way, but in a Christian way of testimony, not just a worldly way of advancement?

Number three, ponder your tasks as forms of service. Think them through in the category of how they serve other people, both in their outcomes and in the way you do them. Christians are fundamentally servants of others. We count others more significant than ourselves, that is, we count them worthy of our service.

Number four, ponder your tasks in relationship to the value of honesty or integrity. How will absolute allegiance to the truth shape the way you do what you do, and how is that rooted in allegiance to Jesus? Number five, ponder the relationship between the tasks you do and the spirit of thankfulness to God, simple thankfulness that you can just do the tasks.

Linger over this question long enough so that you can feel the specifics of how you're thankful for your thinking and thankful to God for your feeling and thankful for your skills and thankful for your hands and thankful for your eyes and your ears and the gift of this job and a dozen other things.

Let a spirit of thankfulness permeate everything about the tasks that you do. Number six, ponder how humility will mark the way you do your tasks. Think through what humility would look like in your particular role and in the tasks that you do. Number seven, pray earnestly that the Lord will give you joy in your work, not just alongside your work in other things you like to do, but in your work, in the very tasks, in the relationships involved in those tasks.

Ask the Lord that your joy in Him would thoroughly saturate all you do. Number eight, ask the Lord to give you—this is one of the hardest ones—utter freedom from murmuring and complaining in your tasks. In Philippians 2, 14 and 15, Paul says that to be free from murmuring makes Christians shine like stars in the night sky of this world.

It is so rare. Number nine, ponder how manifestations of patience can permeate all that you do. In other words, let patience be woven through all your responses to the tasks you have to perform and all the people that you're involved with in those tasks. And number ten, ponder how you can actually see the nature of God, the aspects of the glory of God, in the very kind of work that you are doing.

God is the maker, the creator of molecules of everything you handle. He's the creator of mass and grammar. He's the creator of all human capacities. Nothing that you deal with is foreign to God but speaks something of God. There's a language out there to be read, and God is the meaning of the language.

Develop the ability to read God in all your tasks. And finally, I could call it number 11, or I could say it's the sum of all of them. Ponder how everything you do is an expression of love—love to God, love to people. So here they are. Aim, quality, service, honesty, thankfulness, humility, joy, not murmuring, patience, seeing, love.

And my guess is that if you devote yourself, Dan, to this kind of prayer and pondering, you will find that the earthly work, the tasks, the so-called vocational, ordinary, secular tasks that you do are not as distinct as you think they are from the eternal work and all the relationships around you.

Yeah, that's great. Thank you, Pastor John. You really were a poll holder for a survey company? Yeah. I remember the summer of '68. I wrote poems about it, standing on a railroad track looking, and the railroad track happened to be the keys on the piano, and this field of wheat, I think it was, had a river, and the river shaped the field just like a grand piano, and the railroad was the keyboard.

And they sent me down this railroad till I was almost out of sight. Go down there and hold that thing. And I was standing there all by myself while they were a mile away shooting this thing, and I thought, "This is gorgeous!" Yeah, I did that. The poll holding poet.

The poetry surprises no one. It's the poll holding that does. Thank you, Pastor John. And maybe someone listening right now is on a surveyor's crew. And if so, thank you for listening to the podcast at work and for passing the time with us. Thank you for listening to all of you.

Thank you for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast. You never know what you're going to learn about Pastor John on these things. You can stay current with our episodes through your favorite podcast app, and every episode is now published also on YouTube. You can go to our feed to check it out at youtube.com/desiringgod.

And you can subscribe there. If you're listening to this through YouTube and you already know how all this works already, just be sure to subscribe to the channel for the latest content from Desiring God. And if you have a question for Pastor John, send it to us through our podcast homepage, desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.

Well, we're going to close out the week talking again about doomsday preparations. It's a follow-up question to ask, "Isn't preparing for the worst possible catastrophe like a nuclear apocalypse? Isn't that an act of a man's love and service to his wife and his family?" It's a twist on the conversation that we had earlier.

And I will pose it to you, Pastor John, next time we meet. Until then, I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you on Friday. you you you you you