Your Work and God's Calling
By Paul M. Gould
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On Vocation
By Paul M. Gould
In his video-based course The Missional Life, the New York pastor Jon Tyson notes that we spend roughly one-third of our lives at work.[1] That’s a lot of hours at work—over 90,000 over a lifetime! Of course, as Christ-followers, we want to serve God in all things. This includes work. But it is not always obvious how we connect our daily lives as lawyers, businessmen, cooks, artists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or whatever to the Kingdom of God. In this month’s Worldview Bulletin essay, I want to think a bit about a theology of vocation.
Let’s begin with insightful quotes about work and vocation from three thinkers I respect: Frederick Buechner, Os Guinness, and James K. A. Smith. In his book Wishful Thinking, Buechner asks, what is a vocation? The word comes from the Latin vocare, which means “to call.” So, the idea of a vocation picks out the idea that “a person is called to by God."[2] A calling assumes a caller. This caller is God. It is our job then to listen to God’s voice. How might we hear God’s call? Buechner’s advice:
By and large a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you're bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren't helping your patients much either.
Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.[3]
I love this idea that our calling is discerned at the intersection of “your deep gladness” and “the world’s deep hunger.”
Os Guinness defines a calling as follows:
Calling is the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion and dynamism lived out as a response to his summons and service.[4]
Guinness goes on to note the powerful impact we make when we live—and work—in light of a sense of a divine calling:
This truth—calling—has been a driving force in many of the greatest “leaps forward” in world history—the constitution of the Jewish nation at Mount Sinai, the birth of the Christian movement in Galilee, and the sixteenth-century Reformation and its incalculable impetus to the rise of the modern world, to name a few.[5]
Finally, consider James K. A. Smith and his discussion in You Are What You Love on what he calls “Vocational Liturgies.” Smith notes that,
The doctrine of creation is not just a metaphysics—a statement of what the cosmos is. Rather, think of the biblical theology of creation as a manifesto, as marching orders, as a commission. More importantly, the biblical teaching on creation is a charge, a mission, a commission that sends us into God’s good but broken world with a calling. We can summarize this (com)mission in three verbs: image, unfold, and occupy.[6]
I find some fertile ground in these quotes as we consider the idea of a theology of work or vocation. Three helpful ideas are as follows. First, a robust theology of vocation must be grounded in the divine drama. I love how Smith describes the doctrine of creation as a kind of manifesto. He is right. In Genesis, we learn that humans alone image the divine being. We are kings and queens, priests and priestesses of this world that receive all things from God, steward all things as gift, and then re-gift them back to the Creator in joy and delight. We’ve been given real work to do—to spread God’s glory, to unleash the potentialities latent within this world, and cultivate the good, true, and beautiful for the flourishing of all. Smith is surely correct to link the doctrine of creation to a theology of calling. I think we can even press this point deeper—it is the divine drama—the story from creation to re-creation that grounds a robust theology of calling. All things are from God and all things, in the end, return to God. Our job is to steward and care for the things of this world, including importantly the people of this world.
Second, in order to discern God’s call, we must cultivate the spiritual discipline of listening. Most importantly, we need to listen to God’s voice. This means we need to learn silence. We need to go to God in prayer, in Scripture reading, in solitude. The divine voice speaks to us in a number of ways. As a teacher, I’ve become more and more convinced that God speaks to us as we pay attention to that which moves us. I see this every semester in the classroom. Suddenly a student who has been bored or uninterested (no doubt having nothing to do with the professor) comes alive in class. I see this often with theology students who come into the philosophy seminar room: suddenly things start to come alive. It could be, and I find that it is often the case, that these moments of awakening are divine moments of awaking. God is revealing. God is stirring. God is awakening. God also speaks to us as we consider the needs of the world. Jesus looked out at the crowd full of compassion, praying that God would bring others to shepherd the lost. Likewise, as we become more aware of the people and events around us, we’ll be more sensitive to the Spirit’s moving in and through us. As Buechner colorfully describes this dialectic between God, our souls, and the world, we are seeking that intersection between “[our] deep gladness” and “the world’s deep hunger.” Cultivate the discipline of listening to God. Expect God to be working in you and through you. And expect that your work is connected in some way to the things of God.
Finally, everything matters. All is from God. Nothing that is, nothing that exists, does so apart from God’s loving care. Your work matters. The deep longings of your heart—for meaning, purpose, and identity, matter. Your time matters. The people you see and serve daily matter.
Do you feel aimless in your work? Then spend some time listening to God, your heart, and observing the needs of the world. And then wait and watch as God calls you to be the hands and feet of Jesus to a world in desperate need of hope, faith, and love.
Notes
[1] https://missionallife.co.
[2] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC (New York: HarperOne, 1993), 118.
[3] This famous quote of Buechner’s can be found on the Internet here: https://www.frederickbuechner.com/quote-of-the-day/2017/7/18/vocation.
[4] Os Guinness, The Call (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2003), 4.
[5] Ibid., 4–5.
[6] James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2016), 172.
— Paul M. Gould is an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Director of the M.A. Philosophy of Religion program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He is the author or editor of ten scholarly and popular-level books including Cultural Apologetics, Philosophy: A Christian Introduction and The Story of the Cosmos. He has been a visiting scholar at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School’s Henry Center, working on the intersection of science and faith, and is the founder and president of the Two Tasks Institute. You can find out more about Dr. Gould and his work at Paul Gould.com and the Two Tasks Institute. He is married to Ethel and has four children.