Author: Matt Smethurst

Tim Keller on Pleasing God, Self-Salvation, and Two Lost Sons

The Bible’s most potent depiction of this truth—that there’s more than one way to be lost—is crystallized in Luke 15:11–32.

April 24, 2025 by: Matt Smethurst

Two Lost Sons

The Bible’s most potent depiction of the truth that there’s more than one way to be lost is crystallized in Luke 15:11–32. The broad outline of the parable is familiar: a father has two sons, the younger of whom demands his share of the inheritance and then moves to a far country, where he squanders it on wild living. Eventually, after coming to his senses, the prodigal returns home empty-handed and broken; he simply hopes his father will take him back as a hired servant. But seeing his wayward son from a long way off, the father runs to meet him and requests a party thrown in his honor.

Many people tend to stop there, at least in terms of emphasis, which is why it’s known to history as the parable of the prodigal son—singular. But the returning son isn’t the only prodigal. That’s actually the whole point. Jesus is not addressing the wayward but is aiming the story, like a heatseeking missile, at the religiously devout. Note the context of the chapter:

Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear [Jesus]. And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” So he told them this parable. . . . (Luke 15:1–3)

In light of the audience, then, we dare not overlook the dramatic final scene:

Now [the father’s] older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound.” But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, but he answered his father, “Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!” And he said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.” (Luke 15:25–32)

On September 11, 2005, Keller preached a sermon titled “The Prodigal Sons”—plural—which became the genesis of his 2008 bestseller The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith. This book captures the most distilled essence of Keller’s teaching regarding the heart. Near the beginning he credits a sermon on Luke 15 by his mentor, Ed Clowney, that altered his understanding:

Listening to that sermon changed the way I understood Christianity. I almost felt I had discovered the secret heart of Christianity. Over the years I have often returned to teach and counsel from the parable. I have seen more people encouraged, enlightened, and helped by this passage, when I explained the true meaning of it, than by any other text.1

That last sentence is a remarkable statement. What about the parable is so powerful? If you compare the teaching of Jesus to a lake, Keller says, this parable is “one of the clearest spots where we can see all the way to the bottom.”2 And that’s because what Jesus says about the elder brother is one of Scripture’s most vital teachings.3 We impoverish ourselves, therefore, when we fixate on the younger brother:

The first time I heard the parable, I imagined Jesus’s original listeners’ eyes welling with tears as they heard how God will always love and welcome them, no matter what they’ve done. We sentimentalize this parable if we do that. The targets of this story are not “wayward sinners” but religious people who [think they] do everything the Bible requires. Jesus is pleading not so much with immoral outsiders as with moral insiders. He wants to show them their blindness, narrowness, and self-righteousness, and how these things are destroying both their own souls and the lives of the people around them. It is a mistake, then, to think that Jesus tells this story primarily to assure younger brothers of his unconditional love.4

Apart from Jesus Christ, flagrant lawbreaking and fastidious rule keeping are dead ends. In Keller’s words: “Jesus’s purpose is not to warm our hearts but to shatter our categories.”5

Each brother in the parable represents “a different way to be alienated from God”6—and both ways are strikingly resonant with the latemodern West. Keller dubs the approaches “the way of moral conformity and the way of self-discovery.”7 In fact, he observes, Western culture is “so deeply divided between these two approaches”8 that it’s difficult to imagine an alternative option:

If you criticize or distance yourself from one, everyone assumes you have chosen to follow the other, because each of these approaches tends to divide the whole world into two basic groups. The moral conformists say: “The immoral people—the people who ‘do their own thing’—are the problem with the world, and moral people are the solution.” The advocates of self-discovery say: “The bigoted people—the people who say, ‘We have the Truth’—are the problem with the world, and progressive people are the solution.” Each side says: “Our way is the way the world
will be put to rights, and if you are not with us, you are against us.”9

But King Jesus is not kind to false dichotomies. Nor is he beholden to natural expectations:

So we have two sons, one “bad” by conventional standards and one “good,” yet both are alienated from the father. The father has to go out and invite each of them to come into the feast of his love. . . .

But Act 2 comes to an unthinkable conclusion. Jesus the storyteller deliberately leaves the elder brother in his alienated state. The bad son enters the father’s feast but the good son will not. The lover of prostitutes is saved, but the man of moral rectitude is still lost. We can almost hear the Pharisees gasp as the story ends. It was the complete reversal of everything they had ever been taught.10

Both sons are lost, but only one knows it. You are lost, Jesus is saying, but you refuse to know it.

Self-Salvation Projects

It’s sobering to notice that when the older son protests, “Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command” (Luke 15:29), the father doesn’t disagree! His firstborn has been obedient; he has done everything “right.” And ironically, it’s keeping him fromthe feast. His outward goodness—and resultant pride—has erected a barrier between him and the father’s love.

An elder-brother mindset can haunt us all. Keller offers an example:

I knew a woman who had worked for many years in Christian ministry. When chronic illness overtook her in middle age, it threw her into despair. Eventually she realized that deep in her heart she felt that God owed her a better life, after all she had done for him. That assumption made it extremely difficult for her to climb out of her pit, though climb she did. The key to her improvement, however,was to recognize the elder-brother mindset within.

Elder brothers obey God to get things. They don’t obey God to get God himself—in order to resemble him, love him, know him, and delight him. So religious and moral people can be avoiding Jesus as Savior and Lord as much as the younger brothers who say they don’t believe in God and define right and wrong for themselves.11

The stakes are that high. If you think God should accept you because you’re good, “then Jesus may be your helper, your example, even your inspiration, but he is not your Savior.” How could he be? You are occupying that role.11 Keller concludes,

So there are two ways, not one, to be your own Savior and Lord: you can break all the moral rules and chart your own course, or you can try keeping all the external moral rules and seek to earn heaven’s favor. Both are strategies for avoiding God. Apart from Jesus Christ, every person is “dedicated to a project of self-salvation, to using God and others in order to get power and control for themselves. We are just going about it in different ways.”12

King Jesus is not kind to false dichotomies. Nor is he beholden to natural expectations.

Equally Wrong, Not Equally Dangerous

By the end of Jesus’s parable, only one son has been reconciled to his father. Why conclude like this? Why not show us a redemptive arc for Tim both brothers? The reason certainly isn’t that elder brothers are hopeless; if they were, the father wouldn’t have gone into the field and pleaded at all. We can’t know for sure, of course, but perhaps Jesus is conveying that while “both forms of the self-salvation project are equally wrong,” they are not “equally dangerous.”13 The younger brother’s rebellion is obvious; the elder brother’s is not. And therein lies the danger:

He would have been horribly offended by the suggestion that he was rebelling against the father’s authority and love, but he was, deeply. Because the elder brother is more blind to what is going on, being an elder-brother Pharisee is a more spiritually desperate condition. “How dare you say that?” is how religious people respond if you suggest their relationship with God isn’t right. “I’m there every time the church doors are open.” Jesus says, in effect, “That doesn’t matter.”14

The takeaway, Keller says, is shocking: “Careful obedience to God’s law may serve as a strategy for rebelling against God.”15 He often returned to an image of two people sitting side by side in the same pew—hearing the same sermons, singing the same songs, engaging in the same spiritual activities—but for utterly different reasons. One does it all to please God; the other does it to justify self.

And yet on the outside, they look exactly the same.16

The True Elder Brother

When it comes to pleasing God, both the rebellious path and the religious path are dead ends. But Jesus shows us a more excellent way. It is not a comfortable middle option between earthly extremes, for his gospel occupies a transcendent plane.17

In the parable, the older son should have gone into the far country in pursuit of his wayward brother. He should have rejoiced at his return. He should have gladly relinquished part of his inheritance in order to reinstate his brother’s. He should have joined the party. But, as Keller observes, “By putting a flawed elder brother in the story, Jesus is inviting us to imagine and yearn for a true one.”18

Jesus Christ is the ultimate elder brother who didn’t just travel to a far country; he descended from heaven to earth to seek and save the lost. “Who is the true elder brother?” Keller asked in a funeral sermon for his own younger brother Billy. “Who is the one who truly obeyed the Father completely? Who truly has lost his robe so he [could] put it on us? Jesus!”19 He is the “God of Great Expenditure,”20 who, at infinite cost to himself, paid our debt and now binds our wounds and brings us home to the Father.

This message is true, but it’s not tame. The process of reckoning with it is disruptive to idol-ridden hearts. Keller recounts a time when a woman coming to Redeemer was hearing, for the first time, that she could be accepted not on the basis of her behavior but by God’s sheer grace. Keller was intrigued by her response: “That is a scary idea! Oh, it’s good scary, but still scary.” When he asked what was so scary about unmerited free grace, she replied,

If I was saved by my good works—then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through. I would be like a taxpayer with rights. I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life. But if it is really true that I am a sinner saved by sheer grace—at God’s infinite cost—then there’s nothing he cannot ask of me.

Keller comments,

She could see . . . the wonderful-beyond-belief teaching of salvation by sheer grace had two edges to it. On the one hand it cut away slavish fear. God loves us freely, despite our flaws and failures. Yet she also knew that if Jesus really had done this for her—she was not nher own. She was bought with a price.21

As we wait in hope for the ultimate feast and eternal party, may we never get over what it cost to bring us home. In December 1662, a Scottish minister named David Dickson lay dying when a close friend of over fifty years arrived to inquire how he was. The eighty-year-old man replied, “I have taken all my good deeds, and all my bad deeds, and have cast them together in a heap before the Lord, and have fled from both to Jesus Christ, and in him I have sweet peace.”22

That is the message of the gospel, and it is the message Tim Keller loved to communicate. Don’t just flee your bad works. Flee your “good” works, too. Flee them both and collapse into the open arms of Jesus Christ.

Notes:

  1. Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith (New York: Penguin, 2008), xvii. Clowney’s sermon, “Sharing the Father’s Welcome,” is available in Edmund P. Clowney, Preaching Christ in All of Scripture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2003).
  2. Keller, Prodigal God, xvii.
  3. Keller, Prodigal God, xix.
  4. Keller, Prodigal God 12.
  5. Keller, Prodigal God, 13.
  6. Keller, Prodigal God, 9.
  7. Keller, Prodigal God, 34. See also Tim Keller, “The Prodigal Sons,” preached on September 11, 2005, and “The Lord of the Sabbath,” preached on February 19, 2006. He writes, “Each acts as a lens coloring how you see all of life, or as a paradigm shaping your understanding of everything. Each is a way of finding personal significance and worth, of addressing the ills of the world, and of determining right from wrong,” Keller, Prodigal God, 34.
  8. Keller, Prodigal God, 37.
  9. Keller, Prodigal God, 37. As Keller explains in a sermon, “Jesus says, ‘You’re both wrong. You’re both lost. You’re both making the world a terrible place in different ways.’ The elder brothers of the world divide the world in two. They say, ‘The good people are in, and the bad people (you) are out.’ The younger brothers do as well—the self-discovery people also divide the world in two. They say, ‘The open-minded, progressive-minded people are in, and the bigoted and judgmental people (you) are out.’ Jesus says neither. He says, ‘It’s the humble who are in and the proud who are out.’ ” Keller, “The Prodigal Sons.”
  10. Keller, Prodigal God, 40.
  11. Keller, Prodigal God, 48. In a 1992 sermon, Keller remarked, “I’ve seen plenty of people—who have been non-Christians and skeptical and under the influence of the flesh—come on into the Christian faith, and their flesh continues to dominate them, because now they find religious ways of avoiding God, whereas before they were finding irreligious ways.” Tim Keller, “Alive with Christ: Part 2,” preached on November 8, 1992.
  12. Keller, Prodigal God, 44.
  13. Keller, Prodigal God, 45.
  14. Keller, Prodigal God, 51.
  15. Keller, Prodigal God, 53.
  16. Keller, Prodigal God, 54. Keller explains further, “The younger brother knew he was= alienated from the father, but the elder brother did not. That’s why elder-brother lostness is so dangerous. Elder brothers don’t go to God and beg for healing from their condition. They see nothing wrong with their condition, and that can be fatal. If you know you are sick you may go to a doctor; if you don’t know you’re sick you won’t—you’ll just die.” Keller, 75.
  17. Keller, Prodigal God, 43.
  18. See, for example, “Preaching the Gospel,” 2009 Newfrontiers Conference at Westminster Chapel in London, available at https:// vimeo .com /3484464. Elsewhere was a gardener who grew an enormous carrot. He took it to his king and said, ‘My lord, this is the greatest carrot I’ve ever grown or ever will grow; therefore, I want to present it to you as a token of my love and respect for you.’ The king was touched and discerned the man’s heart, so as he turned to go, the king said, ‘Wait! You are clearly a good steward of the earth. I own a plot of land right next to yours. I want to give it to you freely as a gift, so you can garden it all.’ The gardener was amazed and delighted and went home rejoicing. But there was a nobleman at the king’s court who overheard all this, and he said, ‘My! If that is what you get for a carrot, what if you gave the king something better?’ The next day the nobleman came before the king, and he was leading a handsome black stallion. He bowed low and said, ‘My lord, I breed horses, and this is the greatest horse I’ve ever bred or ever will; therefore, I want to present it to you as a token of my love and respect for you.’ But the king discerned his heart and said, ‘Thank you,’ and took the horse and simply dismissed him. The nobleman was perplexed, so the king said, ‘Let me explain. That gardener was giving me the carrot, but you were giving yourself the horse.’ ” Timothy Keller, The Gospel in Life Study Guide: How Grace Changes Everything (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010), 17. Keller first shared this illustration at Redeemer on May 5, 1996. Though he attributes it to Charles Spurgeon, I cannot find the original source.
  19. Keller states, “It’s off the scales. It’s not halfway in the middle. It’s something else [entirely].” Keller, “The Prodigal Sons.”
  20. Keller, Prodigal God, 94.
  21. Hansen, Timothy Keller, 218 (emphasis original). As a young man, Keller had, in a sense, embodied both younger-brother and elder-brother tendencies: “Tim was the oldest child who always did the right thing, and yet at the same time when he went off to college he really did rebel, and he rebelled in large part against his [overbearing] mother. He was torn between the dynamics of wanting to do the right thing, but also the pressures of falling far short. . . . Once I saw that [he had demonstrated the proclivities of both sons], all of a sudden Tim’s core message of the transforming power of grace—this gift from God that changes everything about our lives—made a lot more sense.” Hansen, “Collin Hansen on The Making of Tim Keller, Overcoming Loneliness, Tim’s Teenage Rebellion, How He Finished Well, and Why He Wanted People to Know About His Weaknesses,” The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast, July 11, 2023, https:// care ynieuwh of .com/. In his book, Hansen also shares a poignant story about Tim’s literal younger (and only) brother Billy, a gay man who died of complications from AIDS in 1998: “[Over the years] when they visited [Billy and his partner], Tim and Kathy talked to him about the gospel. . . . Tim tried to emphasize the difference between grace and the legalism of their childhood. . . . [Eventually] when Billy entered hospice in December [1997], he said to Tim, ‘My Christian family isn’t going to come with me when I enter eternity, and neither are my gay friends. So I have to figure out what is on the other side of this life.’ . . . [Billy] had thought being a Christian meant cleaning up his life and making himself righteous. But Tim pointed to 2 Corinthians 5:21: ‘For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’ Finally, Billy felt God’s love. The transformation was immediately evident. He even called his lawyer and told him to give his money [marked for donation to gay causes] to [a local] ministry instead. . . . When all hope seemed lost, God welcomed this prodigal son home.” Hansen, Timothy Keller, 218–20.
  22. Keller, Prodigal God, xx.

This article is adapted from Tim Keller on the Christian Life: The Transforming Power of the Gospel by Matt Smethurst.

Matt Smethurst is lead pastor of River City Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of several books, including Tim Keller on the Christian Life; Before You Open Your Bible; Before You Share Your Faith; and Deacons. He also cohosts, with Ligon Duncan, The Everyday Pastor podcast from the Gospel Coalition. Matt and his wife, Maghan, have five children.

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Tim Keller on the Purpose of Your Job, Your Life, and the Universe

Does Monday morning excite you? If so, that’s great, but that’s not how many of us feel. Our jobs challenge us, exhaust us, and sometimes threaten to consume us.

April 13, 2025 by: Matt Smethurst

Devotion to Christ in the Workplace

Does Monday morning excite you? If so, that’s great, but that’s not how many of us feel. Our jobs challenge us, exhaust us, and sometimes threaten to consume us. So what does devotion to Jesus Christ look like in our workplace environments—whether they be cutthroat or mundane?

From small-town Virginia to the hustle of New York City, Tim Keller spent his life ministering to believers struggling with work. As he discovered and taught, how we work (and why) reveals our deepest values and dearest treasures.

According to Keller, work is not merely a way to earn money or a strategy for self-advancement or a necessary evil to fund truly important things like ministry. Work is a divine calling through which we honor our heavenly Master and love our neighbor in tangible ways.

Not long after Keller planted Redeemer, a soap-opera actor got converted and came to his new pastor asking, “What roles should—and shouldn’t—I take? I assume stories don’t have to be religious to be good for people, but how do I know which stories are good and which are bad?” He also wondered, “How should I think about method acting? This is where you don’t just act angry; you get angry. You tap into something within yourself and really live it. What’s your advice?” Though Keller had the wherewithal to reply to the second question by saying, “That doesn’t sound like a good idea,” he knew he was out of his depth. Despite years of formal theological training and ministry experience, he sensed a gap in his ability to form Christians for daily work. He knew how to encourage deeper involvement in church activities, but here was a young Christian wanting to be discipled for his public life. Years later, Keller would point to this interaction as an “epiphany” that propelled him to think more seriously about the integration of faith and work.1

Situating Your Job in a Story

Your vocation will make little sense to you unless you’ve situated it in a significantly larger story. What’s the purpose of my job? is too small a question to start with. We must first ask, What’s the purpose of my life? and, more fundamentally, What’s the purpose of the universe? Only when we’ve surveyed God’s ultimate plan for the world, as revealed in his word, will we duly grasp the implications for our work. This sweeping story unfolds in the major plot points of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. Or, Keller notes, we can distill it in four chapters:2

Chapter 1
Where did we come from?
From God: the One and the relational

Chapter 2
Why did things go so wrong?
Because of sin: bondage and condemnation

Chapter 3
What will put things right?
Christ: incarnation, substitution, restoration

Chapter 4
How can I be put right?
Through faith: grace and trust

The Bible’s storyline presents an unfolding drama that powerfully resonates with our jobs:

  • Work was created good.
  • Work became corrupted by sin.
  • Work is being partly redeemed through the Holy Spirit.
  • Work will be fully redeemed when Jesus Christ makes all things new.

Work Is Created

The Bible begins with the most productive workweek of all time.3 That’s how we’re meant to think of it. Note the repetition:

And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. (Gen. 2:2–3)

The narrative then rewinds to focus on the sixth day. Though God was exceedingly pleased with his universe (Gen. 1:31), something was lacking: “There was no man to work the ground” (Gen. 2:5). So the Creator knelt down, as it were, to solve the problem:

Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. (Gen. 2:7–8)

Behold the King of glory, with his hands in the dirt.

No wonder the first image bearer was given a similar occupation: Adam was put “in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15). And the job was too much for Adam to handle by himself: “Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him’” (Gen. 2:18). Keller aptly contends, “We see God not only working, but commissioning workers to carry on his work. . . . Though [everything] was good, it was still to a great degree undeveloped. God left creation with deep untapped potential for cultivation that people were to unlock through their labor.”4

Could the Bible begin with a more exalted view of work?

Work Is Cursed

Yet by the time we finish the next chapter in Genesis, the story has become a tragedy. Following Adam and Eve’s rebellion, God pronounces a series of curses, including this:

And to Adam he said,

“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
     and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
     ‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
     in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
     and you shall eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your face
     you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
     for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
     and to dust you shall return.” (Gen. 3:17–19)

Behold the King of glory, with his hands in the dirt.

Yet even after banishment from Eden—the original exile—Adam retains his vocation: “The Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken” (Gen. 3:23). But work has now become toil. As the father of Noah says, looking at his newborn son, “Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands” (Gen. 5:29).

In one sense, the whole ensuing story of the Bible is about the promise of a royal deliverer who will end the exile and heal the world, bringing relief to our toil and everlasting rest to our souls. But what about the meantime? The curse remains. The exile persists. Thorns and thistles threaten to sabotage even our best efforts. Even thoughthe kingdom of God has made a personal appearance on earth in the person of Jesus Christ, we still await the renewal and restoration of all things—including the gift of work.5

The iconic words of Isaac Watts may put you in the Christmas spirit, but they are actually about the joy to come at the King’s return:

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as the curse is found.6

Dignity of All Work

On the topic of work, Keller invoked no one more often than Martin Luther. The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformer, having reclaimedm the biblical truth of the priesthood of all believers, loved to highlight the nobility of all human work—no matter how menial:

[Luther] mounted a polemic against the view of vocation prevalent in the medieval church. The church at that time understood itself as the entirety of God’s kingdom on earth, and therefore only work in and for the church could qualify as God’s work. This meant that the only way to be called by God into service was as a monk, priest, or nun. . . . [Secular labor was] akin to the demeaning necessity that the Greeks saw in manual labor. Luther attacked this idea forcefully.7

Indeed, in his expositions of the Psalms, Luther observed that God cares for his creation not directly but indirectly—through our work. Consider, for example, Psalm 145:

The eyes of all look to you,
     and you give them their food in due season.
You open your hand;
     you satisfy the desire of every living thing. (Ps. 145:15–16)

But how does God feed us? It is not as if heavenly manna plops onto our plates. No, he works through human workers—farmers, drivers, bakers, grocers, and countless others along the way—to provide the food that now sits in your refrigerator or pantry.8 We pray, “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matt. 6:11), and God answers by dispatching people to their jobs.

Even in the smallest tasks, the Lord Almighty is working through our work. The implications of this teaching, once they sink in, are explosive. Keller reflects,

Not only are the most modest jobs—like plowing a field or digging a ditch—the “masks” through which God cares for us, but so are the most basic social roles and tasks, such as voting, participating in public institutions, and being a father or mother. These are all God’s callings, all ways of doing God’s work in the world, all ways through which God distributes his gifts to us. Even the humblest farm girl is fulfilling God’s calling. As Luther preached, “God milks the cows through the vocation of the milkmaids.”9

In one of his first sermons at Redeemer, Keller explained it like this:

The glorious teaching of the Bible is you can be a person on an assembly line, you can be just turning a screw, you can be somebody who’s just sweeping a floor—but if you see it as part of the whole complex way God has enabled us to bring the potential out of his creation—then you can do it with joy. Paul was writing to slaves [in Ephesians 6:5–8], and if this theology can work for slaves—if he can say, “Slaves, the menial work you do, you do it for the Lord”—[then you too can] see it as part of everything God made work to be, [and] you can do it with joy.10

Though today we tend to think of vocation and job as synonyms, the former word is far richer. Based on the Latin vocare (“to call”), it means nothing less than a calling—an assignment to serve others—whether you work on one side of the political aisle or in the produce aisle.

And these assignments come ultimately from the sovereign throne of a working God. What could possibly infuse more nobility into an ordinary job? “In Genesis we see God as a gardener, and in the New Testament we see him as a carpenter. No task is too small a vessel to hold the immense dignity of work given by God.”11

Notes:

  1. Tim Keller, “Why Tim Keller Wants You to Stay in That Job You Hate,” interviewed by Andy Crouch, Christianity Today, April 22, 2013, https:// www .christianity today.com/ (emphasis added). The quote has been lightly edited for clarity. Keller also relates the actor anecdote in “The Dream of the Kingdom,” preached on April 30, 2000, and in a panel discussion at the 2006 Desiring God National Conference. See John Piper, Mark Driscoll, Tim Keller, and JustinTaylor, “A Conversation with the Pastors,” September 29, 2006, https:// www .desiring god .org/.
  2. Timothy Keller, Shaped by the Gospel: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016), 34–43, chart on 36. Elsewhere he writes, “Without an understanding of the gospel [story], we will be either naïvely utopian or cynically disillusioned. We will be demonizing something that isn’t bad enough to explain the mess we are in; and we will be idolizing something that isn’t powerful enough to get us out of it. This is, in the end, what all other worldviews do.” Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work, with Katherine Leary Alsdorf (New York: Penguin, 2012), 161. He then sketches some biblical implications for a few fields of work: business (164–68), journalism (169–70), higher education (171–73), the arts (173–75), and medicine (175–80).
  3. Keller comments, “The Bible begins talking about work as soon as it begins talking about anything—that is how important and basic it is.” Keller, Every GoodEndeavor, 19.
  4. Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 22.
  5. Keller had little patience for a triumphalist perspective on work: “[We must settle] one sure fact: Nothing will be put perfectly right . . . until the ‘day of Christ’ at the end of history (Phil. 1:6; 3:12). Until then all creation ‘groans’ (Rom. 8:22) and is subject to decay and weakness. So work will be put completely right only when heaven is reunited with earth and we find ourselves in our ‘true country.’ To talk about fully redeeming work is sometimes naïvete, sometimes hubris.” Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 150–51 (emphasis original).
  6. Isaac Watts (1674–1748), “Joy to the World” (1719), Hymnary.org.
  7. Keller,Every Good Endeavor, 58. He also remarks, “While the Greek thinkers saw ordinary work, especially manual labor, as relegating human beings to the animal level, the Bible sees all work as distinguishing human beings from animals and elevating them to a place of dignity. Old Testament scholar Victor Hamilton notes that in surrounding cultures such as Egypt and Mesopotamia, the king or others of royal blood might be called the ‘image of God’; but, he notes, that rarefied term ‘was not applied to the canal digger or to the mason who worked on the ziggurat. . . . [But Genesis 1 uses] royal language to describe simply ‘man.’ In God’s eyes all of mankind is royal. The Bible democratizes the royalistic and exclusivistic concepts of the nations that surrounded Israel.” Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 36. Keller cites V. P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1–17 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990), 135.
  8. One implication of this, of course, is that we should appreciate many contributions from nonbelievers. Since culture is a complex cocktail of “brilliant truth, marred half-truths, and overt resistance to the truth,” in our workplaces we should expect to see real darkness punctuated by flashes of God’s common grace. Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 198. Moreover, “The doctrine of sin means that believers are never as good as our true worldview should make us. Similarly, the doctrine of grace means that unbelievers are never as messed up as their false worldview should make them. . . . Ultimately, a grasp of the gospel and of biblical teaching on cultural engagement should lead Christians to be the most appreciative of the hands of God behind the work of our colleagues and neighbors.” Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 195, 197. He also suggests, “Christians who understand biblical doctrine ought to be the ones who appreciate the work of non-Christians the most. We know we are saved by grace alone, and therefore we are not [necessarily] better fathers or mothers, better artists and businesspersons, than those who do not believe as we do. Our gospel-trained eyes can see the world ablaze with the glory of God’s work through the people he has created and called—in everything from the simplest actions, such as milking a cow, to the most brilliant artistic or historic achievements.” Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 64.
  9. Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 61. The Luther quote is paraphrased from Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 21, Sermon on the Mount and the Magnificat, ed. J. Pelikan (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1958), 237. According to Psalm 147, God “strengthens the bars of your gates” (147:13) and “makes peace in your borders” (147:14). In other words, he provides safety and security for a city through lawmakers, law enforcement, military personnel, those working in government and politics, and so on.
  10. Tim Keller, “Feeling His Pleasure,” preached on October 22, 1989. Keller clarifies, “Slavery in the Greco-Roman world was not the same as the New World institution that developed in the wake of the African slave trade. Slavery in Paul’s time was not race-based and was seldom lifelong. It was more like what we would call Tim indentured servitude. But for our purposes . . . consider this: If slave owners are told they must not manage workers in pride and through fear, how much more should this be true of employers today? And if slaves are told it is possible to find satisfaction and meaning in their work, how much more should this be true of workers today?” Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 219 (emphasis original).
  11. Keller, Every Good Endeavor, 37.

This article is adapted from Tim Keller on the Christian Life: The Transforming Power of the Gospel by Matt Smethurst.

Matt Smethurst is lead pastor of River City Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of several books, including Tim Keller on the Christian Life; Before You Open Your Bible; Before You Share Your Faith; and Deacons. He also cohosts, with Ligon Duncan, The Everyday Pastor podcast from the Gospel Coalition. Matt and his wife, Maghan, have five children.

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