This blog is the text of a 5-minute video: WHY WORK? To view the video, click here.

I was twenty-six. A Christian. With a new job working as a state government employee. During those first few days, it didn’t take long for one seasoned worker to size me up. He saw a young man who had been raised in a Christian home, a fresh graduate of a Christian college, and unsophisticated in the ways of the world. I heard later that he had commented to a coworker: “This guy won’t last three weeks.”

Should you earn more than you need for yourself and your dependents? Getting more does not have to be motivated by greed. Instead, you can aim to make enough to be able to share with others. What “others” need your support? People and organizations who depend on the contributions of those with the means to give. Those means are generated by enterprises that turn a profit.

Here’s the problem: for many of us, getting paid for our work connects only loosely (if at all) with God’s Kingdom agenda. We don’t identify our paycheck with God’s will being done on earth as in heaven. At best, money crosses over into something spiritual when we give it to the church or missions. At worst, having cash can seem like a necessary evil—filthy lucre, as the King James version puts it five times.

That’s when I saw Marc. He had pinned a non-Christian in the right angle formed by the steel wall and one side of a Coke machine. Marc was “witnessing” away at the cornered man with some clearly unwelcomed intensity. Suddenly, my face felt flushed. I was embarrassed to be identified with this fellow Christian.

How can we worship when our minds must be laser-focused on chores like cleaning a carburetor, changing a diaper, or filling a tooth?

As suggested in an earlier blog, the current exodus from work opens a door for churches. In that article, I briefly described seven Kingdom-of-God reasons for working. This will expand on the fourth reason: God uses our work to grow us up.

Although I could not see it at the time, my role on Dad’s farm pictured the much larger reality of the human task on God’s earth. The whole farm was Dad’s property, not mine. But within the boundaries he had marked out, I ruled that half-acre. And I did so through my work.

Is imaging God on the job even possible? Can his light penetrate in a profit-obsessed, ambition-centered, self-seeking environment? “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (Jn. 1:5). But how?

As I pointed out In the previous blog, this exodus from work opens a door for churches. In that blog, I briefly described seven Kingdom-of-God reasons for working. This article will expand on the first reason: God tells us to work. We work to obey him.

Jesus, through John, told the church in Philadelphia: “I have placed before you an open door . . .” (Rev. 3:8). Today, the “Great Resignation” offers churches another open door.

The snag for so many of us is that we have been conditioned to think that our “secular” work has little or nothing to do with God’s eternal agenda. A car tire detached from its wheel cannot carry out its purpose. Your work separated from the hope of glory will never realize God’s aim for it. Any job, with no connection to God’s eternal plan, becomes meaningless. Blah.

“Most of us spend a lot of time at work. This means that our Christian identity is being formed much of the time under uncongenial if not downright hostile conditions.” —Eugene Peterson

A friend once sent a link to a blog that began with the comical story of two couples canoeing on a lake. The first couple pull their boat to the dock and step out. The other couple park their craft alongside the first. The man in the second canoe steps one foot in the first, hoping to use it as a bridge to the dock. But in doing so, he pushes his own canoe away—with his other foot still in it. As he does the splits, arms thrashing, he plummets headfirst into the water.

Wherever you meet a Christ-follower, you meet a priest. The implication? God has sprinkled his priests into all kinds of workplaces—shops, offices, factories, fields, schools, hospitals, and so on.

Can you think of a more effective way to scatter countless believers among earth’s population than to send them into jobs ranging from accounting to zoology and from Argentina to Zimbabwe?

“The loneliness of the Christian results from his walk with God in an ungodly world, a walk that must often take him away from the fellowship of good Christians.” —A. T. Tozer

When was the last time you heard an entire sermon devoted to the place of our daily work in God’s Kingdom purposes?

If we do not train our young people to seek God’s Kingdom first—even in their work lives—then the world will fill the vacuum with its own default workview.

If we lose our way, pushing doggedly on only makes things worse. At such times, we need to pause and look back to discover where we left the path. The insights of E. Stanley Jones, a 20th century missionary to India, can help us get back on track.