Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Being Called and Assigned Your Work

Uh sermon text for today is 1 Corinthians 7:17. Continuing our series in work, today’s sermon is on being called and assigned your work. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. 1 Corinthians 7:17. But as God has distributed to each one, as the Lord has called each one, so let him walk. And so I ordain in all the churches. Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for your scriptures. Thank you, Father, for giving us new eyes to look at our world through by studying your scriptures and bless us today as we continue to try to look at vocation and work through new eyes with this text. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated. So I’m going to talk about four things today. The first is—is the sound okay for all of you? Can you hear me okay? Yeah. Okay. Sort of interesting. I’ll just continue.

Okay, so what we’re going to talk about is four things from this text. And the first one is really more directly what the text talks about. And the text says that God has assigned us and called us to particular things. We’ll talk about vocation as an assignment and calling from God. And then secondly, we’ll talk about the implication of that—that we’ve been assigned and called to serve in our vocations. That service is a key element of that.

Third, we’ll talk about love. That we’re called and assigned to exercise love in our work for our neighbors. And then finally we’ll talk about the need for competence—that we’re called and assigned by God to our vocations to do them competently and the significance of competence in vocation. So this is where we’ll be going.

And we’ll start first of all then with actually not with the text we just read, but I want to talk about one other text first by way of introduction, and this is Psalm 16. One of my children reminded me this week, talking about my life, that the lines have fallen to me in good places. And some of you might have seen that I put that on my Facebook status for the day of my birth, my birthday celebration last Thursday. And it was a delightful day.

In the afternoon all the grandkids came over and they did a little thing for me and gave me gifts of song and stuff, and that was really nice and recitation delightful. And then in the evening most of my adult children and one of the spouses, we went out to dinner together at a very nice restaurant in Portland. So that was very nice, and it’s certainly true that you know the line has fallen to me in good places.

This is actually verse 6 of Psalm 16. We read: “The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places. Yes, I have a good inheritance. I will bless the Lord who has given me counsel.”

So what I want to do is to tie this text a little bit to the subject of our vocations. And if, as we’re going to talk about in a couple of minutes, our vocations are things that we have been assigned by God and called to do and therefore equipped to do them—I mean, he doesn’t do that without equipping us for the task—then I want us to think about our work not as some kind of drudgery that we go and perform, but one of the main elements of this sermon series is to look at it as a pleasant inheritance from God.

That our vocations, the jobs that you’ll go to tomorrow, many of you, are places of pleasantness. These are blessings from God to have work. And we only think it’s not a blessing if we have some kind of pagan understanding of what work is and what humanity is. So I think that hopefully you know you’ll have that kind of perspective, and probably a lot of you already do. That when you go to work tomorrow, you’ll say to yourself the lines have fallen to me in pleasant places. Yes, I have a good inheritance. This is the lot. This is the life that God has given to you. That’s your inheritance. That’s your lot in life.

And as I just read, the very next verse says: “I will bless the Lord who has given me counsel.”

So we’re looking at these texts today, this text and other texts today, to get counsel from the Lord to help us understand what a blessing this inheritance is and how we’re to use it—this lot of our life, the vocation and work that God has called us to. We’re looking for counsel from the Lord who has made us.

And so Psalm 16 kind of informs us in terms of overall what we’re trying to do. Now, the verses preceding in verse 5—with this verse: “Oh Lord, you are the portion of my inheritance and my cup. You maintain my lot.”

So ultimately God is our great reward and inheritance. And then he gives us calls and assigns us vocation and work to do. And that—if we delight ourselves in God, if we understand that he’s the portion of our inheritance, he’s really the one that gives us the lot, and we find relationship with him in the context of our lot in life and our vocation—that’s required to see the pleasantness of being able to work in the context of this world and produce wonderful things, Christian culture as we talked about last week.

And then today we’ll talk about other related things. So what we’re trying to do is focus on Christ, focus on God, look at him as the ultimate reward and ultimate determiner of who we are and what we do. And then when we do that—when we look to him and understand our relationship to him is the greatest reward we have, it is the essence of all blessing—and then we go about doing the work that he has assigned and called us to. Then we’ll say our lines are pleasant ones. God has given us a good lot in life. And then we’ll continue to seek counsel as the next verse that I already read says.

We’ll continue to seek counsel from God as to how we do that.

A couple of verses later in verse 8, we read, “I have set the Lord always before me.” Okay. So you know, ultimately this is a psalm of Christ. It ends, of course, with a couple of verses about how he won’t allow my soul to see corruption, my body, my flesh to see corruption. This is a messianic psalm. So ultimately, it’s only ultimately true and wholeheartedly true of Jesus, but it’s also true of all of us in Christ.

And so certainly Jesus always was aware of his relationship to his heavenly father. But the point is that’s what we’re supposed to do as well. We are to set the Lord always before us. And that means in the workplace where you spend, or most of you spend, the majority of your time. And if you do that, verse 9 says, “Therefore, my heart is glad, my glory rejoices, my flesh will rest in hope.”

So as by way of introduction, that’s part of the significance of seeing our vocations in relationship to our lot in life. Seeing that in relationship to our—the Lord being all of our inheritance and giving us this lot, seeking counsel from him, putting him ever before us in the workplace—and as a result of that finding joy and delight.

Now all this assumes what the verse before us says, and the verse before us says a couple of things. It says God has distributed to each one. This word distribute, as translated in the ESV as “assigned,” is probably a better way to think of it. Although when we read the word distribute, we might call to mind the distribution of gifts of the Holy Spirit, spiritual gifts for the edification and building up of the church. And this is the same word.

And so it is a word that, as we understand our New Testament, this particular word has a lot of religious connotation to it, right? And the word called, the second phrase he uses here—”But as God has distributed or assigned something to each one, as the Lord has called each one, so let him walk in his conduct.” So the second word is call, and calling as well is you know a heavily connotative religious word.

We know that in the Bible we are called into a relationship with Christ, right? We are the called ones. We’re called to serve the Lord Jesus Christ. The church itself in the New Testament Greek—the word is ecclesia, and it comes from this same root to call out. So the church are identified specifically as the called ones or the called out ones to follow Christ, to serve Christ, etc. We’re called as well into relationship and fellowship with Jesus and his church.

So this word call, in its broadest sense in the New Testament, has a community aspect to it as well. It’s not just me and Jesus. It’s me and Jesus and his people. And we’re called into a particular church and collectively are the called out ones.

So the point of this is that these words are words that we would normally think of in kind of a narrowed, spiritual, religious sense. You know, that’s what we normally think of. And that’s because these words are commonly used that way. But that’s not what Paul is talking about here. What Paul is doing in this particular verse is stating a general principle which he applies to various specifics. He’s actually responding to a question from the Corinthians about marriage.

And his discussion up to this point in 1 Corinthians 7 has been about marriage. So he’s going to make a point. He’s made a point about marriage. After this verse, he’ll talk about circumcision. If you’re circumcised, don’t try to remove the circumcision. If you’re uncircumcised, don’t worry about getting circumcised. He’ll talk about bondman and free. If you’re a bondman, don’t worry about it. If you’re free, great. If you’re a bondman and can get freedom, that’s good. But in the state in which you’re called, understand that’s the state God has called you to and appointed to you. It can be improved upon—bondman to free. But the point he’s making in verse 17, and he frequently does this in the epistles, he’ll make a general truth, you know, a broad-ranging truth, in which he applies that truth then to particular circumstances or questions that he’s getting or concerns that are arising in particular churches.

So that’s what Paul is doing here. And what he’s really doing then here is not just restricted to marriage or circumcision or bond or free. And it’s not just restricted to our calling to the church and to follow Christ in the church. Rather, he’s making a general point about everything about who we are. He says that God has distributed, assigned, to each of us. The Lord has called each one of us. So walk.

And so the idea is he’s saying your life is one that you have been called to by God, and you have been assigned that particular task. And he says he ordains this in all the churches. So now he’s not just talking about work and vocation, but that is an absolutely important understanding to have—that’s a subset of all of your calling in life.

So the point here is that this text is a significant New Testament text that tells us that our work, our vocation, that part of our lot in life has been assigned to us by God and he has called us to that task. So it’s very significant, very significant. It provides this linkage.

You know, we can look—as we have made in God’s image, work and rest like God worked and rested. We can see the commands of God to our original parents, Adam and Eve, to work in the garden and to imitate his work and to take culture out over the world. We can look at all that stuff, but here we have a very explicit didactic teaching that your work and—now you could think of it broader than this, who you’re married to and your children and you know all kinds of other things. But for the purpose of this sermon series—your work that you’re going to go, many of you will go to tomorrow morning, your vocation is a calling from God. And it’s an assignment from him to you to perform.

That means your work is not a matter of individual choice. It’s not just about you in the workplace. It’s something God has called you to do.

You know, as a church, when we embraced the Protestant Reformation, the great truths of Calvin and Luther, you know what we ended up—one of the first things we realized that they really stressed—was vocational calling, which is, you know, it’s repetitive. A vocation means somebody, something that somebody vocated, called you to. So vocation and calling really are redundant terms. It’s okay to use it. Don’t feel bad about talking about vocational calling. And in fact, it’s good to use that phrase, and here’s why: because as language developed, we still have the word vocation from the Latin, and that’s good, but we have tended in our day and age to see calling—that word on its own—as a calling to be a pastor or an elder or a deacon or some office in the church. You’re called to that office in the church, and we have tended to think of vocation as a job that we perform. All right, as work. And so we’ve kind of distinguished these two things.

So a lot of you guys think that I’m a called pastor and I don’t work. Nobody’s listening. Boy, that’s bad. Okay, you get the idea though. We’re back to that Greek idea of kind of the spiritual and the physical, and they’re divided, and blah blah. And that’s the way we use these words. You know, I, most people wouldn’t say my vocation is pastor. They should. It’s the same thing as saying your calling is. But the important part for today’s sermon is that the same thing is true about your job. It is not just a vocation. It is a calling. It is a calling.

Now, I know some of you are saying, Dennis, we’ve heard that for 30 years. Yes, you have. But your children have not. Depending on how well you’ve reiterated this to them. But don’t assume that. I’ve always thought this about my kids. If it’s in my mind, they know it. You know, I don’t understand why you didn’t get everything I got. So you—we have to make these cases over and over again both to remind ourselves, because the pressures of the world push us in a secular view of work, and also to teach the next generation to see their jobs as callings from God.

And this makes all the difference in the world, of course, right? If you’ve been called—unless you want to say it’s some kind of internal call that you made to yourself—you know, if you’ve been called, you’re working for somebody else. And I don’t mean your employer necessarily, but ultimately your job has been—is a calling from God. And you’ve been assigned to perform that work. And it makes all the difference in the world in terms of being content or not content, for instance, with our work and how well we do that work.

Is it important to do that work to the glory of God the same way we would apply a standard in Bible study or leading our family in family worship or whatever it is—so-called religious activities? Would we apply the same standard? Well, we have to. If we see that part of our life is part of this whole lot of our life to which we’ve been called and assigned by God, then yes. So this truth has particular implications which we’ll talk about as we move on.

A couple of other words though that we use for our work: “work” just means you’re working. But it’s interesting because normally that word is not used about callings as much. When people ask you what work you do, that usually has this kind of inference of manual labor. Now the word “job” is interesting too because it comes—they think—from a word that means kind of a particular job rather than an ongoing vocation. So you do this job lot or that job lot, and so it’s kind of a small thing, a segmented off thing.

So the way we think of these words, how we apply them to our—the life that we do in—in the workplace is very significant, and I would want to continue to encourage us to think of calling as what we all are doing in all of our workplaces.

Early on in this church, you know, we had commissioning services for people going into the ministry or going into missions in church. And we thought it was just as important to recognize college graduates who are going off to business. We don’t do that formally anymore because we wanted to combat this idea that somehow it’s a more spiritual task to enter into the pastor or the mission field than it is to become a banker or a typist or a ditch digger. It’s not. All of those things are—we have a calling to—by God, and we’ve been assigned to that.

Rushdoony, speaking of the importance of this connection to God and our work, says this: “Without the sovereignty of God to undergird and ensure the validity and efficacy of a calling, man works in a void, a vast meaningless emptiness. He floats aimlessly in that space. Where men believe in the triune God and take time and history seriously as the arena of God’s kingdom work, they can then both work and rest with confidence and peace. Where God is man’s lord and man’s ultimate and essential environment, then man is responsible and effective in his actions and in his work. Where, however, man is without God, his environment becomes a hostile and determinative force, and man is stripped of responsibility. For the godly man, because God is the Lord and the determiner, man is not under the control of his physical environment. And time becomes the partner and aid to eternity.”

So this idea that God has called us to work is absolutely significant to what we do now. You know that. But what I’m urging you to do is sort of what I’m forced to do, which is tomorrow when you start work up again, to think of it not as a secular calling. You know, there’s a sense in which it’s secular, but don’t think of it as a secular calling, because what that means in our day and age is with no reference to God.

When you go to work tomorrow, in that car or on the Max or whatever it is, you know, think self-consciously of what Pastor Tuuri said today—that I’m going to a holy calling of God to a task that has been assigned to me by God. And when we say that something’s been assigned, that means we have culpability and responsibility for doing something about that, right? Okay.

So our vocation is a calling and assignment from God.

And secondly, that calling and assignment is a calling and assignment to serve God and our neighbor in our vocations. So all the texts that we think of in terms of our private lives and our religious duties to one another, all those texts now can be poured into what we do in the workplace.

For instance, in Philippians 2:4, we read, “Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.”

So we think about that, you know, and how we treat people at church or treat people in things we go to with them or whatever it is. But this is a verse that is absolutely critical to the productive and effective work going on in the workplace.

I was going to mention this last week, I forgot, but when I became a purchasing agent, I spent 10 years doing that. I have a certificate in the wall of my office declaring I’d passed the courses and stuff and was awarded the certificate showing I was a certified purchasing manager. Why would that be in the pastor’s office? You ever ask yourself that if you came in and saw it? Maybe you haven’t been called to the office, which is a good thing typically, but you know, it’s to remind myself of the connection to work, and it’s to remind people that come into my office that I see work as very significant, and it’s to remind myself of many of the lessons that I learned.

One of the first things I learned after a year or two of being a purchasing agent and trying to, you know, get the best deal and you know make the other guy suffer in the deal—that’s how I started out of course, evolution mindset, right?—but was this verse. You know, a good purchasing agent has to look to the interest of his supplier as well as to his own interests. Negotiations is not about trying to, you know, rip off the other guy. Negotiations is the application of Philippians 2:4—to look out for the interest of others rather than just yourself.

When you do that, wonderful things happen. Money might be tight for you, but he’s got a lot of money, so he doesn’t care as much about when the payment happens. Maybe it’s a net 60-day or 90-day contract, and maybe that helps your business, right? Maybe he’s got access to really cheap shipping. So as part of the negotiation, he’ll, you know, take a little bit more on the price side, but give you the option that you don’t have to pay the freight.

The point is, you’re trying to determine in these negotiations the interests of others. Why? Because in work, which is a holy calling, we’re supposed to do just this very thing. You’re serving people through your work in obedience to Philippians 2.

2 Corinthians 4:5 says this: “For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.”

Okay, so you know, Paul’s writing to a church and he’s saying the pastor is a servant. The apostles particularly are servants. But if we see that our vocations are called and assigned to us by God just like the pastor is, then what we see is the applicability of this to the workplace. We’re there as servants of the people that we interact with, right? The clients, the customers, our employers, other people. We’re there as servants. So we have to serve.

Martin Luther—when I mentioned the Reformation and its great emphasis on vocation and calling as vocation, a lot of this was Martin Luther and John Calvin. Martin Luther particularly in terms of 1 Corinthians 7:17—the verse we started with—had to translate. You know, one of the first things he did that’s most significant things was to translate the New Testament into the vernacular of the day, the common speech of the day, and in his case that was German.

So words he used to translate it were quite significant, right? So what Luther translated this word called—as in the German—was “Beruf,” which was the normal German word for occupation or vocation, his work, men’s work. Very significant. So Luther understood the significance of the verse to vocation to the—nor what we would think of as ordinary secular work. Said no, it’s a calling from God. And so I’m going to translate that word “occupation” or “work,” “vocation,” whatever you would think of in the English language. But that’s what he did.

And Luther really stressed this stuff a lot. Here’s a quote I’m going to read. This is from a paper he wrote called “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation.” He said: “It is pure invention or fiction that popes, bishops, priests and monks are called the spiritual estate while princes, lords, artists and farmers are called the temporal estate.”

That’s what was going on pre-Reformation. And so the idea was the church was identical to the kingdom. Everything else is not. Everything else is temporal. The church has this spiritual eternal state. And so there was this big, almost Greek-like distinction again that we talked about several sermons ago. And Luther is attacking this with vigor and with force because he knows how much that kills the sense of vocational calling.

He says, “This is indeed a piece of deceit and hypocrisy.” And of course, it’s deceit and hypocrisy, which is quite self-serving on the part of the religious leaders, the pope and others and the pastors, because this makes them the really important people, right? So you can see how it’s there’s a natural sinful tendency to do this. But anyway, so Luther says this is deceit and hypocrisy.

“Yet no one need be intimidated by it. For this reason all Christians are truly of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them except that of office or calling. We are all consecrated priests by baptism. As St. Peter says, ‘You are a royal priesthood and a priestly nation.’”

See, again, you take a text like that which you normally apply just to the institutional church. But if you see it in its broader relationship, it has tremendous significance for your work, right? Because you’re a royal priesthood. And as part of that priesthood, you go and minister, you serve others in the workplace.

And he says the book of Revelation—which he called the apocalypse—says, “Thou hast made us to be kings and priests by thy blood.” And so to take that and to apply that to us when we go to work tomorrow morning is quite significant. And that was what Luther was doing.

Luther argued vigorously that every Christian calling is equal to the work of the priest or the pope. So that all these callings are callings before God.

And then Luther draws this out some in Psalm 147. Luther said this about verse 13. Verse 13 of 147 says this: “For he strengthens the bars of your gates. He blesses your children within you.”

“He strengthens the bars of your gates. What does it mean?” And here’s Luther’s comments on it. He said that this verse assures a city that God strengthens the bars of your gates. Luther then said, “Well, how could he—how does God strengthen these bars, right? How does he provide for the security and safety—that’s what bars are—of a city?”

And here’s his answer: “By the word bars, we must understand not only the iron bar that a smith can make, but everything else that helps to protect us, such as good government, good city ordinances, good order, and wise rulers. This is a gift of God.”

So how does God grant a city security? He says, “Well, it’s through lawmakers, police officers, those working in government and politics.” God cares for his own. He provides safety and defense through all these people serving each other in the context of a city to provide for that defense.

So again, you know, God does this. That’s great. How does he do it? He has decided to use you and I to strengthen the bars of the city. That’s what you’re going to do. Most of you in three weeks, three or four weeks, you’re going to cast ballots. And that’s one small thing, but it is a significant thing to do in terms of how God strengthens or weakens the bars of a city.

So Luther draws this concept of 1 Corinthians 7:17 to say, look—look how significant this is. You know, these, all of us are called and assigned. That calling and assignment is to serve one another. In this case, in terms of the defense of a city. And that means all kinds of vocations are involved and all kinds of activities are then holy and priestly activities to strengthen the bars of the city. This is God’s work. This is God’s work.

So here’s a quote from Luther: “What else is all of our work to God? Whether in the fields, in the garden, in the city, in the house, in war, or in government—but just such one of these activities to do God’s will. God wants to give us his gifts in the fields, at home, and everywhere else. How does he do it? He uses men and women who are called and assigned particular tasks.”

And Luther says this: “These are the masks of God behind which he wants to remain concealed and do all things.”

The masks of God. So what he’s saying is that God wants to strengthen your bars. How does he do it? He does it through your vote. He does it through some of you being involved in city government. He does it through some of you being involved in neighbor watch programs or helping your neighbor with his household safety. He does it with some of you becoming a policeman. And so you and you in the voter booth or whatever it is, you’re all the masks of God.

God is at work through his priests and kings in the world through their normal vocations and calling to strengthen the bars of a city. So the significance of this is that our calling and assignment is to serve other people—to fulfill the task that God has said he will perform.

He talked on Psalm 147:14 as well, that says this: “He makes peace in your gates, or in your borders rather. He fills you with the finest of the wheat.”

Luther says this: He says, “How does God make peace in your borders?” His answer is through good neighbors who practice honesty and integrity in their daily interactions and who participate in civic life. He talks about this as related to marital sexuality. God could create all kinds of children. He doesn’t need that to do it. But he’s pleased to work through his people. This is the way he’s designed it—is to affect all these things. He uses the so-called masks of God to accomplish these things.

And you know, if you think about it, a couple of things in two different directions. When God made Adam and Eve, he said to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. And we always just think of fruitful and multiply in terms of sexuality—producing children. But is it? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe that’s the primary thing that’s being talked about in the text. I’ve never really studied it closely, that particular text. But fruitfulness is used in a wide variety of ways in the scriptures.

And what we’re all called to do is to serve other people. And when we do that, the results of our labor are multiplied, right? And we fill the earth with more of our labor, what our labor has produced. You plant a seed and you get maybe 20 seeds from the plant that comes up after it. And you plant those 20 seeds and you get a whole bunch more. You got multiplication, fruitfulness going on.

And so our tasks and our labor are given to affect as well as child rearing—multiplication and fruitfulness in the earth—to fill it not just with children or other human beings but with the work that those human beings will accomplish—the culture, the civilization. And then on the other side of it—and I mentioned this last week, probably poorly, but the other side of it is that whether it’s you know husband and wife or whether it’s the workplace, whether it’s the messiness of politics and all that stuff, when God gives you that task to fulfill—rather than just doing it for us, which he is well able to do—it develops us.

It develops us not just individually but it develops us as a human community. Husband and wife have to learn to get along together, right? And navigate that marriage, and you have to learn to get along with your co-workers, and you have to. So human community—and this is a reflection. This is a direct reflection of the nature of God, right? Male and female created he them. In the image of God, he created them. Part of the image-bearing capacity of men is to be seen in community. And so that community is a reflection of the sort of work that God has called us to do.

So God’s labors are carried out through his people.

So this is what—the implication of God’s calling and assignment to us is, since it’s God’s calling and assignment, then we’re to do it in service to others, right? We’re to do it in service to other people.

Even, you know, the most rudimentary aspects of life. You know, Luther talked about the milkmaid. Milking the cow—another one of these masks of God—is using his people. He’s empowering them, calling them, assigning them tasks to produce, you know, what’s on your breakfast table tomorrow morning. And that’s because somebody served you directly or indirectly. Somebody served you.

Luther put it this way: “God milks the cows through the vocation of the milkmaid.” God milks the cows.

Now, closely related to this is our third point, and that is that we’re called and assigned in these vocations to be done in love for our neighbor, right? We know that we’re to love our neighbor as ourself. We’re to love God and to love our neighbor as ourself. So those are the two great commandments. And so not only to serve our neighbor, but to see service as our neighbor as part of the love of our neighbor as well.

Ephesians 4:28 says, “Let the thief no longer steal but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with someone in need.”

The purpose of his calling and assignment to do labor with his hands, manual labor, is to love somebody by providing what they need. Okay? He had hated somebody by being a thief. Now he’s called to love and serve his neighbor through industry, through diligence, through the calling and assignment of his work from God.

Proverbs 22:28 and following. I’ve talked about this a couple weeks ago. I read from it. But if you look at the ten words of the thirty words of the wise, the first ten are a unit, second ten, third ten. And that first ten—the last seven of those ten—I believe is an exposition of the fourth commandment. They’re bounded together.

Let me—it begins in verse 28 by saying, “Don’t move the ancient landmark that your fathers have set.” So work is about not stealing things like we just read, but work is about serving people instead. And that section moves, concludes in chapter 23:10: “Don’t move an ancient landmark or enter the fields of the fatherless.” And it says God will beat you because of it.

So it’s work in that section—in the words of the wise at the center of the book of Proverbs. The first thing that’s really kind of focused on at that center is labor and work. And that labor and work is seen not in stealing, but in actually loving, being kind to the fatherless.

And then at the very center of that section is the admonition I talked about a couple of weeks ago: “Don’t labor to be rich. Riches get wings and fly away.” So there’s a warning at the center, and it drives us to a proper sense of serving the fatherless, certainly not stealing from them, and doing diligent labor rather than stealing—so that bringing in the text from Ephesians—so that we can help other people.

So Proverbs reminds us that really our calling and assignment from God is service. It’s not the accumulation of wealth. Well, that’s big, right? That’s very significant. I mean, in terms of how you young people—you don’t have you’re not sure what your vocation will be. Well, if you’ve got an opportunity on one hand to make a ton of money, and but really be isolated and not really serve people or maybe provide a good or service that isn’t that good for them, and on the other hand an opportunity to serve people very directly for less money—which are you going to do?

Well, if you see your vocation as an individual thing—it’s what I call myself to do, it’s for me, it’s for my own attainment—then you’ll do X. But if you see yourself as called to serve and love your neighbor, that will take a big component—that’ll be a big component of what you going to do, and you’ll choose why. Now, there’s nothing wrong with making a lot of money. Don’t get me wrong. But I’m just saying that typically when I hear young people talk about vocation, I don’t hear about this part of it: Which job can I serve people better at?

But if our jobs are calling and assignment from God to love our neighbor and serve him through our productive labors, it should be—in addition to having enough money to support a family and all that stuff—it should be.

Dorothy Sayers talked about this, and she talked about British men and women learning in World War II about love and service of others in their vocations. And first she sets it up this way. She says: “The habit of thinking about work as something one does to make money is so ingrained in us that we can scarcely imagine what a revolutionary change it would be to think about it instead in terms of the work itself—the work done itself.”

I then she went on to say: “I believe there is a Christian doctrine of work very closely related to the doctrine of the creative energy of God and the divine image in man. The essential modern heresy being that work is not an expression of man’s creative energy in the service of society but only something one does in order to obtain money and leisure.”

We’ve talked about that. So she’s saying the big problem is people work just so they can get money and leisure. And she talks about the end result. What happens if that’s what you’re doing? She says this: “Doctors then practice medicine not primarily to relieve suffering but to make a living. The cure of the patient is something that happens on the way, and it’s important, right? But ultimately it’s the money you’re after.”

And so when push comes to shove, that’s what you’re going to go for. “Lawyers,” she said, “accept briefs not because they have a passion for justice, but because the law is the profession which enables them to live, to accumulate money, and get leisure time.”

And what she says is that during the war, people found a new delight and satisfaction in work. Why? Because doctors, lawyers, all kinds of people had to serve their country, right? Their country, your country’s life was at stake, you know, against Nazi Germany. And so now a doctor would be a doctor in the army, and he would make no money—very little money, right? So he’s not able to do it for the money anymore.

And what they found—what a massive amount of Englishmen and women found—was the delight in doing the job just for the job itself—to serve and love other people through that vocation—even though they made no money.

And so Sayers says this was a big revelation, and it really helped a whole generation of people to have a different perspective on what work and vocation is. She said: “For the first time in their lives they found themselves—found themselves doing something not for the pay, which was miserable, but for the sake of getting the thing done.”

So we are called and assigned by God, and because of that we know we’re called and assigned to serve and to love other people.

Now listen to how love works itself out. This is a quote from a man named Lester Doster. He says: “Work is the form in which we make ourselves useful to other people, in which others make themselves useful to us. We plant with our work. God gives the increase to unify the human race.”

“Look at the chair you are lounging in. Well, you’re in a pew, but imagine one of the nice chairs you have in your house, right?” He says, “Look at the chair you’re lounging in. Could you have made it for yourself? How would you get, say, the wood—go and fell a tree, but only after first making the roads for that, or the tools for that rather, and putting together some kind of vehicle to haul the wood and constructing a mill to do the lumber and roads to drive on from place to place?

“In short, a lifetime or two to make one chair. If we worked not 40 hours,” he said, “but rather 140 hours per week, we couldn’t make ourselves from scratch even a fraction of all the goods and services that we call our own. Our paycheck turns out to buy us the use of far more than we could possibly make for ourselves in the time it takes us to earn the check.”

Work’s far more in return upon our efforts than our particular jobs put in.

“Imagine that everyone quits working right now. What happens?” He said, “Civilized life quickly melts away. Food vanishes from the shelves. Gas dries up at the pumps. Streets are no longer patrolled. Fires burn themselves out. Communication and transportation services and utilities go dead. Those who survive at all are soon huddled around campfires, sleeping in caves, clothed in raw animal hides. The difference between a wilderness and culture is simply work.”

That’s very significant, isn’t it? Think about that. Now, what does that show us? It shows us the incredible blessings, fruitfulness, multiplication effect of service and love to one another. When we go to our jobs and serve and love one another, the stuff that human culture comes up with is astonishing, because God is blessing those very endeavors.

Don’t want to quit. Don’t have a desire to quit working. The whole thing would come down around our heads if we all quit working. Working is good. It’s one of the best, most significant ways we actually do and can love one another.

And as I said with the example of the British people in the war, when you see that—when you see the value of serving and loving other people through your work—and that you’ve been called and assigned to love and serve others through that very job that you probably grumbled about this last week, when you see that, that’s what produces satisfaction in what you do.

To think about that and to think about the multiplication effect that your labors have in the context of the world, your accepting, rejoicing in the lot of your life, in God giving you a calling and an assignment to work, is the greatest way that you love other people. We always think of loving your neighbor as yourself as mission work, evangelism, charity work. But you know, each of you who go off to work, or those of you that work at home regularly, your lives are filled with loving other people.

Loving other people. And the significance of your labors should not be downplayed.

Calvin said this—quoted Luther—let’s quote some Calvin. “No task will be seen as sordid and base provided you obey your calling in it; else it will not shine and be reckoned very precious in God’s sight.”

So obey your calling in it. Calvin says it’ll shine, be very precious in God’s sight. See it sordid and base—is just as something you do for necessity—and no shining—no—whatever, it’s sordid, it’s base, and it’s not satisfying. Obey your calling is what Calvin said, because he understood that God has given us a calling and assignment, and obedience to God is obedience to perform that calling and assignment as service and as love for other people. And that, Calvin said, brings us great satisfaction.

One last point. If we go now, the implication is obvious, but let’s talk about it just for a couple of minutes. And the implication is that means if you’re going to love your brother or sister, and you’re going to serve the world through God, right, at work tomorrow, you’re not going to do it in a slipshod way, right? You know, as the guy that made the jams from Armenia said, “God doesn’t make junk. I don’t make junk. I’m not going to do things half-heartedly. You know, I’m not going to do things poorly. I’m going to do things competently.”

And so this last element is that we have been called and assigned to exercise our vocations competently. Competently.

Keller, in talking about this in “Every Good Endeavor,” describes this plane—a Boeing 727. Okay, so it takes off. It’s going, I think—I’m not sure where it’s going. It doesn’t make any difference. It takes off, and about 100 miles out over the ocean, the cargo door blows off. Big hole in the side of the plane. Immediately, nine people get sucked out to their deaths, of course.

And now the pilot, he’s got to figure out what to do, right? And so he’s gotta, you know—now think of the implications. He’s just taken off. That means that plane is way heavy. You can’t land a plane—you’re not supposed to land a plane loaded up with gasoline because the landing gear have been designed to carry a particular weight, but not the weight of all that fuel that you haven’t expended.

So he’s got that difficulty. The aerodynamics of the plane have changed. It’s got a hole in the side of the plane, right? So the normal things he knows about the aerodynamics of the plane and what he should do, that’s all kind of gone away. He can’t really trust the instruments to tell him what to do because the instruments assume the aerodynamics of a plane without a big hole in the side of it.

He knows he has to land the thing. He’s got to get back and land it quickly. But on the other hand, he also knows that he’s got to slow it down for that landing, right? And so of course in the meantime, he’s got to control the direction of the plane with the rudder or whatever it is, and the wings and stuff, and those things start to malfunction too.

So he’s got to control the plane. He’s got to start thinking about, you know, the new set of aerodynamics. He’s got to worry about the heaviness of the plane, what speed he has to bring it back to land it in, and all that stuff, right? And so he’s got to do all those things, and he does. He actually lands the plane at a speed that’s a lot faster than it’s supposed to be landed—an extra 20 miles per hour—but they say it was one of the smoothest landings that they’d ever experienced.

Somebody interviewed him afterwards, and they said, “Well, you know, what did you do when you knew the cargo door blew off?” He says, “Well, the first thing I did is I said a prayer for my passengers, and then I got to work. And what those passengers wanted was to get to work—that he would get to work competently. They didn’t care if he was spending a lot of time, you know, liking them or not liking them, you know, being kind to them or not kind to them, how much time he was going to be up there praying for them.

“And you know what they cared about, and what was significant, the way he was going to love those people and keep them alive was to be competent as a pilot, right?

And so this is what we’re called to do.

And the Bible of course certainly you’ll remember my sermon last Advent on the coming of diligence and the significance of diligence in the scriptures. And in fact this stuff—I mentioned earlier in the words of wisdom, the words of the wise rather, in Proverbs 22 verse 29: “Do you see a man who excels in his work? Who’s competent, who does really good skillful work? He will stand before kings. He will not stand before unknown men.”

It’s—in the center of the book of Proverbs—for people to learn how to—adults and young men—to be young boys to become men, it says work and to do your work diligently, and dominion is tied to diligence and competence in your labor.

What does it mean by the way to be a postmillennial? Have you ever thought about that? What does it look like? Well, if the things we’re talking about today are understood, there’s your postmillennialism. There’s your eschatological result that’s going to happen. And you know, if you think of things in those terms, the world is doing pretty well. God has created a wonderful culture. Now we’re in the throes of an apostasy, so to speak, worldwide. But understand that these blessings that God gives to service to our neighbor and the love of our neighbor, the blessings God gives to what we normally do in life, our work—that is what the mission of God in the world is. Our labor.

And that’s what the end result is going to look like. A world framed in beauty, given back to God, complete and beautified and glorified. And that’s what work is, and that happens through competence—not just through working, not just through understanding service and love of others, but to do it in a competent way, right?

So I would admonish you that if the lessons of calling and assignment mean anything to you from today’s text, to see yourself tomorrow as servants and lovers of your neighbor through your tasks, but then to see that as an image bearer of God who doesn’t make junk, who doesn’t work in a slothful, incompetent way. But we’re image bearers of God who is competent, right? Who is diligent, who doesn’t make junk, and doesn’t work half-heartedly.

So may the Lord God grant us that.

Dorothy Sayers puts it this way. She says, “The church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him to not be drunk or disorderly in his leisure hours and to come to church on Sunday. What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.”

I like that. Dorothy Sayers. He should make good tables. That’s the demand that’s being placed upon you today. Do your work well tomorrow. You have been called by God for that particular work. He has assigned you that. And because he’s assigned it to you, you can work with confidence. You can work with a degree of delight, even though it’s still work and work. And as you work, realize you are blessing the created order.

You’re engaged in this wonderful work of humanity that produces far more than we could on our own in terms of goods and services. You’ll return home tomorrow night to chairs that you couldn’t make—given a lifetime, or at least it take you many, many years of labor to do it at all. And so look at the blessed things that flow from your work and service, and commit yourself tomorrow to go into your work tomorrow seeking competence and doing what you’ve got to do to become more competent.

Keller closes the chapter on his—in his book—on competency and service with a quote from John Coltrane, who is probably acknowledged as the best jazz saxophone player of all time. And Coltrane had—raised Christian, lapsed, got into drugs, alcohol, etc.—and then I don’t know what happened, but something happened to him in, what, 1957? God somehow did a work in his life. And he then did an album later on called “A Love Supreme,” and it was his desire to have this album be his labor of love and that of the people that played with him—in praise to God—and to bring that kind of competency in the musical arena to other people.

Let me read you from some of the liner notes of Coltrane. Now Coltrane, you know, was a strange figure and got into universalism in his later years, etc. But here’s what he wrote at the time. This is from the liner notes of “A Love Supreme.”

He says, “Dear listener, all praise be to God to whom all praise is due. Let us pursue him in the righteous path. Yes, it is true. Seek and ye shall find. Only through him can we know the most wondrous bequest.

“During the year 1957, I experienced by the grace of God a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music. I feel this has been granted through his grace. All praise to God. At this time I would like to tell you that no matter what—it is you—I have missed a part of the quote here.

He says rather that God is gracious and merciful. His way is in love through which we all are. We all have our existence. It is truly this aspect of God—a love supreme. This album is a humble offering to him, an attempt to say, ‘Thank you, God,’ through our work, even as we do it in our hearts and with our tongues. May he help and strengthen all men in every good endeavor.”

That’s the name of the book, Keller’s book on work, which I think is excellent. And he gets the title from Coltrane—talking about work, tongues, hearts—all in praise to God and all trying to serve his fellow man with beauty and bringing them satisfaction.

May the Lord God grant that would be our heart’s desire as we go tomorrow to our lot in life, to our calling and assignment from God.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for today. Thank you, Father, for your scriptures. Thank you for the delight of knowing that our jobs are calling and assignments from you. Bless us in them this week. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.