The question we all must ask

When I was in my last year of law school, I seriously considered entering the ministry when I graduated. I went so far as to attend training during the Christmas break on raising financial support so I could become a campus minister.

I had seen how my life had been changed and how lives of other college students had been changed with the gospel, and I couldn’t imagine more meaningful work. However, I realized before I graduated that God had called me to be a lawyer.

One question lingered, though. I understood why God might want me to be a campus minister: He wanted to see people saved and their lives transformed.

But how would my job as a lawyer fit into the kingdom of God? 

Financing the Kingdom?

Then I started practicing law. If you work, you know the routine. You work hard day after day, and you receive a paycheck. At the end of the year, you receive a bonus and, perhaps, a raise. Then you start the new year and do it all over again.  

When you do this week after week, month after month, year after year, it’s easy to start to believe the primary purpose of work is to make money. Then there are Bible verses like Paul telling the Thessalonians that if a man doesn’t work, don’t let him eat (2 Thessalonians 3:10), and that a man who doesn’t provide for his family is worse than an infidel (I Timothy 5:8).

It’s easy to conclude that the role of work is to generate money for other things. After all, someone does need to support the local church, ministries, and missionaries. But when you go to work thinking the only reason you are working day after day is for a paycheck, it can become a drudgery. And the question remained: Was this really the value of my work in the kingdom of God—to be the sugar daddy for the Bride of Christ?

The workplace as a mission field?

Then I considered the possibility that work was a doorway into the kingdom of God for the lost. After all, work is usually a microcosm of the world and therefore is full of non-Christians who need to hear the gospel. The problem was that I was not getting paid to provide spiritual advice to clients. There is something that just doesn’t feel right about taking money from an employer to do one thing with the intent of doing another.

Also, if you are not careful, you can end up offending the very people you have to work with every day.  If you are going to do evangelism at work, it has to be done strategically and selectively, and with a lot of prudence and discretion. 

If you do that—and you should—and you’re successful, over the span of your career, you may lead a few people to the Lord. But is that the role of work in the kingdom of God?

The problem with both approaches

There is another problem with both these explanations. If they are right, then it doesn’t really matter what work we choose to do, so long as it pays well and offers the opportunity for evangelism. Work itself becomes merely a tool and has no inherent value.

The Bible teaches, though, that work does have inherent value. See e.g. Ecclesiastes 9:10; Colossians 3:23; Proverbs 22:29. So, while work does enable us to support the local church and can provide opportunities for evangelism, neither adequately explains its true importance in the kingdom of God.

Fortunately, Jesus did. 

That is the subject of the next post. GS