devotional

Doing Your Job as Jesus Would Do It

 Dallas Willard

From: The Divine Conspiracy (Harper SF, 1998)

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Consider your job, the work you do to make a living.  This is one of the clearest ways possible of focusing upon apprenticeship to Jesus.  To be a disciple of Jesus is, crucially, to be learning from Jesus how to do your job as Jesus himself would do it.  New Testament language for this is to do it “in the name” of Jesus.

Once you stop to think about it, you can see that not to find your job to be a primary place of discipleship is to automatically exclude a major part, if not most, of your waking hours from life with him.  It is to assume to run one of the largest areas of your interest and concern on your own or under the direction and instruction of people other than Jesus.  But this is right where most professing Christians are left today, with the prevailing view that discipleship is a special calling having to do chiefly with religious activities and “full-time Christian service.”

But how, exactly, is one to make one’s job a primary place of apprenticeship to Jesus? Not, we quickly say, by becoming the Christian nag-in-residence, the rigorous upholder of all propriety, and the dead-eye critic of everyone else’s behavior.

A gentle but firm non-cooperation with things that everyone knows to be wrong, together with a sensitive, non-officious, non-intrusive, non-obsequious service to others, should be our usual overt manner.  This should be combined with inward attitudes of constant prayer for whatever kind of activity our workplace requires and genuine love for everyone involved.

As circumstances call for them, special points in Jesus’ teachings and example, such as non-retaliation, refusal to press for financial advantage, consciousness of and appropriate assistance to those under special handicaps, and so on would come into play.  And we should be watchful and prepared to meet any obvious spiritual need or interest in understanding Jesus with words that are truly loving thoughtful, and helpful.

It is not true, I think, that we fulfill our obligations to those around us by only living the gospel.  There are many ways of speaking inappropriately, of course—even harmfully—but it is always true that words fitly spoken are things of beauty and power that bring life and joy.  And you cannot assume that people understand what is going on when you only live in their midst as Jesus’ person.  They may just regard you as one more version of human oddity.

I once knew of a case in an academic setting where at noon one professor very visibly took his Bible and lunch and went to a nearby chapel to study, pray and be alone.  Another professor would call his assistant into his office, where they would have sex.  No one in that environment thought either activity to be anything worth inquiring about.  After all, people do all sorts of things.  We are used to that.  In some situations it is only words that can help towards understanding.

But, once again, the specific work to be done—whether it is making ax handles or tacos, selling automobiles or teaching kindergarten, investment banking or political office, evangelizing or running a Christian education program, performing in the arts or teaching English as a second language—is of central interest to God.  He wants it well done.  It is work that should be done, and it should be done as Jesus himself would do it.  Nothing can substitute for that.  In my opinion, at least, as long as one is on the job, all peculiarly religious activities should take second place to doing “the job” in sweat, intelligence, and the power of God.  That is our devotion to God.  (I am assuming, of course, that the job is one that serves good human purposes.)

Our intention with our job should be the highest possible good in its every aspect, and we should pursue that with conscious expectation of a constant energizing and direction from God.  Although we must never allow our job to become our life, we should, within reasonable limits, routinely sacrifice our comfort and pleasure for the quality of our work, whether it be ax handles, tacos, or the proficiency of a student we are teaching.

And yes, this results in great benefit for those who utilize our services.  But our mind is not obsessed with them, and certainly not with having appreciation from them.  We do the job well because that is what Jesus would like, and we admire and love him.   It is what he would do.  We “do our work with soul [ex psyche], to the Lord, not to men” (Col. 3:23). “It is the Lord Christ you serve” (v. 25).  As his apprentices, we are personally interacting with him as we do our job, and he is with us, as he promised, to teach us how to do it best.

Few have illustrated this better than Kirby Puckett, thirteen years the centerfielder for the Minnesota Twins baseball team.  He had a career batting average of .318, made the All-Star lineup ten years in a row, and won six Golden Gloves for defensive play.  He was one of the most loved men ever to play the game, and a well-known Christian.

Dennis Martinez, pitcher for the Cleveland Indians, once crushed the left side of Kirby’s face with a pitch.  Martinez assumed that Kirby would hate him.  But when he recovered a bit, Kirby called Martinez “my good friend” and blamed himself for not getting out of the way of the fastball.  He was an outstanding community leader for good causes, and expressed his faith naturally in words that matched his life.  Everyone knew who Kirby was trusting and why he would not hate someone who had injured him.  He was living in God’s world and relying upon it.

One who does not know this way of “job discipleship” by experience cannot begin to imagine what release and help and joy there is in it.  And to repeat the crucial point, if we restrict our discipleship to special religious times, the majority of our waking hours will be isolated from the manifest presence of the kingdom in our lives. Those waking hours will be times when we are on our own on our job.  Our time at work—even religious work—will turn out to be a “holiday from God.”

On the other hand, if you dislike or even hate your job, a condition epidemic in our culture, the quickest way out of that job, or to joy in it, is to do it as Jesus would.  This is the very heart of discipleship, and we cannot effectively be an apprentice of Jesus without integrating our job into The Kingdom Among Us.

Excerpted from The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God by Dallas Willard (Harper SF, 1997). Used by Permission. All rights reserved.

Dallas Willard is a Professor in the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He has taught at USC since 1965, where he was Director of the School of Philosophy from 1982-1985. He lectures and publishes extensively in the area of spiritual formation and living christianly. His book The Divine Conspiracy, from which this article is excerpted, was selected as Christianity Today's "Book of the Year" for 1999.