Faith and Work News ~ Links to Interesting Articles

• A Conversation with Tim Keller. This interview with Tim Keller by Mike Cosper is an excellent bonus episode on The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill
• Abram Van Engen, Professor: Origin Stories. On this episode of the Working with Dan Doriani podcast, Dan talks to Abram Van Engen, professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, Executive Director of the Carver Project, and the author of two books. The second and most well-known is titled City on a Hill, a History of American Exceptionalism.
• Managing Tension. On this episode of the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast, Stanley discusses why a certain amount of tension is necessary for a healthy organization. Leaders must learn to recognize the difference between “conflicts that need to be resolved” versus “tensions that need to be managed.
• “You Are An Agent of Flourishing” Featuring Amy Sherman. On this episode of the Denver Institute for Faith & Work Faith & Work Podcast, join Joanna Meyer and Amy Sherman, author of Kingdom Calling and the new book Agents of Flourishing, as they discuss community, shalom, and the Church.
• Called to Lead. My book Called to Lead: Living and Leading for Jesus in the Workplace is available in both a paperback and Kindle edition. Read a free sample (Introduction through Chapter 2).
• On this episode of the Minute with Maxwell podcast, John Maxwell tells us that a career is what you get paid for, while a calling is what you’re made for. You can quit a career at any time, but a calling stays with you throughout your life.
• Examining Our Aspirations & Worship in the Great Resignation. Judy Allen writes “The impact of the Great Resignation will not be fully understood for years, but Christians can take immediate advantage of it by asking ourselves two important questions: To what do we aspire? Who, or what, do we worship?”

Click on ‘Continue reading’ for:

• More links to interesting articles
• The Top 10 Faith and Work Quotes of the Week
• My Review of The Road to J.O.Y. Leading with Faith, Playing with Purpose, Leaving a Legacy by Scott Drew
• Quotes from the book You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News by Kelly Kapic

• We Rest to Work. Guy Richards writes “Rest in a post-Fall world should be directed to the end of enabling us to fulfill our mandate to work.”
• Ordinary Christian Work. Tim Challies writes “Of the many legacies of the Protestant Reformation, few have had greater and wider-reaching impact than the rediscovery of the biblical understanding of vocation.”
• 25 Chores to Teach Kids About the Goodness of Work. Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra writes “When we work alongside our kids with prayer and patience, we don’t need to say a lot to explain that what we’re doing is good. It’s self-evident.”

• What Should My Teen Consider When Applying for a Summer Job? Joe Carter responds to the question “My teen wants to get a job this summer, but I’m not sure how to help him apply wisely. What things should I discuss with him about possible positions? How can we consider pay, hours, working on Sunday, work environment/culture, resume-building, and transportation to and from work?”
• How Will I Find My Ministry Calling? On this episode of the Ask Pastor John podcast, John Piper addresses questions summarized as “How will I find my ministry calling? Will I find it internally, like some impulse that will lead me to start a new thing? Or will my ministry calling come from the outside? Will it come from others telling me where I’m needed?”
• Have I Sinned If I Fall Short of Excellence at Work? On this episode of the Ask Pastor John podcast, John Piper responds to the question “In Colossians 3:22–24, Paul exhorts his readers to ‘work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.’ Does this mean that any work not done in excellence is sin? How do we apply God’s view of work to cleaning our house, writing a paper for school, or working a nine-to-five job? I have been feeling guilty about the way I handle these things for months now, and I’m not sure if I’m just being self-righteous, or if I am being disobedient to the Lord. Is Paul describing a type of excellence in all that we do?”
• How Do We Respond if We are the Incompetent Colleague? Russ Gehrlein writes “Do you ever feel like you just can’t keep up with all of the expectations and requirements of your job? Do your boss or your coworkers ever give you the impression that you are the weakest link on the team?”

---

• The value of our work isn’t finally found at all in the particular thing we do; it’s found in the fact that whatever we do, we do it for our King. Greg Gilbert and Sebastian Traeger
• The real secret to leading like Jesus is found in Proverbs 3:5–6: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.” Ken Blanchard and Phil Hodges
• Do not be discontented with your calling. Whatever God has made your position or your work, remain in that, unless you are quite sure that He calls you to something else. Let your first concern be to glorify God to the best of your ability where you are. Charles Spurgeon
• If you’re living for nothing more than your own significance, you will feel more and more insignificant. Tim Keller
• You achieve true mastery when you identify the few things God has created you to do most exceptionally well and work at them “with all your heart, as working for the Lord” (Colossians 3:23). Jordan Raynor
• Work, it seems, was never meant to be something we do just to make a living. It was meant to be a means of making a difference – in our own lives and in the lives of others. Jeff Goins
• Human beings need to work because work is in our blood. As carriers of the divine imprint, as bearers of the image of God, we are, by nature and design, helplessly vocational beings. Scott Sauls
• We are not to choose jobs and conduct our work to fulfill ourselves and accrue power, for being called by God to do something is empowering enough. We are to see work as a way of service to God and our neighbor. Tim Keller
• Work is always going to be a disappointment to each of us because of sin. Russ Gehrlein
  

  ---

The Road to J.O.Y. Leading with Faith, Playing with Purpose, Leaving a Legacy by Scott Drew. Thomas Nelson. 239 pages. 2022
****

This book, written by Scott Drew, the coach of the Baylor University men’s basketball team, is about the culture of J.O.Y. (Jesus, Others, Yourself), and Baylor men’s basketball. As his co-author Don Yaeger writes, this isn’t a book about a basketball team, rather it’s a book about a ministry. In this inspiring book you will read about how Coach Drew integrates his faith and work as the men’s basketball coach at Baylor.
The book takes us through the 2020-21 season, in which Baylor won the NCAA Championship and the parade which followed in Waco, Texas. Drew had taken the job in 2003 which he writes was arguably—because of a tragedy and scandal—the most infamous team in all of college sports. He writes of his life leading up to Baylor – his father was also a basketball coach, and his brother made a famous shot to win an NCAA game for Valparaiso. He attended Butler University, where he tells us he learned how to be a coach. He would replace his father as head coach at Valparaiso, where he coached for a year before taking the Baylor position. In his first season he and his coaching staff tried to figure out how they could be competitive with only eight scholarship players.
His first three years, and the third year especially, helped solidify in his own heart the kind of foundation they were trying to build at Baylor. He writes that helping take a program from the brink of the NCAA “death penalty” into the NCAA tournament in five seasons was the kind of thing that God had to be involved in.
Most important, Drew writes that they saw their program as a ministry (chapel messages, players accepting Christ, being baptized, etc.). He writes that as coaches they spend as much time on their spiritual posture and positioning as anything else. There’s nothing more important that they can teach the players. He tells us that he is a basketball coach and likes to win, but he has come to understand that winning the game of life is the only game that matters.
He tells us that in the off-season of 2019, he started reaching out to men of faith whom he felt he could learn from. The coaches knew they needed to increase their pursuit of God and incorporation of Jesus into their program. Coach Drew called coaches Dabo Swinney and Tony Dungy. They started to tell him about a culture of J.O.Y., which stood for Jesus, Others, Yourself. They implemented the culture of J.O.Y. into their daily routines at Baylor and putting Jesus first in that overt way literally changed their program.
He writes that their team came together inside that Indianapolis (COVID) bubble in ways that only made them better as a team, even when basketball was the furthest thing from their minds. Their entire group, one through thirty-four, was there to invest in and pour into one another. He tells us that in some ways, it was three weeks of the closest thing to the early church lifestyle any of them had experienced.
Baylor would beat Gonzaga in the national championship game, the culmination of the eighteen years Coach Drew had been at Baylor and the incredible challenges God helped them to overcome.
I really enjoyed this inspiring book about how Coach Drew integrated his faith and work as the men’s basketball coach at Baylor University, the challenges and successes. Below are some of my favorite quotes from the book:

• Sometimes God calls us at the times when it doesn’t seem to make much sense. So, we have to rely on him and seek his hand in all of it.
• One of the things I’ve learned: always give 100 percent and let God decide the results.
• When you have what seems like an impossible task, don’t forget to ask Jesus to make the impossible possible and seek his guidance throughout.
• In life, I think God uses our process as much as our progress. We are shaped by the experiences God has for us, and I think that shaping equips us for the next parts of our journeys.
• When you regularly pursue God, it’s important to stop and see the ways he is speaking and moving in your life, even if the ultimate outcome isn’t yet what you’ve hoped for.
• A lot of times, during some of the moments the world would consider to be the lowest, God brings you the closest to him, making those moments, in hindsight, some of the best.
• Sometimes, when you find that you aren’t having the success you want, ask yourself if what you want is what God would consider success.
• I’ve always believed in trusting God with the outcome if you put in the work.
• When you have genuine faith, you see service for and investment in others as things you get to do, not things you have to do.
• If you live your life on mission for God, everything you do can be a ministry, because everyone you encounter can be someone you serve because Jesus has served you.
• Tomorrow is promised to no one. All we can do is make the most out of today.
• God often uses the least of us to make amazing things happen, not so much to bless the vessels he chooses for the mission but so when people look and see what has happened, they have no choice but to see it as a thing God has done.
• When you think of the things in your life as a ministry, instead of a career or a hobby, or even just a family, it changes everything.

---

Faith and Work Book Club – Won’t you read along with us?

We are reading through You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News by Kelly Kapic. The list of demands on our time seems to be never ending. It can leave you feeling a little guilty–like you should always be doing one more thing.
Rather than sharing better time-management tips to squeeze more hours out of the day, Kelly Kapic takes a different approach in You’re Only Human. He offers a better way to make peace with the fact that God didn’t create us to do it all.
Kapic explores the theology behind seeing our human limitations as a gift rather than a deficiency. He lays out a path to holistic living with healthy self-understanding, life-giving relationships, and meaningful contributions to the world. He frees us from confusing our limitations with sin and instead invites us to rest in the joy and relief of knowing that God can use our limitations to foster freedom, joy, growth, and community.
Readers will emerge better equipped to cultivate a life that fosters gratitude, rest, and faithful service to God.

This week we look at Chapter 3: Are The Limits of My Body Bad? Praise God for Mary. Here are a few quotes from the chapter:

• The Creator God is not embarrassed by the limitations of our bodies and his material world but fully approves of them in and through the Son’s incarnation.
• The doctrine of the incarnation of God, that the Father sends the Son in the Spirit to become human, includes the teaching that God puts a high value on the particular humanity and finitude of each of us.
• Eve sought to escape her finitude, whereas Mary embraced it, opening herself up in utter dependence to the Creator Lord.
• If we are ever going to move from a time-management view of our limitations to a theological one, we need to reconnect creation with re-creation, Genesis 1 with John 1.
• If we are ashamed of our bodies, of our physicality and finitude, we are in danger of being ashamed of our Creator. But God is not ashamed of our physicality. Why are we ashamed of what he freely loves?