A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it for them rather than for yourself. And so our work can be a calling only if it is reimagined as a mission of service to something beyond merely our own interests. Thinking of work mainly as a means of self-fulfillment and self-realization slowly crushes a person.
Interpretation
A job becomes meaningful when it's seen as serving others rather than just fulfilling personal desires.
In this quote, Timothy Keller emphasizes that a job transcends mere self-interest when it is viewed as a calling to serve others. He suggests that defining work solely by personal gain can lead to a sense of emptiness, while viewing it as a mission to help others fills work with purpose and meaning.
In practice
In a speech to inspire volunteers, one might say, 'Remember, as Timothy Keller said, a job is truly a vocation when it's about serving others.'
Falling in love in a Christian way is to say,'I am excited about your future and I want to be part of getting you there. I'm signing up for the journey with you. Would you sign up for the journey to my true self with me? It's going to be hard but I want to get there.
Only in Jesus Christ do we see how the untamable, infinite God can become a baby and a loving Savior. On the cross we see how both the love and the holiness of God can be fulfilled at once.
All human problems are ultimately symptoms, and our separation from God is the cause.
While your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage.
To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.
God's Kingdom is "present in its beginnings, but still future in its fullness. This guards us from an under-realized eschatology (expecting no change now) and an over-realized eschatology (expecting all change now). In this stage, we embrace the reality that while we're not yet what we will be, we're also no longer what we used to be.
I like the job. That's what I'll miss the most... I'm not sure anybody ever liked this as much as I've liked it.
The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work.
Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
I'm not interested in doing work that doesn't captivate me.
Our point of view is, lets not be so elitist that we can't honor good, hard, dignified, ennobling work: people working with their hands, building things, putting up solar panels, weatherizing homes, working on organic agriculture, building wind farms. We don't have robots in society, so somebody has to do that work. Lets make sure that the people who can use that work get a chance to do it. I see that as a first step toward bigger and better things.
Work is work; wherever I'm working, I do the best I can. If the actual dollars come from investors as opposed to taxpayers and patrons, what's the difference?
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