Book Recommendation: Why Your Work Matters

Name of Book:  Why Your Work Matters: How God Uses Our Everyday Vocations to Transform Us, Our Neighbors, and the World

Author: Tom Nelson

What’s the “Big Idea”?

In this excellent update to his original book Work Matters, Tom Nelson guides readers through God’s story of work as revealed in Scripture and invites readers to see how their lives and work fit into that story. As an experienced pastor and a leading voice in the faith and work conversation, Nelson understands that a disconnect exists for many Christians between their faith and their work—what he identifies as a gap between their Sunday worship and their Monday work.

In Why Your Work Matters, Nelson presents a holistic story of God’s intentions for the creation, arguing that work is not an accidental aspect of God’s created world, but integral to its very design. And while work, along with all of creation, has become distorted through sin and the fall, God’s redemptive work for the world in Jesus frees all of creation from sin’s distortion, restoring our relationship to work along the way. Nelson beautifully highlights how love is a prominent theme throughout God’s story of work that knits together our lives and our labors along with those of our neighbors. By allowing our lives to become aligned with God’s work story, Christians are able to see the dignity in all work and all workers, pursue excellence without overwork, enjoy rest without giving in to sloth, and reframe all of our labors as an expression of neighborly love.

Whether you are burned out and tired with your current work, energized and hopeful for your future work prospects, or desire a deeper understanding of a biblical theology of work, this book will serve as a helpful resource and guide.

Why It Matters to Our Life, Work, and Leadership

There are many aspects of this book that are crucial to the life of a Christian leader. Perhaps most important is how Nelson presents a holistic vision of God’s salvation and Christian discipleship that takes root in the day-to-day rhythms of our lives. Let me highlight a few ways he does this.

All work is an expression of discipleship. Many Christians believe that true discipleship requires leaving “secular” jobs for the overtly Christian jobs of pastor or missionary. Or at the very least, working for a Christian non-profit. The result is many Christians believing a significant part of their life holds no value as a disciple. In contrast, Nelson shows how John the Baptist exhorts soldiers and tax collectors, not to leave their work, but to do their work differently (Luke 3:12–14). In this new and biblical understanding, the workplace, whether Christian or secular, becomes the arena where we live out our discipleship. It is the workplace where we find meaning, worship God, and grow into Christlikeness.

Our discipleship in the workplace changes over time and does not end with retirement. Nelson probes the different seasons of work that change across the decades of our lives. He discusses what faithful discipleship looks like in the seasons of career formation, career maturation, career retirement, and unemployment. He spends a significant time discussing God’s story of retirement, encouraging those in or approaching this season to enter it prayerfully, resisting cultural narratives that make this season entirely individualized and focused on leisure in order to steward well the gifts of wisdom and time that often accrue with age. This section resonates well with the De Pree Center’s emphasis on equipping leaders to be faithful and fruitful in their first third, second third, and third third of leadership.

Discerning the difference between resiliency and burnout. Through his various leadership roles, Nelson understands that our labor will often be demanding. There will be seasons of high demand on our time and attention, and we must discern how hard we can push to be faithful to our calling without falling over the precipice of burnout. To aid in this discernment, Nelson encourages us to pay attention to the pace of life, the patterns of rest, and the people who know us and can give wise guidance during times of discernment. Paying attention to these three facets will help us stay on the track toward resilient flourishing and away from the precipice of burnout.

Pastors can help. Nelson honestly and humbly discusses seasons in his life when, as a pastor, he failed to equip his congregation members to live out their discipleship in their Monday work. He calls this “pastoral malpractice” and explains, “My discipleship focus was first on how my congregants could be good Sunday ​Christians rather than faithful and fruitful apprentices of Jesus in the places where God had called them to serve him the majority of their week” (pp. 84–85). Instead, he encourages pastors to learn and preach God’s true work story and has adopted a practice of visiting congregation members at their work. This not only allows him to learn about the day-to-day lives of his members, but provides an opportunity to pray for them in their work and to help them envision their work as an expression of neighborly love.

Favorite Quotes

• Put simply, ruling over creation succeeds when we rule in love with the ultimate ruler, and ruling over creation fails when we don’t. As human beings, we are commissioned to rule ​with the ultimate ruler, align our will and work within his kingdom purposes, and bear fruit for him. (pp. 15-16).
• In exploring the beginnings of God’s work story, it becomes evident that we are created with community in mind, to work with others who bring needed wisdom, gifts, and abilities to our work. While we may or may not do daily work directly with others, work was never designed as a solitary enterprise. None of us can be truly productive unless we work with others. (p. 19).
• The gospel not only addresses our greatest impoverishment, which is spiritual impoverishment, but also presses into other everyday realities and compels us to address economic impoverishment. The gospel compels us to live in such a God-honoring way that we do good and honest work that adds value to our neighbor. (p. 116).
• We express our neighborly love not only in and through the work we are called to do but also in the way we work. Neighborly love is more about how we work than where we work and who lives near us. (p. 120).
• Embedded in Jesus’s teaching on the Great Commandment is the proper ordering of our loves, including a proper love of ourselves as an image bearer and beloved child of God. Self-care properly understood involves attending to ourselves so that out of the overflow of well-being we can be fully present and faithful in what God has called us to be and do. (p. 129)
• In the ever-changing seasons of work, may we follow Jesus closely, love his church dearly, and honor him in who we are becoming and in all that we are doing. (p. 161).