Tim Keller (18:34)

It's estimated that most of us spend half of our waking hours at work. How does the wisdom of the Bible apply to our careers? In other words, how can our work connect with God's work and how can our vocations be more missional? In his book Every Good Endeavor, Tim Keller draws from decades of teaching on vocation and calling to show you how to find true joy in your work as you serve God and others. The book offers surprising insights into how a Christian perspective on work can serve as the foundation for a thriving career and a balanced personal life. Every Good Endeavor is our thank you for your gift. To help gospel and life share Christ's love with more people around the world, just visit gospelandlife.com give that's gospelinlife.com give now here's Dr. Keller with the remainder of today's teaching.

Richard Mao (19:24)

And that is the second point. Why? Because there are ways of doing entrepreneurship. Because you have just you just you want to compete, you want to get famous, you want to do, you know, you, you want status. Or you could also this is what Richard Mao says Christian entrepreneurship is. You see a need that's unmet, you see a resource that's untapped, and you put the need with the resource because you know it's going to create new goods, it's going to create new jobs, it's going to create new wealth, it's going to create new value. And of course it's very easy if you forget the first point, to get that hijacked and say, and it's going to make me a lot of money. Or you could keep your Christian, you know, faith and you know, in gear here and say, but basically what I want to do is I see that I'm going to be expanding the amount of goods in the world. And therefore see, the second point is God did it just because he wanted to. That's why he created. Why did he create? Because he wanted to. But why did he want to? Out of love. You should create because you're made in the image of God. But why should you want to do any particular entrepreneurship? It should be out of love. You should say, this is going to add value to people's lives. This is going to, this is going to enhance the common good. This is going to, this is going to create wealth for people who need it. It's going to create value for customers, going to create value for shareholders. It's going to enhance life. I would just keep this in mind. You cannot, you could be a secular person and still say, that's what I want to do. Entrepreneurship. We call it social entrepreneurship, right? But Christians have got to have that extra kind of extra high octane in their motivation when you know that this is how you got Here, God made space in the world for you to share his goods, his image. You know, we have rationality, we have personality, we have creativity, we have relationships because God has given us his image. Three we should do, I think what the gospel, what Christianity shows us here, the Bible shows us, is that entrepreneurship should be done because you want to, not because you have to. Secondly, out of love. Thirdly, in full knowledge of the risk and the cost. Now, you can see the risk and the cost from the very beginning, because in Genesis 3, immediately, as soon as Adam and Eve sinned, God says, now thorns will come up along with the plants. You know, God put us in this world and we're supposed to cultivate, and that's work. But now because of sin, thorns come up. Now think of it this way. God made the world filled with human beings made in his image, therefore human beings with free will. And so God made the world knowing what it was going to cost him, knowing what we were going to do, knowing that he was going to have to, that the son was going to have to come into the world and experience what he experienced. And we, because we're entrepreneurs in a broken world in which thorns come up, we also know that even though we have the joy of the vision and we have our motivation of love because of what we know we can do for the world through what we're doing through our entrepreneurship. But thirdly, you've got to go into with your eyes open, knowing because it's a broken world, there's going to be a great risk, there's going to be a great cost. You don't know how much it's going to be, but you do know that God, the ultimate entrepreneur, leveraged his resources to create, to open up a space for us, to share us his goods. But he knew it was going to come at an enormous price and cost. See how this is all coming together? God creates because he wants to. He creates out of love. And he creates, though he knows it's going to be an enormous cost, an enormous risk. And you can't be a real Christian entrepreneur, I don't think, unless you're doing it for the joy of it, not just because you have to. You're doing it for the love of it, not just to make yourself, you know, a nice nest egg for the future. And you have to do it with, without any kind of romanticism about the cost and the price of it, the insecurity of it, the difficulty of it. You got to keep in mind how you, how this all comes together. Richard Mao has I heard a president of Fuller Seminary was doing some teaching in China, I think it was some years ago, and speaking to entrepreneurs and, and venture capitalists. And he said this, this is my notes from that talk. He says God created through a radical act. He already had all the glory and power and love, community that you could possibly want. But he decided he wanted to grow it. He wanted to create a universe of beings who could participate and share in his own goodness and joy and love. And so he gave us life and he made the world. Even though he knew he was doing it at great risk and cost to himself, he knew that a universe of beings with free will, he knew what we were going to do. And in order to share, to make space, to do this entrepreneurial venture, it was going to cost him radically and dearly. And in spite of that, he invested himself in it. Why? Because he knew that in the end the investment was going to turn out to be greater. I mean, the dividends, the end result was going to be even greater than the investment. That's hard to believe, but the fact is, at the very, very end of Jesus whole, the. The description of Jesus atonement in Isaiah 53, we're told that the results of his suffering, he will be. He will see and be satisfied. And that's astounding. Consider the investment. Consider what happened. God becoming human, God emptying himself of his glory. You know, God going to, going to hell. Essentially the excruciating pain for Jesus at this, when it's all over to look back and say, the salvation of these people, this new humanity, my brothers and sisters, that I've bought through my blood, it was worth it, means that the dividends were greater than the investment and the investment was infinite. So the dividends, you know, new heavens and new earth. And so then Richard Mao put it like this. He says, so God is an entrepreneur, investment banker, a venture capitalist. He leveraged his resources at great cost to himself. He made space in the universe for us. So if you see a human need not being met, you see a talent that can meet that need. If you invest your resources at risk, cost to yourself so that the talent can meet that need and you create new space in the world, new value in the world, new goods to be shared, better quality of life, human community, flourishing, then what you've done is not just godly, but godlike. He said venture capitalism can be entrepreneurial. Work can be not just godly, but godlike. And by the way, he told me after, I mean, he actually told me after the talk almost all These businessmen came up and says, could you please speak to my pastor? Because my pastor has no idea that what I'm doing is of any good at all. Here's one last thought. God didn't just do one great act of entrepreneurship, did he? Which is creating the world. We're also told in 2nd Corinthians 5:17 that if any man is in Christ, he is a new creation, which means the cross actually is a second act of entrepreneurship. It's the new creation. It's the creation. It was an enormous investment. It was a. In order to create the new humanity. And it's pretty remarkable to see that God was willing to do it again. But that is the second act. And as a result, because of that, we can know that there will be satisfaction. I guess that's my fourth point. Let me just end it like this. I think that from the Christian point of view there probably if you got into your entrepreneurial venture not for power, but out of love, not just because you had to, but because you wanted to, because you saw an opportunity, because you got a vision, you thought about the good you could do. I really think that if you, if that's the case, then in the end, even if the risk and the cost was so great that essentially it doesn't work, essentially you can't keep going. Essentially, you have to close up shop. I think a Christian can always be satisfied, like Jesus. He looks back on his investment and says the results of his suffering, he sees and he is satisfied. I do think you can always see the good that you did as long as you did it for the, you know, motives that were relatively pure. Nobody's motives are perfectly pure, but relatively pure. And especially you could know that you were part of what God is doing, which is creating a new humanity, and you are part of that. So you're part of his entrepreneurship. Even now when you try to be creative out of the motivation you have in the gospel. So those are some thoughts. It's, you know, I don't know how inspirational that was, but it's some ideas. I mean, this is just a kind of a talk rather than a sermon, but let's, let's. I can't imagine some of that was kind of scrap. Scrappy, you might say, and sketchy. So I'm supposed to take questions for a while and so let's do that. Is there anything I just said that would raise a question or you want me to clarify some more? Do you want me to elaborate at some point? I mean, how God is. Is. Is actually looks inefficient yeah. Well, no, that's right. Okay, God as an entrepreneur, let's just write. New Humanity is his second great entrepreneurial initiative. The first one was with the world. The second one is the creating a new humanity. You know, salvation. And the brother there is right, that it's not particularly efficient. And somebody. Actually, you could really do a pretty good sermon on the fact that, you know, God continually chooses. If you go all the way back into Genesis, he always chooses, usually not the older son, even though law of primogeniture, the oldest son always had the money. You know, he chooses David out of the group. He's the, you know, youngest and the weakest. He's constantly doing that. He chooses Israel. It doesn't seem like the center of the world, in fact, at all. It's a backwater and that kind of thing. On the other hand, I don't know how to put this exactly. In a way, it's not going to sound pretty crass. God is very concerned about his brand. His brand is weakness, Salvation by grace. And so the best way for him to get that point across is to constantly choose. It says God chooses the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chooses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. He chooses, you know, even the things that are not to bring to nothing the things that are. That no man may boast in his presence. That's First Corinthians 1. And so God is, in some ways, he's on message, like a good entrepreneur on message. This is what we're about, and we're true to this principle. Whether or not it seems like it's the most efficient. On the other hand, it's the most effective. It has been very effective, by the way. It is the biggest, weirdly enough, it is the biggest religion, if you really want to look at it that way. It's not only the biggest religion in the world, but the only one that's really universal. It's the only one that's not basically completely connected to one demographic. You know, if you think about it, and I wonder about this. See, you know, Hinduism is still basically rooted in India. Buddhism migrated a little bit, but it's still basically Asian. Islam is still basically, you know, Arab and Middle Eastern. Christianity is just big everywhere. I mean, frankly, almost everywhere except a certain part of the world at this point. But by and large, it's huge in Africa, huge in Asia, huge in Latin America. It was huge in Europe. It's still got a legacy there. And so there's something about God's using the weak to shame the strong. That has made it more flexible and also more appealing because it's a message of grace to the masses of the world. So you could actually say that it wasn't efficient. On the other hand, it was. So. Good question, though. Very good question.

Audience Member (32:13)

At the beginning, you said that we have a different set of assumptions than social entrepreneurs. And I wonder if you could flesh out a little bit. How do our different assumptions about human nature and the structure of reality manifest themselves as distinct from social entrepreneurs who care about some of the same issues?

Richard Mao (32:29)

Yeah, that's a good question. We live in a post Christian society, not a pre Christian society. In a pre Christian society, humanitarianism made no sense. Christians came up with the idea of hospitals. Christians came up with the idea of caring for the poor. I mean, this just was. I mean, it was the Anglo Saxons, the, the pagans just thought Christianity would never work because it was just, you know, you've got to be strong, you've got to get people scared of you, you know, so post Christians, secular people. In fact, Richard Rorty, who's now dead, but he's a brilliant postmodern philosopher, admits that humanitarianism, social entrepreneurship, the very idea of human rights, that every human being has dignity, all came from Christianity. It did not grow out of any other soil, he says. Hopefully, he says along with Christianity comes what he considers the intolerance of believing you're right. So he says the problem is now we've got to somehow keep the humanitarianism going without the Christian truth. And he thinks, I think we can do it. He says, if you ask people, why should we care about the poor, that's a very bad way to go. Because you see, if you're a secular person, you've got no good answer. You know, the strong eat the weak. He knows it. So, you know, there's a fascinating article in which he said what you got to do in a secular world now is tell people sad, sentimental stories because that gets their feelings up, but they don't. He says, if you're a secular person, you've got no good reason to believe in human rights or humanitarianism, but we don't want to go there. So I would just say the secular social entrepreneur is living off Christian capital and probably could do a lot of good in the world. And we should be very, very careful to, to make common cause with all the folks that are trying to do what we, for our Christian reasons, want to do, too. You want to feed the hungry, you want to dig wells where there's no good water in Africa. They want to. Rorty is right in saying, if you oppress them, why. Why is it so important to you? They don't have a good answer. They're just moved by their. At a visceral level. I think in the long run, Christian belief has got to make you. It's a tortoise hair thing. I actually do think what it does is it keeps you in the race a lot longer. I think it probably keeps you. It's a more thorough and strong motivation, but it's not. They're not. We're not the only people out there trying to do good, though. Even the people, as Rorty says, who are trying to do good are kind of doing it off of Christian capital. That's a couple of ideas about the differences. So the differences aren't that great at the superficial level. Many of them will have very much the same kind of emotional motivation and want to do the very same thing you're trying to do. Yeah.

Audience Member (35:18)

You touched on the idea of Christian struggle in the work and also on the idea of ultimate lack of success. So we're modeling a God who's ultimately very successful in all that he does. How do we as entrepreneurs deal with our own failures?

Richard Mao (35:38)

I'll tell you what, this will be the last question. Because it's so good. I'm just sure it can't. You can't get any better after this one. Now, here's. Here's this. That's a really important question I was trying to say, though I don't think I said it. I didn't. I probably didn't give it enough time or treatment. There's a verse in First Corinthians 15, the very, very last verse, where it says, you must know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. This is one of the differences I was just trying to allude to with a social entrepreneur. A person who's trying to do good but doesn't have a worldview, doesn't even believe in God. If you fail, you've just failed. And I know it's sappy, but it's totally true. The little. I've seen so many places in my little church in Virginia, go to see my older people, and they have this, you know, on a doily or something, it says, only one life. So soon it's passed, but only what's done for Christ will last. And the whole idea was, if you've done something, you try to do good, you try to do it in Christ's name. You said Lord, because you've given me so many goods, I'm going to try to do this for people. And it doesn't economically work. See, a Christian can sit down and say, this is not in vain, God's going to use it. I've already done some good, I've created some ideas, I don't know, but all I know is that God sees it and it's going to be good. See, that's one of the. That's an incredibly powerful shock absorber. It's a theological shock absorber. If you've ever been in a car in which the shock absorbers are going bad, you know that every little pothole will pretty much, you know, knock your teeth out. And I feel like when you're out there trying to be a social entrepreneur without the kind of shock absorber of knowing that, that God is working in it, I don't know how you make it. But I also want you to consider all the failure that God used. I mean, there's all these people like Joseph, I mean Moses, almost every person that God uses, a deliverer, went through long periods of time in which everything was going wrong. And yet looking back, God used the failure again. That's a theological shock absorber that you don't have. So there's a sense in which if your motives are largely right, forget nobody's got perfect motives largely right. In doing what you're doing, whether you economically succeed or not, or the world thinks you succeeded or not, you can know that this is not in vain. And that's really important. So that's a very big part. I think the theology that helps you as an entrepreneur take the risk knowing that in the end you can sit down. That's what I was trying to say at the very end. You can sit down, look at the results and be satisfied knowing you did it and God sees it and he knows what you tried to do and that he's going to use it somehow.

Tim Keller (38:33)

Thanks for listening to Tim Keller on the Gospel and Life podcast. If you'd like to see more people encouraged by the gospel centered teaching and resources of this ministry, we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel and Life Monthly partner. Your partnership allows us to reach people all over the world with the life giving power of Christ's love. To learn more, just visit gospelandlife.compartner. that website again is gospelandlife.com partner. Today's talk was recorded in 2010. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel and Light podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2017. While Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, SA.