Introduction

Did God really mean for work to be joyful? You’d never know it by going to church on Sunday. There, the minister talks about serving God, impacting the world for good, helping the needy, living with purpose. Many ministers attempt to connect these activities to the marketplace, but the illustrations often lack the rich specifics of personal experience. As a result, the concerns of the “secular” world would hardly seem to matter much to God. So, even if we actually enjoy our work and sometimes have a lot of fun doing it, it’s easy to feel a kind of guilt, because it would seem that our fun is coming from the pursuit of the wrong goals.

If you’re feeling any of these sorts of things, this study is for you. We’re going to see that God really does intend us human beings to find joy in our work. Moreover, God Himself intends to find joy in our work. That truth will be considered through three themes that will surface again and again throughout this study.

Session 1 — God’s Original Purpose for Business

All of us as humans desire to be significant, to make a difference, to live a life that makes a worthwhile contribution. No one is immune from this desire. There is no reason to be ashamed of feeling it; the longing for significance is part of what it means to be a human in God’s image.
The problem is not the desire for significance but the fact that on this side of heaven, we will always desire more significance than we can achieve. Living as we do outside of the Garden, we can never attain the full sense of meaning and fulfillment that God intended us to have. In the Garden, where God originally put us, we would have felt at the end of every day.

Session 2 — Work: After the Fall

Every religion, life philosophy, art, and social science attempts to answer the question, Why is it that we can imagine a state so much better than the one in which we actually live? There seems to be a universal tendency among humans, even in primitive cultures, to hold out a “vision” that is better than the present, a universal drive to improve things, to create something, to achieve something, to make something more than what exists. That drive seems to point directly at the truth taught in Genesis, that we humans were made in God’s image. Of course we would feel as we do if we were created to be God’s representatives, designed and instructed to take the perfect raw materials of a newly created earth and “improve” upon them, using God-given gifts of creativity, communication, and work. It is our destiny as humans to have dominion over the earth, and so we find ourselves in a constant state of envisioning and implementing improvements.

Session 3 — Trust: Stewarding People’s Gifts

Adam was designed by God for a specific task. So is every other human being. God handcrafts each one of us and designs into us unique attributes that fit us to specific tasks. That design is our giftedness: It is God’s gift to us as individuals. It is an endowment from God that enables us to add value to the world. And it is the thing we most love to do. Not “like” to do but love to do, are born to do, and instinctively do because the motivation to do it springs from the very core of our personhood, which is from God.

Session 4 — Values: Stewarding Corporate Culture

Stewardship is all about responsibility. God designed us to be stewards, which accounts for why we actually desire responsibility and enjoy a bit of weight on our shoulders. Responsibility is what we were made to hold and use, so we experience great joy when we get to hold it and use it, and when we get to make a decision and the outcome turns out well. We are made in God’s image and the height of fun for image-bearers is being responsible for what our Creator has asked us to steward.

Session 5 — Influence: Stewarding Power

Much of the Bible is about power, too—about a single Source of all power, who, amazingly, has dispensed it among many flawed, deceived, and even evil creatures. Being made to serve as God’s representatives taking care of creation means that we are given power in our very essence to oversee, to name, to co-create, to choose, and to lead. Power is at the core of what it means to be human, made in the image of God. Like electricity, this kind of power is not a substance that can be seen; nevertheless, its presence can be known, its impact measured, and its amount increased or decreased.

Session 6 — Failure and Success: Stewarding Circumstances

Humility meant not denying that we have power and influence, but recognizing that God has given power to us and that we must use it for the purposes for which He gave it to us.

A similar principle applies to our definitions of success and failure. As we consider the outcome of our work, we need a measure of humility in making our evaluation. Humility causes us to recognize that it is God who has given us whatever skills, abilities, resources, coworkers, opportunities, markets, and other benefits that allowed us to “earn” what we have. Humility also creates in us a mind-set that we must steward what we have for our Master. And humility reminds us that ultimately we are not in control of what happens to what we have been given to steward.

Session 7 — Service: Stewarding Community Resources

Clearly, our world does not lack for problems to be addressed, whether locally, nationally, or internationally. The question is: Who is responsible to address them? Is that the job of governments? Or charities? Or churches? Or individuals?
What about businesses? Dennis Bakke believes that the business sector has a primary calling to help meet the needs of the world. Christians especially have a role to play in using their enterprises as vehicles for stewarding their communities, both through the goods and services they supply and the goodwill they impart.

Session 8 — Truth and Beauty: Stewarding Values

Values are like the air we breathe—vital to our functioning but largely unnoticed and often undefined. Values are the “rules” of our work, the moral and ethical commitments an organization makes and by which it “plays the game” of business, school or government.

Each stakeholder in an organization brings his or her own set of values to the enterprise. For example, customers define their values in terms of their needs and wants, and how they demonstrate those needs and wants factors into how a business sells them products. Employees bring many values, including a value on employment and providing for their own needs and their families’ needs. Shareholders bring a value on getting a good return on their investment. The larger community may bring a value on stability in its job market and tax base. Vendors may bring a value on securing a reliable customer or creating new marketing opportunities. These and countless other stakeholders bring a mix of values that pull and tug at the organization, making the job of sorting out what the venture really stands for a challenging one, to say the least.

Session 9 — Church, Family, and State: Holistic Stewarding

In almost all societies of the world, there have always been four sectors of work that contribute to the functioning of society: the family, religion, government, and commerce. In the past century, a fifth sector has also come into existence, the nonprofit or nongovernmental organization (NGO). The five sectors have distinct purposes but also overlap to some extent. Some of these purposes are clearly defined in Scripture. Others have historically or culturally defined purposes.
The church has a unique purpose among the five sectors in overseeing the sacraments, making disciples, and communicating the message of reconciliation between God and fallen humanity through Jesus Christ. These functions are carried out by individual congregations/communities of Christians in localized, individual “churches.”

Session 10 — Return on Investment: Stewarding Rewards

Success is more about being faithful to the task, not accomplishing the results. Yet not accomplishing the results we hope for causes pain. So why would we risk pursuing something unseen—namely, joy—when the chances of always getting it seem so slim? The answer is: Because the “upside potential” of taking that risk is so great. “
This Bible study presents you with a call that is not easy and holds great risk. Yet the reward of obeying that call is great. In Session 1, we calculated that the average person works 111,800 hours in a career. So, we can spend that huge chunk of our life experiencing drudgery at work, or we can choose to find joy.