How to Decide About Your Next Job
In 1997 I put a list of Bible texts together to help folks think through what job to pursue. Below I have taken that list and added comments to flesh out more specifically what I had in mind.
My prayer is that these thoughts will help saturate your mind with the centrality of Christ in all of life. He made you to work. And He cares about what you do with the half of your waking life called “vocation.” He wants you to rejoice in it. And He wants to be glorified in it.
May the Lord position you strategically in the workplace, as only he can when his people care deeply about these kinds of questions.
12 Questions to Consider
1. Can you earnestly do all the parts of this job “to the glory of God,” that is, in a way that highlights His superior value over all other things?
“Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31, ESV).
It almost goes without saying that a job that requires you to sin will not be done to the glory of God. Sin is any feeling, word or action that implies the glory of God is not supremely valuable. So you can’t sin to the glory of God. But things are often not that clear. A job may involve me in questionable practices that are not clearly sin. Then the question becomes: Is my conscience clear? And the crucial text becomes Rom. 14:23, “But whoever has doubts is condemned if he eats, because the eating is not from faith. For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.”
2. Is taking this job part of a strategy to grow in personal holiness?
“For this is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thess. 4:3).
When Paul says, “Pursue righteousness” (1 Tim. 6:11; 2 Tim. 2:22), he does not mean: Do so at church and home but not at work. Our work is about half our waking life. If personal holiness in all of life is our calling, then how this happens at work matters. God will be pleased if you ask the question: How does this job fit into the overall strategy of my pursuit of Christ-like character?
3. Will this job help or hinder your progress in esteeming the value of knowing Christ Jesus your Lord?
“I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil. 3:8).
Think through the demands of this job and how it may affect your pursuit of knowing and treasuring Jesus. For example, will it require you to choose between excellence in work and faithfulness in corporate worship? Will it present you with sinful images or offers, to which you are most vulnerable—that is, which lure you to treasuring this world more than Christ?
4. Will this job result in inappropriate pressures on you to think or feel or act against your King, Jesus?
“You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men” (1 Cor. 7:23).
The point here is bondage. All jobs constrain behavior. We must show up. We must produce these outcomes. We must follow these procedures. Constraints are not bondage if we joyfully affirm their wisdom. Will this job pressure you in ways that are in fact unduly oppressive and enslaving?
5. Will this job help establish an overall life pattern that will yield a significant involvement in fulfilling God’s great purpose of exalting Christ among all the unreached peoples of the world?
“Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, ‘All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age'” (Matt. 28:18–20).
I assume every one is a goer, sender or disobedient when it comes to the Great Commission. There’s no neutral zone. We don’t all go. But we all care that there be goers. We are all world-Christians. We are all burdened by how many unreached peoples there are. And we are all thrilled with news of gospel spreading.
Some jobs may advance this life-goal significantly by involving travel or multi-ethnic interactions. Other jobs may seem unrelated. But are they? Workplaces are the source of income for giving to the cause of Christ. Workplaces are places of conversion and recruitment for the global mission. Workplaces are places of training for the kinds of things one could do for a living in another country with few Christians. Workplaces are places for speaking intelligently and wisely about the peoples of the world.
6. Will this job be worthy of your best energies?
“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might” (Eccl. 9:10).
Nothing is to be done half-heartedly. This means that things that are not worth doing wholeheartedly should drop away from your life. Tasks don’t have to be high impact to be worthy of high effort. Most of the things we do in any given day are relatively low impact. Working on an assembly line means doing hundreds of times a task that in itself seems low impact. But if the product or the service is valuable, the cumulative effect of thousands of low-impact tasks is huge. These tasks can be transposed by an act of faith into worship. That is what it means to do them with your might and for the glory of God.
