Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human

“Our job is to make the invisible God visible — to mirror and mimic what he is like to the world. We can glorify God by doing our work in such a way that we make the invisible God visible by what we do and how we do it.”

“It’s not failure if you fail at doing something you’re not supposed to do. It’s success. Because with each success, and with each so-called failure, you’re getting a clearer sense of your calling.”

“I love Tim Keller’s definition of work. He puts it this way: work is “rearranging the raw material of God’s creation in such a way that it helps the world in general, and people in particular, thrive and flourish.”

“That’s why Sabbath is an expression of faith. Faith that there is a Creator and he’s good. We are his creation. This is his world. We live under his roof, drink his water, eat his food, breathe his oxygen. So on the Sabbath, we don’t just take a day off from work; we take a day off from toil. We give him all our fear and anxiety and stress and worry. We let go. We stop ruling and subduing, and we just be. We “remember” our place in the universe. So that we never forget . . . There is a God, and I’m not him.”

“Sometimes a calling is staring us in the face, we just need to make eye contact.”

“Everything matters to God. The way of Jesus should permeate and influence and shape every facet of your life.”

“All too often there is a massive disconnect between “spiritual life” and life.”

“You were made to do good— to mirror and mimic what God is like to the world. To stand at the interface between the Creator and his creation, implementing God’s creative, generous blessing over all the earth and giving voice to the creation’s worship.”

“Jesus is calling us out. He’s saying that greatness is when we love and serve others.”

“We need to relearn how to power down, unplug, disconnect, take a break, and be in one place at one time. We forget that we’re not a machine. We can’t work 24/7.”

“We’re called to a very specific kind of work. To make a Garden-like world where image bearers can flourish and thrive, where people can experience and enjoy God’s generous love. A kingdom where God’s will is done “on earth as it is in heaven,” where the glass wall between earth and heaven is so thin and clear and translucent that you don’t even remember it’s there. That’s the kind of world we’re called to make. After all, we’re just supposed to continue what God started in the beginning.”

“What we do flows from who we are. Both matter.”

“We need to learn to embrace our potential and our limitations. Because both of them are signposts, pointing us forward into God’s calling on our life.”

“Calling isn’t something you choose, like who you marry or what house you buy or what car you buy; it’s something you unearth. You excavate. You dig out. And you discover.”

“When you think of Eden, don’t think of a public park with a lawn, a play set, and a flowerbed or two, where God hands Adam a lawnmower and says, Keep it tidy, will ya? Think of a violent, untamed wilderness teeming with beauty, but no infrastructure, no roads, no bridges, no cities, no civilization, and God says, Go make a world. Adam wasn’t a landscape-maintenance employee. He was an explorer, a cartographer, a gardener, a designer, an architect, a builder, an urban planner, a city-maker.”

“We were put on earth —because the entire cosmos is this God’s temple —to make visible the invisible God. To show the world what God is like. We are the Creator’s representatives to his creation.”

“Do you see your work as an essential part of your discipleship to Jesus and as the primary way that you join him in his work of renewal? If not, you should.”

“The more like Jesus we are, and the more like the image of God we are, the more people see of God’s glory.”

“God’s view of the family, however, is over-the-top. To him, it’s the first thing on human’s job description.”

“The cultural milieu we live in is one of celebrityism. The temptation, when you get really good at something, is to do it to serve and love yourself, not the world, and to do it for your own glory, not God’s. It’s so easy for gifted people to fall into pride, hubris, shameless self-promoting, and self-aggrandizement. It’s lame.”

“you would think that if Jesus’ agenda is to fix the world gone awry, then the story would end up back where it all started — in Eden, with everybody naked and unashamed. But instead, it’s a little different. Actually, it’s a lot different. It’s a Garden-like city called New Jerusalem with walls and gates and streets and dwellings and art and architecture and food and drink and music and culture. Why is that? Because the Garden was never supposed to stay a garden; it was always supposed to become a garden city.”

“For starters it means that your work is a core part of your humanness. You are made in the image of a working God. God is king over the world, and you’re a king, a queen — royalty — ruling on his behalf. Gathering up the creation’s praise and somehow pushing it back to God himself.”

“Human beings are responsible for art, science, medicine, education, the Sistine Chapel, Handel’s Messiah, New York City, space travel, the novel, photography, and Mexican food — I mean, who doesn’t love Mexican food? But we’re also responsible for a world with 27 million slaves, blatant racism, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the genocide in Rwanda, ISIS, the financial meltdown of 2008, pornography, global warming, the endangered-species list, and don’t even get me started on pop music. So we humans are a mixed bag. We have a great capacity — more than we know — to rule in a way that is life-giving for the people around us and the place we call home, or to rule in such a way that we exploit the earth itself and rob people of an environment where they can thrive. This was God’s risk. His venture. His experiment.”

“Yes, Jesus was the template for what Godness looks like. If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus of Nazareth. But the mystery of the incarnation is that he was also the template for what real, true humanness looks like. He’s the Son of God and he’s the “son of Adam.” If you want to know what a human being, fully awake and alive, ruling over the world as a conduit for the Creator God’s love looks like in flesh and blood — then look at Jesus.”

“We’re image bearers, created to rule, to partner with God in pushing and pulling the creation project forward, to work it, to draw out the earth’s potential and unleash it for human flourishing — to cooperate with God in building a civilization where his people can thrive in his presence. And in this cosmic agenda, each of us has a vocation, a calling from God, a way that God wired us, somebody to be and something to do — because the two merge in perfect symmetry.”

“If we fight the image of God in us — even if we succeed in the short run — it will come back to eat us alive.”

“I would argue the desire to be great was put there by the Creator himself. After all, we’re made in his image. The problem is this desire, which in its embryonic, innocent state is so, so right, is quickly warped and soiled and bent out of shape by the ego. We devolve from a desire to be great to a desire to be thought of as great.From a desire to serve the weak to a desire to be served by the weak.From a desire to save the world to a desire to have it.”

“To borrow from the language of Jesus, you gotta figure what the “work the Father gave you to do” is. And then you need to learn the art of saying no. To good things. A smart man once said, “Good is the enemy of best.”17”

“Most of us spend years of our short, ephemeral life trying to be somebody we’re not. Trying to be like our mentor or our hero or some ideal we aspire to or some person our parents want us to be, or our generation wants us to be, or what our friends think is cool — and we spin our wheels and spiral out of control until we end up nowhere but the end of our rope.”

“So we humans are a mixed bag. We have a great capacity — more than we know — to rule in a way that is life-giving for the people around us and the place we call home, or to rule in such a way that we exploit the earth itself and rob people of an environment where they can thrive.”