Little causes more handwringing for Christians than the question of work. Specifically, what job should I do? In many ways, it’s that little word should that causes the problem. Should suggests there is a singular right answer. I think we all know that isn’t really true.
Lurking behind the question are often vexed thoughts about the will of God. There is a right sense of wanting to please God and so not wanting to do anything that would displease him. These are important things to think about. But there is often an erroneous sense in which we might operate outside of God’s will, miss his best for us and potentially foil his best laid plans.
On that latter point, it is worth briefly saying that you cannot operate outside of God’s will. You cannot thwart God’s plans. Everything that occurs operates within the sovereign will of God. I don’t wish to burst any bubbles or shatter any illusions here, but you simply aren’t big enough or sufficiently powerful to do a single thing that God doesn’t want to ultimately permit. Whatever else that may mean (and it has lots of implications), it certainly means you can chill out a bit about whether you make this or that decision. None of them will derail anything God has planned.
In relation to what job we might do, all of that means we do want to ask whether this job is explicitly ruled out by the Lord. That is, will this job force me to do things that God’s Word explicitly tells me I ought not to do as a Christian or will it force me to not be able to do things God’s Word explicitly tells me I must do? We want to know whether this job is at all biblically legitimate. However, we don’t want to be tying ourselves up in knots over whether this specific job is within God’s will for me and my life. Not least, God’s secret will is exactly that; secret. It is a fools errand to try and discover what he does not want to make known ahead of time. Suffice to say what the scriptures teach; you cannot operate outside the divine will of God in any ultimate sense. No divine plans for your life nor for the rest of the world will be thwarted by the decision you make about your job.
There are all manner of different ways Christian teachers will offer to figure out whether this is the job you should do. They may lay out all sorts of questions to help you decide. I don’t think they are always unhelpful, but I do think they more often cloud the issue by making it seem more spiritually important than it perhaps is in reality. As I judge it, there are two basic questions to ask:
- Does scripture prohibit any Christian doing this job?
- Do I want to do this job?
The first question exists to rule out certain options. It is not a question that is specific to you, but is simply asking whether the bible says this line of work is unacceptable. For example, should you be considering a career as a prostitute, slaver or telephone scammer you can open your bible and discover these are not lines of work any Christian ought to be considering. They are pretty clearly ruled out as unacceptable. Whilst these are painfully obvious examples which society at large would broadly recognise too, you can figure out the kind of things society might tolerate but that scripture says involve doing things that God would not have us do.
The second question is the more positive one. Having ruled out the unacceptable jobs, all other options are on the table. The only question left, then, is ‘do I want to do this job?’ Let me just be clear what this is not asking. This is not asking whether this job is your life’s ambition or whether you find it personally fulfilling. Good as those things are, they are not ultimate. Most of us find ourselves doing jobs at some point in our lives because other considerations outweighed the joy and fulfilment we got from our work, but we still nevertheless wanted to do those jobs because we ultimately said ‘yes’ when we were offered them. This question is much more straightforward than that. it is asking: all things considered, would you rather do this job than not?
Of course, ‘all things considered’ covers a lot of ground. There are all sorts of considerations that go into your decision to want to do it. Is this job actually available to you? Does it pay enough to live and support your family? Will this be detrimental to your health? Are there other options open to you that you would prefer doing? All valid considerations, and many others besides. But in the end, they are all answered by the one: do you want to do this job or not?
These, then, are the only two questions to worry about. (1) Does God prohibit any Christian doing this? (2) Do you want to do it? Answer the first and with whatever is left do whatever you want.