21 Days to Finding Eternal Purpose in Your Daily WorkSample

As we saw yesterday, the gospel enables us to rest from our work, knowing our status as co-heirs with Christ is secure regardless of anything we accomplish. Ironically, that security leads us to want to be productive on the Lord’s behalf.

Why? Because working to earn someone’s favor is exhausting, but working in response to unconditional favor is intoxicating.

Furthermore, as Paul makes clear in today’s passage (Ephesians 2:10), the very purpose of our lives—the reason we were created and saved—was not to wait around for eternity. Christ made us new creations so that we could “do good works!”

But Jordan, when Paul says “good works,” he was talking about giving money to the poor, not writing an elegant line of code, right? Wrong. Of course, “good works” implies charitable and evangelical things, but the meaning of ergon (the Greek word for “good works”) is much broader. One commentary says it means “work, task, [and] employment.”

Remember, work was part of God’s perfect world before the Fall, and Jesus spent eighty percent of his adult life working as a carpenter. So why shouldn’t we expect “good work” as we typically understand that phrase to be central to God’s call on our lives?

Okay, so part of our response to the gospel is to do “good works” for others. But why? How does our work contribute to God’s mission in the world? How precisely does our work matter to God? Over the next seven days, I will show you seven biblical answers to those questions.