21 Days to Finding Eternal Purpose in Your Daily WorkSample

As we’ve seen over the last two days, our work matters because it reveals the kingship of Jesus and makes people crave his kingdom. If those ideas are too amorphous for your taste, consider the much more concrete promise of today’s passage: Our work has the potential to physically last for an eternity on the New Earth.

This is what Isaiah is alluding to in today’s passage in his prophetic vision of the kingdom. All the nations are coming into the New Jerusalem, but they are not empty-handed. They bring their very best work from the previous life—what Isaiah calls the “wealth of the nations” (Isaiah 60:11).

New Testament scholar N.T. Wright comments on what this truth means for our work today by saying, “You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to roll over a cliff. You are—strange though it may seem—accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world.”

What sort of work will carry on? Scripture doesn’t say definitively, but I think it’s safe to assume it will be work created in line with the principles of King Jesus to whom we owe our allegiance.

The physical, material things you produce at work today matter. Work in such a way that your work might be considered among the glory of the nations!