It is strange, given how much time we spend on it, that the product of our labor gets so little attention from many modern ministries. Essays on work offered by Charles Stanley's and Billy Graham's ministries emphasize evangelism. Bob Deffinbaugh claims that Christians' workplace goals are to be exemplars and evangelizers.

Is God indifferent to what our work itself yields?

Martin Luther, responding to the perception that only priests and monks did the Lord's work, declared that a father washing diapers pleases God. Even the lowliest Christian laborer was, in Luther's view, a Kingdom worker.

But something funny happened on the way to the office park, as William Placher explains in Callings: "An idea that seemed liberating to many of Luther's contemporaries has come to seem to some more like a burden."

How? Because today, many people feel their jobs are pointless. Is this really, they ask, how God wants me to spend 40 hours a week? Must we stay with unproductive work because God has supposedly made that labor our means to sanctification? Advice from Concordia University's Center for Faith and Business is blunt; the last of its "Workplace Commandments" reads: "Be satisfied with what you have." Is that always required of us?

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