The “dangerous light” in you makes every Christian’s work sacred
What Jen envisions her work looking like on the New Earth, how the “dangerous light” in you makes every Christian’s work sacred, and why it’s significant that gold will be trampled on for eternity.
Links Mentioned:
[0:00:05.4] JR: Hey friend, welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast, I’m Jordan Raynor. How does the gospel influence the work of mere Christians, those of us who aren’t pastors or religious professionals but who work as furniture makers, electrical engineers, and nannies? That’s the question we explore every week and today, I’m posing it to Jen Wilkin, who is on a very, very, very short list of writers, who I will read every single thing they ever publish.
Jen and I sat down to talk about what she envisions her work looking like on the new earth. How the “dangerous light” inside of you, makes every Christian’s work sacred, and why it’s so significant that you and I will be trampoline on gold for all of eternity. Friend, do not miss this great episode with my friend, Jen Wilkin.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:05.7] JR: Jen, welcome back to the Mere Christians Podcast.
[0:01:08.4] JW: Thank you for having me on.
[0:01:10.4] JR: Yeah. Man, we were talking for a long time before we started recording. One thing I didn’t get to tell you, I don't know if you go through these seasons but I go through seasons where I feel like I’m in a dry spell in my time in the Word, and when I’m there, I love switching up my Bible study habits and I will frequently pick up one of your studies during those dry spells, and God invariably uses your studies to help me fall back in love with His word.
But more importantly, fall back in love with Him. What does that for you? Do you get dry spells and if so, what gets you out of it?
[0:01:44.6] JW: Well, first of all, thank you, that’s super encouraging to hear. I would say that, I don’t feel like dry spell, this may just be because I’m teaching all the time but I don’t feel like I’ve had a dry spell in a while. I will have dry spells around like, my feelings, you know, it will be like, “Why am I not really feeling it?”
[0:02:01.9] JR: Yeah-yeah-yeah, that’s what I mean.
[0:02:03.3] JW: Like connecting the learning to the feeling and the doing and it probably just means that I need to shift my focus because I think we think that all of scripture is supposed to make us feel a positive emotion all of the time, like whenever we bump into it, and honestly, for me, a lot of what can sort of snap me out of a dry spell is to go to an area of scripture that I am uncomfortable with or feel like it’s going to be too hard, like impenetrable.
And then, to just start digging in and to realize, “Oh, yeah, when we say, all scripture is God-read and profitable.” It’s really true. I think we have a tendency like, to spend a lot of time in the same books of the Bible and some of that is because the short ones fit more easily into our calendars and our attention spans, and when I push myself to go somewhere that’s less explored, I usually can feel myself coming alive again to the beauty of the scriptures.
[0:02:53.8] JR: Yeah, that’s good. Speaking of, that’s a good segue to your new study on Revelation. Not the easiest book to teach huh?
[0:02:59.4] JW: No.
[0:03:01.4] JR: Why?
[0:03:01.8] JW: For so many reasons.
[0:03:02.5] JR: For so many, for all the reasons, why now?
[0:03:06.3] JW: Oh gosh, well, I actually had to have someone else point out to me, “Why now?” And that is because I had spent so much time in Genesis and Exodus and so, basically, I had spent years savoring and meditating on the beginning of the story and like many people had no interest in trying to tackle the end of the story because I had childhood baggage, you know?
I shared this a few days ago on social media and actually started the therapy group without meaning to, for a whole generation of people who grew up with sort of a cinema version of the book and I think the book is cinematic. So, I don’t mean to diminish that but where we had watched a movie or read a book series that had brought, not encouragement in us but terror and so, I knew enough that the Bible isn’t supposed to make us feel terrified.
But I just had never, you know, then, there were all of the hurdles of people having strong feelings about how to interpret the book of Revelation and could I tackle that book the way that I’ve tackled all of my other studies and take a bible literacy approach to it, and it turned out that yes, I actually could, so.
[0:04:14.2] JR: Yeah, that’s good. It’s good, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I want to focus today on Revelation 21 and 22 and really, what it means for our work today and for eternity. I want to start here though. Like, so many Christians, I talked about this in The Sacredness of Secular Work, have fallen for this half-truth that earth is our temporary home. It’s kind of true, like, earth as we know it is our temporary home.
But when we read these final two chapters of the scripture, it makes it abundantly clear that one day, earth will be our perfect and permanent home once again. How have we gotten to this place where our theology of the new earth is nearly extinct, right? It feels like that. Like, a lot of people haven’t thought about this concrete reality of heaven on earth. How do we get here? Have you spent time really studying that and thinking through that?
[0:04:59.2] JW: Yeah, I think some of it is because we’re not there yet and so when we think about you know, people have lost loved ones, you want to think about where they are right now, and depending on your view of eternity, there are varying ways to think about that but most of us are picturing a loved one in some sort of intermediate state or with angels wings and a harp somewhere in the sky and that some of that is just like popular views that have sort of sunk into our thinking.
But then, if you think about Amazing Grace, the hymn that everybody still knows, you know, we’ve lost a lot of our hymn knowledge but we could pretty much all sing Amazing Grace together still, it has a verse in it that says, “The earth will soon dissolve in fire or flame, the sun forbear to shine.” And so, there is this idea that it’s all going to burn and it has impacted so many things. It’s impacted the way we think about stewardship of the creation, you know if it’s all going to burn, then it’s disposable.
[0:05:56.7] JR: We’re helping God along with His plan to burn up the earth.
[0:05:59.0] JW: Yeah, we’re actually speeding up the process if we just become consumers instead of caretakers and so, it’s had such an impact and then as I hope and I assume we’re going to get to talk about is that impact on the way we think about our labors.
[0:06:11.3] JR: Yeah, let’s talk about that because we’ve addressed II Peter 3:10 and old translations of this passage that this earth, from what I understand, from the scars I’ve read, God is using fire not to obliterate the earth but to purify and redeem it but yeah, let’s talk about what that means for work because we were talking before we started recording. I mean, the very nature of “secular work” is that it is work we do with the material world, where “sacred work” is done with the spiritual realm.
But if this earth is eternal, what does that mean for the purpose that our listeners can find in the seemingly secular work that they do today, Jen?
[0:06:51.3] JW: Yeah, all work is worship. I think it’s Elizabeth Elliot who said that it turns your sink, you know, where you’re doing the dishes into an altar instead of an aggravation and I think that we forget, you know, another favorite author who has written on this who I would imagine has come up on your podcast before, Andy Crouch, who writes about how, you know, so many of us live with a functional Bible that starts in Genesis three and ends in Revelation 20.
We view our work as a product of the fall and therefore, something that when we think about the new Jerusalem, we think of it as the great vacation or the great retirement party and work is hard and it is exhausting if we’re doing it right. It should be wearing us out to some degree, some jobs are wearing us out for unhealthy reasons, and others for healthy reasons but work is not by nature, sinful. Work is actually what we were given to do in those first two chapters.
[0:07:44.6] JR: It’s God’s first gift to us in Genesis one, yeah.
[0:07:47.5] JW: Yeah, and it is, it does become frustrated when the serpent shows up on the scene but that doesn’t mean that when we think about the new Jerusalem, we should think about labor that is free from the frustrations that sin imputed to it not work that ceases.
[0:08:02.6] JR: Yeah, that’s right. By the way, I loved your piece earlier this year in Christianity Today, where you in deep on one of my favorite passages of the scripture we talk about all the time on the podcast is Isaiah 65, where God says, “The new earth is not this eternal vacation but internal vocation, free from the curse.” I’m curious though, like, let’s go a little deeper here. Like, can you even begin to imagine what work on the new earth will be like?
What will it look like practically for you to teach free from the curse of sin? What will be different if you continue to engage in that craft for billions of years?
[0:08:35.5] JW: I think that we get foretastes of what it will be like in this life. I think that when we ask the Lord, you know, that His will, will be done on earth as it is in heaven that what we’re asking Him to do is not just help us to embody something that is going to be true but also to help us experience a little of something that’s going to be true so that we can long properly for that day and so when I try to imagine what will it be like to teach in the new Jerusalem, I think about the very best day I’ve had of teaching here on the earth.
You know, like, what did it feel like, what was it that was so satisfying about it? Seeing people come alive to an idea, seeing recognition dawn, seeing them connect the dots, and I think you know, we think, “Well, gosh, in heaven, will teachers still be needed?” And of course, I want to make the argument “Yes” because I am one but I think that when we think about what is true about God, and I would argue that the end of all good teaching is to show what is true about God, you could probably even make that argument about teaching that is not based, you know, that is not Christian based that is just in any learning that we do.
[0:09:40.0] JR: Agreed, a science teacher.
[0:09:42.2] JW: Yeah.
[0:09:42.1] JR: Is revealing something about God.
[0:09:43.6] JW: It’s telling something that’s true about God. The number of things that are true about God are infinite because he is an infinite being. So, you know, between the covers of the Bible, we have sufficient knowledge of what is true about God to keep us plenty busy for the 70 or 80 years that we will have on this earth, which is why I always crack up a little when people will say, “I’m just waiting for a fresh word from the Lord.”
Because I’m like, “Oh, did you get done with the ones we already had?” You know, those are – I feel like I’m still trying to fight my way through those, and in the new Jerusalem, we will be free from the constraint of time. We will be free from the murkiness that sin introduces into our communion with God and so therefore, our learning will be like the most positive. For the person who is not a teacher of it, is more of a learner, we all have some teaching role.
But for the person who sees himself as more of a learner, think about the very best day you ever had studying something or discovering something and it can be that for eternity as we increasingly grow in our understanding of the manifold attributes of our holy and glorious God.
[0:10:48.4] JR: That’s good. All right, so that’s future tense, Isiah 65, long enjoy the work of our hands, we will not labor in vain, there is no curse, there is no pain. How does that vision of work on the new earth? How should it shape our work practically today, right now?
[0:11:04.4] JW: Yeah, well, the cultural mandate given to us, you know, back in Genesis one is telling us that we are invited into the work that God begins in the early days of creation, which is bringing order out of chaos, and so the cultural mandate is to continue to bring order out of chaos until those who are going to be formed in the image of Christ had been formed in His image to the ends of the earth.
And so, you know, in Genesis, we see it as be fruitful and multiply. So, in a very literal sense, Adam and Eve we’re going to make image bearers. We carry it forward to the great commission where it’s rearticulated in spiritual terms, where we’re called to go and make image bearers to the ends of the earth and that work of making image bearers happens through the work of our hands as much as through the words that we speak and so –
[0:11:54.4] JR: Say more about that, say more about that. What do you mean?
[0:11:54.4] JW: Anytime that you – yeah, whatever your context is, let’s say that you are working as an engineer. Your work is to bring order out of chaos and in so far, as you do that, you are bearing the image of a creative God who brings order out of chaos and you’re bearing witness to something that is true about Him, and then showing others who may not have union with Christ yet and saying, “Do you know why you love doing your job?”
“It’s because, you are doing what you were made to do, every time you establish order where there was disorder before.” I have this distinct memory of being a stay-at-home mom with four kids four and under, and we lived in a house that had three bathrooms and I was the only one who had the motor skills to clean them, and I remember picking up that toilet brush and saying, “Cleaning toilets today for the glory of God.”
Like, I’m going to bring order out of chaos. Every time we picked up the toys and I put those kids down for a nap, an order was reestablished. I’m bearing the image of God, and those seem like tiny little acts but what they actually are, are expressions of what we were made to do.
[0:12:59.9] JR: Yeah, talk to the engineer, you mentioned an engineer. Let’s go, by the way, do you have a kid who is an engineer? You brought this up before we started recording too.
[0:13:05.1] JW: I do, I do. Yes, I have a son who has a Ph.D. in material science and an undergraduate in nuclear engineering.
[0:13:13.8] JR: That’s fascinating.
[0:13:15.2] JW: Yes.
[0:13:15.5] JR: Okay. All right, so let’s talk to your son for a minute. Let’s get some encouragement to your son. Your son is like, “All right, great mom, I’m bringing order out of chaos. I am discovering the world’s greatest mysteries. But it’s rare that I get a chance Monday through Friday to articulate and explicitly point my coworkers back to the God who created me to do that work.” Does this work matter when he’s not explicitly pointing back to his Creator, and if so, how?
[0:13:42.7] JW: Absolutely, the work has value in and of itself. If you think about the order in which we come to have, right? Relationship with others, it doesn’t start by having right relationship with others. It starts by having a right relationship with God, it starts with the vertical, and that’s why the scriptures speak about whatever you do, labor is unto the Lord. It matters that he shows up for work and he does his work as unto the Lord in an unselfconscious way that he is not trying to proselytize by doing a good job.
He does a good job because to do a good job is to do what he was created to do but what ends up happening is that people around him wonder why his motive for doing a good job does not seem to line up with their motives for doing a good job. He seems to do a good job just because you should, not because it brings him glory, even though it may and in the case of my kids, it’s funny, none of them are in ministry. So there is my, you know, everybody wants to buy my parenting book now but they –
[0:14:40.4] JR: My listeners actually do buy the book, yeah, I know. They’re all about it.
[0:14:42.1] JW: Yeah, they’re all in these vocations where they do end up having opportunities to talk about their why. In particular, Matt, the son I was mentioning, to be a man of science and a man of faith, those two things don’t always overlap, you know? And so, he’s had a lot of opportunities to talk to people who are in his field about his motivations for what he’s doing, and he also did have to wrestle down, particularly, in his days in college with the Christian subculture that said, the only kind of work that’s meaningful is explicitly ministry-related.
[0:15:14.6] JR: Yeah, I’m sure you had to wrestle that, especially growing up as Jen Wilkin’s son. I mean, come on, come on now. You mentioned this before kind of in passing but I think it’s important to go deeper on, you mentioned you’re going to that coworker who loves their job and does not yet have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ but like hey, you know why you love that thing? Because God made you to love that thing.
What’s been interesting this month, we’re coming up on six months after the release of my book, The Sacredness of Secular Work, and I’ve heard from a lot of readers who have said, “Man, Jordan, once I caught this vision for eternal work without the curse, I was so much more fired up to share my faith, right? I was so much more excited to tell others about the hope I have in Christ.”
Because if I’m honest, and I can resonate with this personally, I grew up dreading the idea of having, Yes, I love Jesus. Yes, I wanted to be with Jesus more than anything else but it seemed like loving Jesus necessitated that I give up all the things that I and oh, by the way, Jesus himself loved during his time on earth. Good work, good wine, good food, good mountains and beauty.
And so, do you think that this proper understanding of Revelation, that this proper understanding of the new earth, and eternal work can be fuel for the evangelism of mere Christians in the workplace?
[0:16:32.1] JW: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think if we – you know, imagine if you’ve gotten The Hobbit and read just the beginning and you never read the end, you would not think about the message of the book the same way and I think because we have a generation of people who believe that the 66th book of the Bible is, “Yeah, it’s probably important but I’m not sure how to read it, so I’m just going to” –
“It is all scriptures, God made them profitable but that one is weird and I either need an expert to tell me what it means or you know, if I do know what it means, it’s going to terrify me.” We are operating sort of like someone who’s only read the beginning or the first two-thirds of The Hobbit and never heard the end of it and The Hobbit, is a classic. One of the reasons it endures is because the structure that it follows is the most ancient and reliable structure for good storytelling.
It’s a full circle story, the subtitle for The Hobbit, do you know what it is? As a good Christian, you have to.
[0:17:32.0] JR: I should know this, it’s “There and Back Again” something like that.
[0:17:34.6] JW: There and Back Again, yeah. Do you hear it? He starts in the Shire, he goes on many adventures and then he comes back to the Shire but when he comes back to the Shire, it is not the same and he is not the same and the reason that that story is so sticky for us is because that is the shape of the Biblical story and so when we think about the significance of Revelation and understanding all matters of life and godliness but certainly our work, we need it.
We need to understand that work is something that will be done with delight and joy and great satisfaction for all eternity to help us begin to live toward that now. So, we don’t see work as just an obligation and I’m sure you guys talk about this all the time, some jobs that need to be done are not glamorous but they are glorious in the sense that they are pointing us toward who we are meant to be.
And the less glamorous the job, the more likely that you are doing the good work and obscurity is imaging Christ who did the best work and it was not recognized as being, you know, it was deemed worthy of destroying Him, the perfect image bearer, and so when we labor in obscurity, I think we are never more like Christ who did the best labor in obscurity to the point that His own disciples didn’t even realize its significance in the moment.
[0:18:56.7] JR: This is really good. How do you deal with that as a very public personality? I wrestle with this, right? I do look at the example of Christ and working in obscurity for 80% of His adult life. How do you reconcile that? Is it just an issue of calling and God has called you to this very public persona? How do you think about this? Do you ever wish you were working and laboring in obscurity?
[0:19:18.3] JW: Well, I think the thing is, is that I am. I think people don’t see the work that I’m doing.
[0:19:24.1] JR: Yeah, that’s good. They see the end product.
[0:19:24.7] JW: And/or the work that I have done, yeah, and like now you know, I’ll have very well-intentioned women in particular, “So I really want to do what you do, where do I start?” And I want to say what you see me doing now is the cumulative effect of 25 years. You know, I couldn’t have done what I’m doing now 25 years ago and I am not even talking about platform, I’m talking about like just the mechanics of what I’m doing.
You know, platform is accidental, and people who are at least I think it hopefully it should be, if you have to build it then you are not going to be able to sleep at night and so platform is neither here nor there but it is the living rooms, that I was in for years. It’s the rooms of five women that I was in for years and I would have done that forever. That was satisfying and there are some ways in which a roomful of thousands is never going to be as satisfying or enriching for me, the teacher as the living room space was.
There is a real cost to the living room space not happening with the frequency that it used to 25 years ago. Now, I have other unseen ways of making sure that I still have those kinds of interactions but if that had been all that it ever was because I was doing the work that the Lord created me to do and I knew it because I loved it so much, then the number of people listening just becomes an afterthought.
[0:20:49.2] JR: You didn’t think about that number.
[0:20:50.2] JW: It’s a gift.
[0:20:50.8] JR: You didn’t think intentionally about growing the platform, you were just like, “Listen, I know God’s made me to teach. I am going to teach as well as I can and the results are on the Lord’s hands.”
[0:20:59.3] JW: Yeah.
[0:21:00.1] JR: Yeah, that’s good.
[0:21:01.0] JW: Yeah.
[0:21:01.3] JR: Hey, I loved your Hobbit bit, this full circle moment and you touched on this little detail when you are studying Revelation that I never hear anybody talk about. It is one of my all-time favorite details in the scripture, the gold, gems, and pearls in the second to the last chapter of the scripture, Revelation 21, which we also see in the second chapter of the scripture, Genesis two. Can you break down the parallel for our listeners who might not be familiar with this detail?
[0:21:30.2] JW: Well, you know, it’s funny. We talk about the pearly gates and we talk about walking the streets of gold and our first impression of that is that the new Jerusalem, the heavenly city will be one of incredible grandeur and on the one hand, that’s an accurate way to think about it. I mean, that was the purpose of Solomon’s temple being so glorious and even the Tabernacle, its predecessor, being made with so many precious items.
But I think the other thing that we can miss is that when you get to the new Jerusalem, these precious gems and expensive materials are being used for the most common purposes. In other words, I don’t think we always think about this symbolic richness that gold will be trodden under our feet in the new Jerusalem because, in this life, we have not trodden down. We have elevated it to the ultimate goal.
But the things that we view as the spoils of success will now be trodden under feet in the new Jerusalem. Everything that would have set itself up in opposition to the worship of Yahweh will be in its proper place. You know, Jesus famously says in the sermon on the mountain, you cannot serve both God and money and it’s an oversimplification to see what’s happening in the new Jerusalem of the fine building materials to be only a statement against mammon.
But it is at least a statement against mammon that the things that were meant to bring glory to God in this life that we used to bring glory to ourselves will now finally and fully submit themselves to His glory.
[0:23:09.6] JR: That’s good, it’s really good. Did you happen to read Art and Faith by Makoto Fujimura?
[0:23:14.5] JW: I did not, no.
[0:23:15.9] JR: It’s a phenomenal book, I think it won Christian Today’s book of the year, like five, six years ago but he says in those, he’s commenting on the gold, gems, and pearls in Revelation 21 and Genesis two and he conjectures that quote, “These materials were beneath the ground to be discovered by Adam and Eve or by their descendants for the construction of what would become the city of God” right? Do you agree with that?
[0:23:40.2] JW: Absolutely. Well, I mean and if you think about the parallel to the Exodus story, right? Where did they get to find building materials that they used for the Tabernacle? Well, they’re the spoils of Egypt, like they're pried out of the hands of idol worshippers and what is the first thing they do with them? They form them into an idol. So, there is a theme all the way through scripture of the way that we relate.
And then you get to the wisdom tradition and what do we find is true about wisdom, it’s described in those terms and I think that’s also a significant thing for us to understand about the new Jerusalem because in the wisdom tradition, so in Proverbs, you know we’re told that we’re supposed to seek wisdom, dig for it like rich treasure and like gold that it will be a jewel for us and so all of that language is embedded there, no pun intended, and then you get to the new Jerusalem.
Well, if you think about what Proverbs does is it shows us two women. It shows us Lady Wisdom, who is actually arrayed in all of these items, and then there is Lady Folly, who is the prostitute. She is calling out, she is trying to drag the wayward into her grips. So, fast forward to Revelation, and what do we see? Oh, interesting, there we have a prostitute and a bride, and Lady Wisdom in Proverbs is pictured for us as a bride.
And so, the bride, the prostitute is seated on the beast and she’s Babylon. She is the City of Folly, she is folly embodied, those who have chased after the riches of this world and everything that has to offer, now watch the City of Folly go to its destruction and then what do we see? We see the City of Wisdom descend as a bride and she’s adorned. So, the imagery holds together beautifully but the adornment piece is a piece of what we see when we see all of those things mentioned again.
And we, in this life are to adorn ourselves with true riches, the true riches of the wisdom that causes us to walk in the fear of the Lord, to labor in the fear of the Lord. In other words, to work as unto the Lord.
[0:25:32.0] JR: That’s good, it’s really good. Jen, four questions we wrap up every show with and you’ve already touched on an answer of the first one but what job would you love for God to give you on the new earth? Is there anything you want to do other than teach? I’m really curious.
[0:25:44.7] JW: Garden, I want to garden.
[0:25:46.3] JR: Yeah, you want to garden?
[0:25:47.6] JW: Yeah, right now is like a 100 plus in Texas and I am watering twice a day and sending up prayers of supplication for my plants and yeah, and so I’m like, that’s the oldest vocation we’ve got, right? If we’re going to be literal, I want to garden as I was meant to garden because watching things grow is for me, worshipful and it makes me feel small in a way that is really, really good.
And I wonder I think about the joy of an eternal practice in which I’m constantly reminded of the transcendence of God and my place in His universe. I think that will be another beautiful function of work in the new Jerusalem.
[0:26:25.1] JR: It’s really good.
[0:26:25.5] JW: But yeah, that and teaching.
[0:26:26.8] JR: And teaching, I love it, which I’d be shocked if we’re not continuing to learn.
[0:26:31.0] JW: Oh, I think I we will, yeah.
[0:26:33.4] JR: Speaking of books, if we open up your Amazon order history right now, which books would we see you purchasing over and over and over again to give away to people?
[0:26:40.5] JW: I am always giving away A. W. Tozer’s, The Knowledge of the Holy. It was my introduction to the attributes of God through a pastoral lens. I mean, there were things that I had encountered in passing that we’re in like a systematic theology text but he put poetry to it for me. So, that’s probably my number one thing that I hand out to people to sort of set them on the path of, “Hey, you’ve only begun to meditate on the riches of God’s character.”
[0:27:08.8] JR: Is that what eventually led to your books on like Him and His image?
[0:27:12.0] JW: Yes, absolutely. I can’t remember what study I was putting together and I bumped into a quote, which this will tell you about my theological training, which was zero at that point. It was James Montgomery Boice and he said, “The knowledge of God and the knowledge of self always go hand in hand. There is no true knowledge of self apart from the knowledge of God.”
And it was years before I knew that he was actually quoting John Calvin in the opening to The Institutes. So, I just quoted Boice all over the place, I thought he was a genius and – but then to pair that with what is true about God and then to really delight in what is true about God, we live in such a self-centered age that we read the Bible, we would say the Bible is a book about God up and down.
You know, I read the Bible because it’s a book about God but the problem is, is that many of us have been trained into a way of reading it that actually makes it a book about us. We’re looking first for the knowledge of self and so it’s a bump into Tozer in the midst of this process and to be given a vision of God, high and lifted and I found him on the footnotes of another really good book, which is The Holiness of God by R. C. Sproul.
[0:28:16.9] JR: Yeah, it’s good. It’s a really good one. Hey, who would you most want to hear on this podcast talking about how the gospel influences the work that mere Christians do in the world? Maybe one of your kids, does Matt Wilkin maybe come on the show?
[0:28:26.9] JW: No, trust me, he does not want more exposure but I do think it would be fascinating too and maybe you have done this already, I am always fascinated to hear men of science talk about their faith.
[0:28:38.8] JR: Yeah, we had Dr. Francis Collins on about a year ago. We need to have him back on now that he’s fighting the new crusade and he’s incredible. We found a lot of men and women of science, great astronomers and scientists, and –
[0:28:50.1] JW: I love it. I think the more we can do that, the more we can because I do think that even as like I am seeing young adults or you know, high schoolers head off to college, they don’t even necessarily conceive of those as fields that are open to them and so the more that we can show them, “No, no, no, this is it.” And we had that, I had that for my kiddos, one of my Sunday school teachers at our previous church in Houston.
His name is Gene Frantz, he invented the technology behind what was the Speak & Spell, I don’t know if you remember that toy and he actually got to go to the premiere of ET because they used it in the movie. It was really cool.
[0:29:23.8] JR: That’s really cool.
[0:29:24.5] JW: So, Gene is like a – he’s a fellow at Texas Instruments and he’s a person of deep faith and so my children got to see that, you know, growing up and they got to interact with him and see his love of the Lord was channeling through his work, it was not in spite of it or a side element to it.
[0:29:41.3] JR: It’s really good, I love it. Jen, you are talking to this global audience of mere Christians, very diverse vocationally, what’s one thing you’d want to leave them with before we sign off?
[0:29:51.9] JW: Yeah, so I’ve been thinking a lot about how to give a message, got to give a message on the theme of light throughout scripture and about how the light that we see in scripture is dangerous light. In other words, the manifest presence of God is a holy and righteous expression of His character and people handle it with great care and so, you think about the picture of the burning bush, right?
And Moses comes to the manifest presence of God and when God speaks to him out of this bush that is burning but not consumed. He says, “Take off your shoes because you’re standing on holy ground.” And so, if you trace the theme, in other words, there are certain places you know, in this moment that Moses has with the Lord that are more holy because the manifest presence of God.
He is going to call him to a particular work and He is going to empower him to do it. Well, if you carry forward to the New Testament and what happens at Pentecost in a very real sense, the dangerous light that is the fire that burns the bush that is not consumed now dwells in us. We have this dangerous light in us and we are not consumed because we have union with Christ and what that means is that for the Christian wondering, “Where do I go to do the work of the Lord?” All ground is holy ground, all of it.
Take off your shoes, like understand that wherever the Lord sends you as His witness, you have holy work to do, not just work to do but holy work to do, and the dangerous fire that should consume you will not only refine you, it will sharpen you, it will make you more into the image of Christ as you step forward in faithfulness to whatever the vocation is that the Lord has placed you in.
[0:31:34.1] JR: I can’t believe you brought this up, this is basically page one of this book I published. This is so good.
[0:31:38.7] JW: So great.
[0:31:40.0] JR: It is not what we do that determines whether or not the work is sacred but who we do it with, right? That word secular literally means without God but we believe that the holy presence of God is with us wherever we go and so the only thing you have to do to make a “secular workplace sacred” is walk through the front door, that’s it.
[0:31:57.5] JW: Show up, that’s right.
[0:31:58.5] JR: Show up.
[0:31:59.4] JW: Show up, I love it.
[0:32:00.4] JR: Jen, man, I want to commend you for the extraordinary work you do every day for the glory of God and the good of others, for your just excellent theology of work and just your excellent stewardship of your God-given skills as a teacher. Friends, I cannot recommend all of Jen’s studies highly enough. I think I have done all of them except for the abide study, which is next on my list.
But the one we’ve been talking about today is Revelation-Eternal King, Everlasting Kingdom. Jen, thank you so much for hanging out with us today.
[0:32:31.3] JW: Oh, thanks so much for the great conversation.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:32:33.4] JR: I hope you guys enjoyed that episode as much as I did. Hey, if you did, do me a favor and go leave a review of the Mere Christians Podcast on Apply, Spotify, wherever you’re listening to the show. Thank you, guys, so much for listening, I’ll see you next week.
[END]