Doing Your Job as Jesus Would Do It

Dallas Willard

From: The Divine Conspiracy (Harper SF, 1998)

Consider your job, the work you do to make a living. This is one of the clearest ways possible of focusing upon apprenticeship to Jesus. To be a disciple of Jesus is, crucially, to be learning from Jesus how to do your job as Jesus himself would do it. New Testament language for this is to do it “in the name” of Jesus.

Once you stop to think about it, you can see that not to find your job to be a primary place of discipleship is to automatically exclude a major part, if not most, of your waking hours from life with him. It is to assume to run one of the largest areas of your interest and concern on your own or under the direction and instruction of people other than Jesus. But this is right where most professing Christians are left today, with the prevailing view that discipleship is a special calling having to do chiefly with religious activities and “full-time Christian service.”

But how, exactly, is one to make one’s job a primary place of apprenticeship to Jesus? Not, we quickly say, by becoming the Christian nag-in-residence, the rigorous upholder of all propriety, and the dead-eye critic of everyone else’s behavior.

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Excerpted from The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God by Dallas Willard (Harper SF, 1997). Used by Permission. All rights reserved.

Dallas Willard is a Professor in the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He has taught at USC since 1965, where he was Director of the School of Philosophy from 1982-1985. He lectures and publishes extensively in the area of spiritual formation and living christianly. His book The Divine Conspiracy, from which this article is excerpted, was selected as Christianity Today's "Book of the Year" for 1999.