Glorifying God Through Our Work by Aaron Eppard

Introduction

Recently listening to a lecture from Rabbi Daniel Lapin on the nature of morality and business, it prompted me to further consider the subject. Rabbi Lapin began his talk by discussing how the business professional is perceived in society, how often in today’s entertainment industry, the ‘villain’ is often a business professional. Rabbi Lapin directed much of his lecture around generating activism in society for the Christian and the business professional and made very intriguing points.

However, that’s not the purpose of my writings on the subject.

I do think that Rabbi Lapin’s persuasion is rooted in something that seems fundamentally true. That is, at first glance, people do not generally correlate business, work, or careers with a strong moral compass. Moreover, it’s not considered, especially by the general sentiment of society, of being something that glorifies God or is for the good of people.

The idea of glorifying God through our businesses and careers seems foreign, and the thought itself proposes that glorifying God is confined within the walls of a church or place of worship unless we are directly involved in ministry.

My attempt through this study is to glean from God’s wisdom to see just how our businesses and careers are directly correlated and integrated with who we are in Jesus, and in line with how God created us.

Initially looking at Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created them; male and female he created them.” This verse sets the precedent for the purpose behind our careers, our endeavors, and our work. The foundation is being set for the perspective of this study, is that we are designed to imitate God. God enjoys seeing His character reflected in our lives. In fact, as the word Eden translates from its Hebrew origins to mean “delight”, God is delighted in our imitation of Him. Over the next series of blogs, we will look into how things like ownership, profit, competition, etc. are derived and purposed to reflect God’s character; and obviously the root of its distortion that has caused society to see business and work as something other than just that. If you are interested in chatting about this or any future portion of the series, give me a call!