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Series: Five Mere Christians
Devotional: 5 of 5

[Jesus said,] remain in my love...I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. (John 15:9, 11)

The search for joy was the dominant theme of C.S. Lewis’s life. And he sought it apart from Christ in all the usual (and some unusual) places: alcohol abuse, an alleged affair with his dead best friend’s mom, and perhaps most relatably his career.

In 1925, after years of professional disappointments, Lewis landed his dream job as Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Magdalen College in Oxford. In an induction ceremony that had all the pomp and circumstance a 467-year-old college can muster, Lewis knelt before the president of Magdalen College, who dramatically met his gaze and declared, “I wish you joy.” Lewis then rose and proceeded around the room, stopping in front of each new colleague who echoed the refrain: “I wish you joy,” “I wish you joy,” “I wish you joy.”

I guarantee you that in that moment, C.S. Lewis believed he had finally found joy in the ultimate. He had achieved his vocational dream! But by God’s grace, Lewis came to learn what every successful professional inevitably does: that without Christ, even a dream job will eventually turn into a nightmare. It is only by remaining in Christ’s love that “your joy may be complete” (see John 15:11).

Here’s how Lewis himself said it years later: “God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”

Is it wrong to find joy in our work? Absolutely not! God created us to love our jobs (see Genesis 1:26-28 and Ecclesiastes 2:24). But Lewis’s story and today’s passage remind us that we mere Christians glorify God by finding our ultimate joy in Christ and not our work.

Is your mood perfectly correlated to whether you’re winning at work? Do you spend less time with the Lord when things aren’t going your way? Are you unable to enjoy God’s gift of rest from your work?

Take it from someone with loads of experience in this area: If you answered yes to any of those questions, you’re probably looking to your work to provide you with the ultimate joy that can be found only in Christ.

If that’s you, let me encourage you to do three things right now:

1. Confess your idolatry to God and other believers
2. Meditate on the gospel
3. Ask the Lord for his power to enjoy the good gift of work without turning it into an idolatrous ultimate good

In doing this, you will be glorifying God as you work today!

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Series: Five Mere Christians
Devotional: 4 of 5

Jesus spoke all these things to the crowd in parables; he did not say anything to them without using a parable. (Matthew 13:34)

Jesus revealed God’s kingdom primarily through culture rather than politics. He never sought a seat on the Sanhedrin or in the Roman Senate. Instead, he changed the world with parables—tiny tales that stirred hearts to long for God’s kingdom.

Yet despite Jesus’s example, many Christians put far more faith in political solutions than cultural ones to fix the world’s problems today. We believe electing the “right people” and appointing the “right judges” will finally bring God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

This mindset explains why William Wilberforce, a member of the British Parliament in the 18th century, gets the lion’s share of the credit for abolishing the slave trade—even though historians and Wilberforce himself gave equal credit to Hannah More, a poet, playwright, and novelist who outsold her contemporary Jane Austen ten-to-one.

Eric Metaxas, a biographer of both Wilberforce and More, says, “How Wilberforce came to be the chief champion of abolition...has everything to do with Hannah More.” While Wilberforce worked to change politicians’ minds, More worked to change the people’s hearts through art that exposed slavery’s horrors.

Jesus’s parables and Hannah More’s poetry point to an important truth: We mere Christians glorify God by advancing his kingdom culturally and not just politically.

What might this mean for you today? Consider abortion as a case study. Murder has no place in the kingdom of God. And so it is right to ask the question, “What is the political response to this problem?” But the far more powerful question is, “What is my creative response to this problem?”

If you’re an artist like Hannah More, your response might be to write stories and songs that break people’s hearts toward orphans and birth parents. If you’re a business leader, it could be creating generous maternity and paternity policies or funding adoptions for employees. If you work in a café, it might mean setting up a board with resources for pregnancy centers.

Here’s my point: Please don’t wait for politicians to reveal God's kingdom—be the creator who makes it visible today. Whatever the issue is—abortion, racial injustice, gender transitioning, pollution, etc.— glorify God not just by working to change things politically but first and foremost culturally. Because as Andy Crouch said, “The only way to change culture is to create more of it.”