My Devotionals

As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. (Matthew 3:16-4:2 NIV)

Over the past few weeks, we have been examining what it looks like to pursue “whole-life excellence” as opposed to “work-life balance”. In the final devotional in this series, I’d like to argue that in order to be excellent in every role we’re committed to, we must, like Jesus, embrace seasons of imbalance in our lives.

In Matthew 3, we witness the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry as John baptizes him in the Jordan River. Now, with Jesus’s new season of work just beginning, you might reasonably expect him to...

Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, “This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.” (Luke 14:28-30 NIV)

In this four-week series, we are exploring what it looks like to pursue “whole-life excellence”, as opposed to the seemingly unattainable ideal of “work-life balance”.

Last week, we looked at the first step to achieving whole-life excellence: studying Scripture and those we serve to define standards of excellence for each of the roles in our lives.

With those standards defined, it is now our responsibility to (as honestly as we can) evaluate whether or not we are on the path to fulfilling each role with excellence, and if we’re not, make the necessary adjustments.

About a year and a half into my tenure as CEO of...

However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.” Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bondservant or is free. Masters, do the same to them, and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and...

So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. (1 Corinthians 10:31)

You can’t open Twitter or Instagram without seeing someone talking about “work-life balance.” It seems like all of us are searching for this elusive ideal.

There are two things that have long bothered me about our collective striving for work-life balance. First, I think the term is steeped in an unbiblical view of work which says that “work” is a necessary evil in order to enjoy the truly meaningful things in “life.” By its very nature, the term treats “work” and “life” as separate—as if work isn’t a critical part of our lives. You and I know that this is not at all what the Bible teaches. The Hebrew word avodah is translated into our Bibles to mean “work,” and “worship,” and “service.” The writers of Scripture didn’t see work and...