It is a fundamental human urge to answer the questions: Who am I? Why do I matter? What is my life for? And because we are humans bearing the image of God, we have an indelible instinct that these questions of identity, value, and purpose have positive answers and that these answers have something to do with God.
The opening sentence of Calvin’s Institutes reflects the intuitive relevance of bringing together what we know about God and what we know about ourselves: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”[1] One of the most critical intersections and applications of this double knowledge is in the idea of vocation.
Here’s the working definition of vocation that is guiding our “Called Out” theme in Spiritual Life at Houston Christian University this year: A vocation is a charge from an authority outside oneself to pursue a purpose greater than oneself.[2]
Our vocations are multidimensional. They encompass all of life—the comprehensive matrix of relationships, roles, and responsibilities God has given us in the world in which God calls us to love him and love others.[3] Our vocations can and should include our work, but it is essential to understand that our callings in Christ are more than just our careers. Vocation and profession are not interchangeable synonyms. We have callings that do not pay us anything but cost us much; we can pursue professions that are not vocations but rather self-directed, self-serving ambitions.
But perceiving for ourselves and promoting for our students an understanding of work as a God-given vocation is crucial to our efforts in holistic discipleship and one of the essential modes of integrating faith and learning.[4] This is mission-critical to developing a true professional excellence[5] because ultimately one cannot be excellent within a career if one does not understand the calling that authorizes, empowers, and invests that work with meaning and virtue.
You can help your students to discern a vocation in their profession. You don’t just get them ready for a career; you prepare them to enter a calling with excellence.
“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men…You are serving the Lord Christ” (Col 3:23–24). A vocation changes the motivation for why we want to be excellent and effective in our work and—this is critical—why we would want a university education to help us get there. It is no longer self-oriented or for personal enrichment, to please and impress those around us. Instead, our work is for the Lord, service we offer to him as worship that works for the good of our neighbors.
Dorothy Sayers spoke to this sense of vocation in a 1942 speech entitled “Why Work?”: “The church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.”[6]
The work God has given us to do as his image-bearers is good, and good work ought to be done well. Our discipleship to Jesus demands this. In our apprenticeship to him, consider what his work must have been like, this carpenter’s son whom the crowds acknowledged did “all things well” (Mark 7:37). I can’t imagine Jesus’s tables ever needed the first-century equivalent of a cocktail napkin folded up and wedged under one of the legs so that it would sit level without a wobble. His tables were plane and square because that’s the kind of table that glorifies his Father and serves a neighbor well.
In your field and profession, go and do thou likewise, and teach your students to do the same, and for the same reasons.
But I want to go a step further: Promoting a Christian understanding of our careers as callings might be especially strategic for us to pursue because understanding our professions as vocations has the potential to open students up to engagement with all the other modes of integration as well.
I assume I don’t need to convince you that the dominant motivation for pursuing a university degree for the vast majority of students today is because they (and their parents and federal student loan programs) deem it necessary to get a “good job.” There’s good reason to lament this reductive reason being the dominant, even sole, motivation for a college education, but there is little use in denying its present sociological reality.
We know our students are coming into our classrooms asking the questions: How will this help me get a job? How will this prepare me for work?
And so, like good teachers do, we should begin where they are. We start with their questions. When their chief concern is how we prepare them for their work, we answer their questions with not only rigorous academic knowledge and cutting-edge professional skill, but we also prepare them to get a job by making clear to them that their work is a spiritual vocation that calls from us excellence—excellence that God desires to graciously enable in us—because their work is a means through which God wants to work in the world.
We should work to develop our students’ understanding of Christian vocation because that is itself a proper end of our calling as disciplers and teachers. But showing them why their work matters to God might also help them to see how our disciplines matter to God and so to show this knowledge as intrinsically valuable and not merely an employment credential.
Because our students are already inclined to think of their education as preparation for work, we can leverage that pursuit of a profession, through the motivation of vocation, to create more engagement with the theological reflection and spiritual formation that are possible in our disciplines. Vocation can make integration matter, providing practicality to what can often initially feel too intangible and amorphous to grasp.
Foregrounding vocation in our approach to professional preparation aligns our pursuit of meaningful faith integration with our students’ motivation for their education, deepening the fruitfulness of all of it.
A version of this essay was originally offered as a devotional at the Houston Christian University Faculty Symposium before the beginning of the Fall 2026 semester.
[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John Thomas McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), I.i.1, p. 35.
[2] Adapted from Timothy J. Keller and Katherine Leary Alsdorf, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work (Riverhead Books, 2014), 2.
[3] For an excellent survey aimed to stimulate college students to pursue excellence across the full spectrum of callings included within the comprehensive Christian doctrine of vocation, see Perry L. Glanzer, Identity in Action: Christian Excellence in All of Life (ACU Press, 2021). Glanzer has also more recently published another book for students that focuses less on their particular identities and roles and more on the theological framing of the image of God: Unleashing the Image of God: Discovering Your Identity, Purpose, Vocation, and Character (Baker Academic, 2026).
[4] At HCU, we encourage and equip faculty to develop in four essential modes for meaningful integration of faith and learning: our personal Christian devotion; pursuing a “pastoral pedagogy” in the classroom and beyond; promoting an understanding of our professions as Christian vocations; and pursuing an understanding of our academic disciplines as illuminated and animated by the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
[5] HCU’s mission is to provide a learning experience that instills in students a passion for academic, spiritual, and professional excellence as a result of our central confession, “Jesus Christ is Lord.”
[6] Dorothy L. Sayers, “Why Work?” in Creed or Chaos? (Sophia Institute Press, 1995), 106.
