Vocational Frustration - A Christian Perspective

How, as a Christian, am I to both interpret vocational futility, and respond to vocational futility, in a manner representative of a faithful Christian?

 

Let’s attempt an answer…Genesis 3 describes the world turned upside down.  Labor prior to the Fall was good and had God’s commendation.  Adam labored in joy and in harmony with creation.  The Fall did not introduce labor or work into the world, the Fall introduced frustration and futility into man’s charge to labor as part of God’s creation mandate. 

 

It’s interesting that the first recorded murder in the Bible is the result of a labor dispute.  The Tower of Babel is a demonstration of man’s ‘working’ to create a utopia without God.  It’s also interesting how large of role both labor and frustration in labor play in the biblical storyline.  With this familiar biblical refrain, vocational conflict should not surprise us…in fact, we should expect it. 

 

Because of God’s workmanship, initially, the creation itself is a place of beauty and felicity. And then at the introduction of man’s rebellion in Genesis 3 and because of man’s rebellion against God, the language of beauty and goodness and divine approval give way, and we are introduced to the language of curse, and thorns, and thistles, and sweat.  The language of ‘curse’ found in verse 17 of Genesis 3 refers to the withdrawing of God’s favor.  

A creation designed for dominion and rule begins to groan and sprouts thorns and thistles…Cain and Abel…the Tower of Babel…the vanity of Ecclesiastes…and so on.  The theme carries through the Old Testament and begins to come into clearer focus in the New Testament.  In the book of Romans, the Apostle Paul gives the most exhaustive and logical analysis of God’s redemptive plan.  In chapter 8 he begins to explicate the glorious future that awaits the recipients of God’s salvation.  In verses 20-22 he hearkens back to Genesis 3,

Romans 8:20-22 - For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.

 

For now…futility.  The whole creation groans.  Everything is a bit off.  We live in a world that cannot possibly ever be right…at least not for now.  But what do we do in the interim?  How do we respond?  How do we survive 80,000 – 100,00 hours of occasional vocational satisfaction with lots of vocational trouble?

 

In 1977 country music singer Johnny Paycheck recorded a #1 Billboard hit.  It stayed on the charts and was Paycheck’s only #1 song. The country singer had resonated with country music fans with the lyrics, ‘Take this job and shove it!’ Soon the song became a catchphrase for disaffected employees.  There may be times when even we feel this way, but how do we live (vocationally) as Christians in a fallen world? 

 

If we are to believe the Biblical record and square it with common experience there is frustration, disappointment, and discouragement in our labors.  Even the greatest work God has undertaken in the work of redemption through His Son was subject to frustration.  And consider the reality of God using frustration and futility in His work of redemption.  Opposition and even overt sinfulness were an important and integral part of God’s redemptive work. Here’s the takeaway…in our vocational disappointment, and there will be many, whether we are a butcher, baker, or candlestick maker, our experience in futility is not for nothing, nor is it outside of God’s sovereign control.  In our experience of vocational disappointment God is not absent.  

 

We can be assured of vocational frustration…just ask any housewife or mother of young children.  Her vocation looks like a mountain of laundry that never completely goes away, the bathrooms that never clean themselves, and meals that always need to be made.  But how much more difficult would it be to know that God is absent in our vocational frustrations, rather than knowing He is present and sovereign and places Himself directly in the middle of them.  Now, this ain’t easy stuff, but consider the alternative….  Without minimizing the reality of sin and sinful behavior by others and ourselves, and the difficulty of thorns and thistles in anything we put our hand to, God is not an absent deity when it comes to even the most minute details of our lives, including our vocational callings.  We are Christians and not Gnostics.  God is not repulsed by His creation or uninvolved in everyday and ordinary life.  God’s redeeming work includes Him redeeming our vocations.  

 

There is a very real war taking place in our vocations…ask any young mom trying to get dinner on the table with three young children pulling her in innumerable different directions, or ask any young dad working two part-time jobs so his family can make rent, or ask the middle-aged empty nest mom whose trying to find her sense of value with no kids left at home, or ask the newly laid-off 60-something husband/father/and now grandfather with no prospects for employment and too little saved for retirement.  Is there any hope?

 

Check out Genesis 3 and Romans 8.  If you get a chance to look at them both, as each passage describes the frustration introduced into the world by the Fall. It is supremely important to note that both passages have redemptive repercussions as well.  Genesis 3 provides the promise of One that would begin to reverse the effects of the Fall (3:15), and Romans 8 makes plain that though frustration would be introduced into the world God Himself would not abandon His creation, but, in fact, would provide hope (8:20) in its chaos.  You see…we have a problem that we cannot remedy ourselves.  We cannot be part of the cure…at least as the fallen sons and daughters of Adam.  We need One to reverse the effects of the Fall and we need hope in our frustration.  In a very real sense, we need a new Adam, a true son of God, that will be a new worker in God’s world.  We need a perfect man, able to do the works God requires, without sin, or grumbling, or equivocation.  We need an advocate, one who knows our weakness and our frustration, our sin and temptation, and yet not only is our stand-in in our infirmity, but also provides His vocational perfections for our imperfections.  We need a sovereign Redeemer in every sphere we find ourselves in, including vocational redemption.  And in Jesus Christ we need a new identity.  We are condemned by Adam’s vocational curse, and we are desperate for the new Adam’s vocational redemption.  We need hope and God has provided it in the new Adam…the new Adam as God’s faithful worker in everything God has given Him to do (Hebrews 3:1-6).

- DJM 

3/10/2026

 

Redemptive Speech -

“Put away from you crooked speech, and put devious talk far from you.”

- Proverbs 4:24

“Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.”

- Colossians 4:6

“For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.”

- James 3:7,8

“It may seem too obvious to say, but Genesis 1 makes it plain that the first words ever spoken were spoken by God. Language is not a human invention to be used in whatever way serves our interests. If God is the first speaker, then language is his creation. This means that our ability to speak was given to us by the Creator and it exists for his glory. Everything we will ever say belongs to him and should be used for his purposes. Words, in short, have a high and holy calling.”

- Tim Lane and Paul Tripp, Relationships, A Mess Worth Making, p. 71

“It is time for many of us to confess that we have not known the way of love. Our words have hindered, not helped, what the Lord is seeking to do. We have been controlled by the passions and desires of the sinful nature and failed to represent Christ’s character. We need to cry out for grace to speak loving words as his ambassadors.”

- Paul Tripp, War of Words, p. 229

"It is the nature of goodness to be communicative."

- Herman Witsius

“Please forget the words I just blurted out,

It wasn’t me, it was my strange and creeping doubt

It keeps rattling my cage.

And there’s nothing in this world to keep it down.”

- Radiohead, I Can’t

Dear Friends,

When I think about the things I’ve said over the years my knees get weak. James calls the tongue a restless evil that is full of deadly poison. I can still remember hurtful things I’ve said over forty years ago. A sharp word, a critical judgment conveyed to others, a terse argument, gossip designed to form an opinion – these, and more, are in my collection of spoken sins. My tongue is a restless evil. And there is a sinful satisfaction when the tongue does its work. To refrain from evil speech and to ‘tame’ the tongue is no easy task. It is restless, and the sinful heart is not satisfied until the tongue has its way. When we speak we are simply giving verbal expression to the restless evil already formed in the heart. Our speech reveals our heart and for me this is sobering. By our words we have the power of life and death. When I think about my words I am grateful for the thorough and complete work of Christ’s substitutionary work. Christ’s passive obedience, which is that perfect obedience Jesus rendered to the Father in fulfilling all righteousness, has been credited to my account. His perfect speech, sinless tongue, and unsinning heart have been imputed to me. I no longer bear the just judgment God declares against my sinful thoughts, words, and deeds. And yet, God’s sanctifying work is not yet complete in me. I need reminders to speak graciously. I need my speech, even now, to be redeemed. God, as the first speaker, must redeem my words, and He must do this continually by making my heart new. It will do no good to reform my speech with no change to my heart. I’m praying for God to renew my heart day by day and make it evident by the things I say.

Lord, let my mouth be an evidence of your work taking place in my heart.

- DJM

January 2026

A Plea for Life

'Loving God and loving neighbor are not separate choices. One flows sweetly from the other. Loving my neighbor will always mean a desire to help him or her find the grace of God in all its manifestations. Loving my neighbor will occasionally arrest me, and maybe even require me to help prevent someone from being murdered. Loving God and loving neighbor are never at odds with each other. Those who try to do one at the expense of the other offend both God and neighbor.'

- John Ensor, Innocent Blood - Challenging the Powers of Death with the Gospel of Life, p. 14

'The most fundamental expression of love is care, concern, and protection of human life. The foundational obligation of all government is to protect, sustain, and maintain human life. This is the very reason for government.'

- R.C. Sproul, Abortion, A Rational Look at an Emotional Issue, pp. 87-88

One of the greatest indicators of the church’s commitment to the pro-life cause is whether she will commit herself to becoming dissatisfied with the status quo. Let’s face it; the abortion debate has been around a long time. The destruction of human life far precedes the recent Veritas videos, and yet heretofore the cost to the church has been minimal.  It is one thing, albeit important, to vote for pro-life candidates, and quite another to materially help a young woman with an unwanted pregnancy as she struggles to get on her feet. The pro-life battle comes much closer to home when we invite the stranger into our own living room. To adopt or foster a child is to invest in something far greater than creature comforts, and at the time it's much more difficult to see a return on our investment. It’s a matter of historical record that the early Christians were pro-life, believing that God was the giver of every life. When Roman citizens looked for ways to dispose of unwanted children it was the Christian communities that took them in and raised them as their own. The early church saw the risk and took it. They knew the way of the cross was costly, particularly for their Lord, but they also knew the servant is no greater than the Master.  

 

As long as the church loves her ease and eschews her discomfort it’s likely the pro-life battle will be consigned to a passive yawn. We’ll soon forget the videos and settle back into the routine. You see…to care is to commit time and resources. To care is to cast comfort to the wind. To care is to make hard choices. And frankly, there is a certain risk to it all, and risk is…well, it’s risky. There is a war in our midst, with real bloodshed for the innocent, and as long as the church is satisfied with where she’s at there will be little light and little salt. We shouldn’t wonder why the world then looks at us with eyes aglaze and yawns.

 

- DJM

12/2025

Longing in Hope

There’s a tension that won’t go away. I feel it, viscerally. Try as I might to mitigate its effects the strain is palpable; longing and yearning. What is flies in the face of what should be. No aspect of life has escaped.  We yearn with incessant longing, but as a result of the Fall all of life is often hard and filled with unmet expectations.  Our longing manifests itself in frustration and alienation. Can we escape it? Is it possible to get beyond this tension?

 

What if the tension, and what if the yearning are indications, signposts pointing to something far more significant? What if the incessant longing for something better and different is an indicator of something broken and seemingly unfixable? What if estrangement and its satisfaction here and now are impossible?   In 2002 the rock group Coldplay asked an even more penetrating question,

 

Am I, a part of the cure 
Or am I part of the disease?

 

What if the problem with longing is me? What if the cure I long for is held in abeyance by the contagion I carry? What if the biggest obstacle to satisfying my yearning is rooted deeply inside of who I am?

 

One of my favorite Christmas stories is the story of Simeon found in Luke chapter 2. Simeon, a righteous, clear-eyed, and wizened temple worshiper was a man consumed with longing. He looked at the world around him and saw brokenness. He knew something of the prevalent and encroaching darkness and yet pined for something or Someone better. When the young child Jesus was brought to the temple for the rite of purification, Simeon’s gaze fell upon Him. In that moment Simeon’s yearning, like a man overlong parched for lack of water, found his thirsting sated. For Simeon the answer to the longing was found in deliverance, but even more so, in a Deliverer. Simeon describes his yearning being satisfied by seeing. He exclaims,

 

‘…my eyes have seen your salvation….’(v. 30)

 

In Jesus, Simeon saw deliverance, not just for the world, but for himself. Long bound by chains of his own making, in Jesus Simeon was confronted by his longing, and confronted by his own need and the needs of the world around him. In Simeon’s beatific Advent vision every longing pooled up with satisfaction. Salvation, was found in Jesus in the Incarnation, and in Him the telos (end) of longing, had come. 

 

Simeon wasn’t the only one who longed for something. In generations prior the patriarch Abraham had been whispered a promise. And Jesus, of Himself, spoke as the anecdote to Abraham’s long dormant yearning in John 8, 

 

‘Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.’ (V. 56)

 

Abraham’s longing was rooted deeply in the covenantal framework given to the first woman in Genesis 3. One would come, it said. He is promised, it said. Wait, it said.

 

For all of those like me that still yearn. For all of those that see the brokenness in both the world and in themselves, and long for the overdue mending to come. For those that find themselves longing and waiting, at times impatiently, for things to be different. For those that daily experience the tension that won’t go away…we wait. In this interregnum we wait for the twice-fulfilled promise, once as Bethlehem’s Child and once again soon as a cosmic reigning King.  

 

‘The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.’

–      Phillip Brooks, O Little Town of Bethlehem, 1868

 

In our longing, we hope.

 

-Dan J. Morse

Christmas 2025

War of the Worldviews

What does everyone need, though everyone has, and yet each of us would likely have a difficult time articulating it, or describing it?

 

We all have one, I guarantee it, and whether we want to admit it or not. We all have one, though we may not know where it came from, and, quite frankly, some of us may even be a bit embarrassed by it.

 

What am I talking about? I’m talking about worldview. 

 

What I mean by worldview is that internal thought process, aided by external influences, pressures, and evidences, whereby we make sense out of the world in which we live. There’s a three-dollar philosophical word used to describe this genre of philosophical understanding. That three-dollar philosophical word is the word ‘cosmology.’ Worldview and cosmology describe how we understand the created dimensions around us. What is the nature of the material universe? Where did it come from? Is it material alone? Is there a spiritual aspect to it? Is the material universe self-creating, self-existing, and entirely explainable by the scientific or empirical method? Or, in or more rudimentary terms worldview and cosmology ask and attempt to answer questions such as who am I? Why am I here? Where did all of this come from? Is there any purpose to life? Are humans only material beings? Is the created world only an illusion? Is there life after death? Are binary gender distinctions a religio-social construct? Or any number of questions that come up in everyday life….

 

Why is our worldview important? Our worldview will determine the trajectory for our lives. How we think about God, how we think about ourselves, and others, and how we think about the universe around us is critically important for how we live our lives in the world. Just look around and you’ll see the maelstrom of colliding worldviews.

 

Where do we get our worldview? I want you to think about how you think? Maybe you’ve never done this before, but you hold certain things…certain ideas, about most everything. Where did those ideas come from? Was the philosopher Aristotle correct in that the mind is but a ‘unscribed tablet’? Or how about the 17^th century French philosopher Rene Descartes who said all humans are a ‘tabula rasa’ or a blank slate. Are we simply an open receptacle for ideas about life and how we interpret them are nothing more than connecting synapse to synapse in everyday experience and translating it into a coping mechanism for dealing with the verities of life? Or, perhaps Freud was correct and we are nothing more than familial impressions and sexual urges formed into a mishmash of behavioral compunctions? Where did you get your ideas about you, and how you understand the world and your place in it? You have a worldview, you have an interpretive grid for understanding life, but where did it come from? And, I would dare say that your interpretive grid is different than most anyone else’s. Perhaps you are entirely secular in your worldview. In other words, you let culture, friends, social media, or whatever else serve as the interpretive grid for how you think about things. Or perhaps your worldview is syncretistic. In other words, your worldview is a little bit religious, a little bit secular, and a little bit of a crap-shoot. You know, whatever floats your boat. Perhaps you’re a pragmatist. You’re going to do whatever it takes to get by. 

 

Here’s the question…regardless of your worldview…where did it come from? And the second part of the question is this…who’s to say your worldview is the best and most helpful interpretive grid? 

 

Are there assurances in life? Is there a worldview that helps me interpret the world that I live in? Are there any real answers? In a world that has seemingly gone mad, worldview matters. It matters for you, and for me, and it matters for this crazy world that we live in.  

 

If you’re interested in talking about worldview, specifically how the Christian worldview interprets at the world around us, I’d love to connect. 

- DJM 

11/2025