JACKSON, Tenn. — Feb. 14, 2025 — Jason Myhre challenged the typical view of living out one’s faith in the workplace in his Feb. 11 address at Union University.
“We need to always be asking, with every decision we make, is this going to enhance the beauty and provision and flourishing of the world God made? Or is it going to diminish it?” Myhre said.
Myhre was the keynote speaker for Union’s annual Faith in the Marketplace luncheon, which gives students and local business leaders an opportunity to learn about the integration of faith and the workplace.
Myhre is the executive director of the Eventide Center for Faith and Investing, an educational initiative of Eventide Asset Management which helps Christians understand and practice biblically faithful investing.
He also serves as a fellow of the Center of Faithful Business at Seattle Pacific University, and he facilitates the Capital Stewardship Hub of the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology.
Using the narrative of the Bible, Myhre discussed how the creation, fall, redemption and new creation found in Scripture shape lives.
“God gives humanity a task, a job to do,” he said. “We were given the task of cultivating and keeping the garden estate of the great king.”
This “macro-purpose” is work, Myhre said. After the fall, however, that work remained a gift but one with which people can sin.
“The fall did not change the fact that work was still a gift,” he said. “But what it did do is it meant that work could either be directed toward God according to his original purposes, or we could rebel against God by making work serve our human selfish ends alone.”
After God’s redemption of man through Jesus, Christians find restoration, Myhre said.
“We have the opportunity, as restored imaged bearers, to take up God’s original purposes for work again,” he said. “To refuse the fall. To embrace the good. And to be a vision of what it should look like.”
Myhre then encouraged listeners to look to the future when there will be a new creation and consider what work will one day be.
In places of work, Myhre said, “God wants to use you to be a taste of his redeeming grace” and of the new world he is bringing about.
In conclusion, Myhre said his prayer for the audience was to “make God’s story the controlling narrative” of their work and to “be a foretaste of [God’s] redeeming grace for the whole world.”