If you're serious about the Christian faith, you enter the ministry or the academy, or perhaps both. This is the first lie I was ever told as a new convert.
I was fettered for years by such "wisdom." This was the wisdom of an ecclesiastical communism of sorts, where the Bible-believers are the bourgeoise, and all the rest are simpletons and pew-warming proletarians.
But (thank God!) this was a lie, and the truth is more precious for me having believed it. The truth is that the iron worker, the politician, and the pastor are equally important in Christ's kingdom, and no one calling is superior to another.
Jared C. Wilson has teased this out for us in detail in his new book, The Story of Everything. Like any good student of the Word, he shows his work, and the biblical evidence for his worldview is breathtaking.
Work, art, politics, pain, marriage - anything mundane, anything magnificent - they're all part of God's story. Mr. Wilson traces various themes from Genesis to Revelation, showing the goodness of God's world and where you and I fit in it.
If you feel inadequate, it's because you are. But your inadequacy doesn't spring from a deficiency in your vocation or in God's design, but from the Fall, which warps and reshapes our values and how we engage this good creation.
But the Gospel reorients us to God's design, a design in which everything assumes its rightful place and serves to magnify His glory. That's why folks should read The Story of Everything, because it will readjust your thinking and put a spring in your step as you head off to the factory, lunch pail in hand, to work another 10-hour shift.