Top Highlights

• human beings, having been made in God’s image, were to work in a way that emulated God’s work.
• For Luther, vocation, as with everything else in his theology, is not so much a matter of what we do; rather, it is a matter of what God does in and through us.
• God has chosen to work through human beings, who, in their different capacities and according to their different talents, serve each other. This is the doctrine of vocation.
• Though work is a blessing, enjoyed even by Adam and Eve who were employed in the Garden of Eden “to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15), after the Fall we must labor in frustration and sweat: “Cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall e...
• People sin in their vocations, and they sin against their vocations. And in not being aware of what their vocations are—and that there is a spiritual dimension to work, family, and involvement in society—they are plagued by a lack of purpose, confused as to what they should do and how they should live and who they are.