Navigating the tension of vocation in exile involves a loving sensitivity and some amount of nuance but must always remain anchored in God’s vision for human flourishing, unswayed by cultural tides. Embodying and expressing this vision requires courageous, loving resistance. And part of resisting is remaining rather than retreating. This has been God’s plan for his people in exile since the earliest days.

But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. (Jer. 29:7)
During most of my college years, I worked part-time at a bank. I started as a teller before eventually becoming an assistant branch manager. The job paid well, especially for a young college kid, and was straightforward. It was the sort of work that was easy to leave behind when the workday ended. But as many do in their early 20s, I became increasingly discontent. The job was fine, but it wasn’t meaningful. It didn’t satisfy my growing need for purpose and significance.
A job is necessary, but what most people are seeking is vocation—their voice (from which the word is derived) into the world, their unique contribution to the ongoing conversation of human history. The ability to potentially “disrupt the industry” always begins with the angst of “What should I do with my life?”—an expression of vocational longing.
But the question is somewhat misleading. Tim Keller writes, “A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it and you do it for them rather than for yourself.” Vocational calling isn’t found within; we receive it from another. Vocation is a gift given, not a treasure hidden.
In her essay titled “Why Work?,” Dorothy Sayers quotes the French philosopher Jacques Maritain and writes, “If you want to produce Christian work, be a Christian, and try to make a work of beauty into which you have put your heart; do not adopt a Christian pose.” Vocation is the calling to serve others by creating a heartfelt work of beauty. An artist’s painting, an engineer’s code, a teacher’s lesson, a baker’s cake, a stay-at-home parent’s myriad of responsibilities—these and so much more are vocation, the gift of invitation to offer our best effort, to God’s glory and for the good of others, in the various places and spaces we occupy.
While we live in exile on this side of eternity, the gift of vocation, when received gratefully and stewarded responsibly, offers immense hope and opportunity for followers of Jesus. Vocation offers us a chance to truly disrupt things—not just industries but culture itself. Vocation as exiles calls Christians to disrupt a culture of self-interest with sacrificial, self-giving love by leveraging skills and resources in partnership with others, for God’s glory and the good of all.
Setting Up Shop in Exile
In Acts 18, the apostle Paul makes his way from Athens to Corinth and meets a married couple there, Aquila and Priscilla. Aquila was a Jew from the Roman province of Pontus (in modern Turkey), but many scholars believe Priscilla was from a wealthy, aristocratic Roman family. 
Luke tells us the couple had recently relocated from Italy because Emperor Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome (vv. 1–2). Since she was married to a Jewish man, Priscilla was expelled from her homeland along with her husband. Together they land in Corinth, where they meet Paul. The three of them, brought together by their shared experience as exiles in a land not their own, work together.
Paul, Priscilla, and Aquila were “tentmakers by trade” (v. 3). Because of the itinerant nature of Paul’s work, it’s unlikely he carried the necessary materials to set up shop and launch an operable tentmaking business of his own in the various places his travels took him. It’s far more likely he carried a few smaller tools with which he could execute minor repairs. But in Corinth, he partnered with Priscilla and Aquila, who’d established a viable tentmaking business there.
These three exiled followers of Jesus shared their skills and resources, set up shop in a frenetic foreign city, and presumably went about the work of crafting tents for a wide variety of clientele. And in a competitive marketplace like Corinth, it’s safe to assume they held their work to a high quality standard. They wouldn’t have been in business long otherwise. Finally, as we learn from the broader story of Paul’s missionary journeys and Priscilla and Aquila’s significant influence on a number of churches throughout the region, tentmaking was simply the exterior of a much deeper, much more meaningful vocational engagement in exile.
For the Good of All
At the risk of stating the obvious, Paul, Priscilla, and Aquila didn’t make “Christian” tents. They were Christians who made tents for all. Evidence indicates they would’ve made leather tents. At the time, leather tents were purchased in bulk by the Roman military to house their soldiers during long treks to battle, making them a likely client. This is a fascinating tension for Christians. Does vocation in exile require an ethical compromise?
What does vocation in exile mean for the medical professional when it comes to the sanctity of life? What does it mean for the business owner when it comes to serving customers who uphold values distinctly counter to Scripture? What about for the parent when it comes to juggling her child’s schedule between academics, sports, and church?
I recently talked with a friend about the tension she’s experiencing as a public school teacher. Faced with mounting pressure to affirm and teach modern cultural mores around sexuality and gender, she’s navigating the complex intersection between personal faithfulness and public witness. Her courageous conclusion was that the two are one and the same. The most loving thing she could offer her students, their families, and her fellow faculty was a loving, resilient, and kind but firm commitment to what she believed to be true, while also leaving enough room for meaningful dialogue with those who disagree with her position.
Vocation in exile necessitates clarity and conviction coupled with empathy and compassion. Ultimately, there’s no vocation, no human endeavor, that works toward God’s glory and the true common good while also directly violating God’s plan for his glory and our good. This would be an untenable incongruity. Navigating the tension of vocation in exile involves a loving sensitivity and some amount of nuance but must always remain anchored in God’s vision for human flourishing, unswayed by cultural tides. Embodying and expressing this vision requires courageous, loving resistance. And part of resisting is remaining rather than retreating. This has been God’s plan for his people in exile since the earliest days.
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As we pull apart and trace these threads of salvation, Sinclair Ferguson cautions us that “the traditional ordo salutis runs the danger of displacing Christ from the central place in soteriology” (The Holy Spirit, 99). Each aspect of saving grace was not only secured by Christ, but comes to us only in living relationship with him. Each grace is first true of the God-man, and then communicated to us in union with him by faith.

The curious man came at night, under the cloak of darkness.
By and large, the masses may have been missing the significance of Jesus’s miracles, but Nicodemus, a Pharisee and “ruler of the Jews,” was catching on. “No one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him,” he recognized. He was beginning to understand. These visible signs Jesus performed were designed to open ears to the words he spoke. “You are a teacher come from God” (John 3:2).
Now, the great teacher stunned him with a doctrine the learned Pharisee could have known from his own Hebrew Scriptures: “Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). Regeneration or new birth, we call it. Physical, human birth, “of water,” is not enough to see Jesus’s kingdom. You need spiritual birth, to be “born of the Spirit”:
unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.(John 3:5–6)
Long before born-again became a popular adjective, Jesus called for new birth in this famous late-night encounter. Not many of us today will be as stumped as Nicodemus was that night, but we may still scratch our heads, especially those of us who call ourselves “Reformed” and (rightly) take so many of our theological cues from Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Romans and the Reformed Road
In broad strokes, Romans moves from human depravity (1:18–3:20), to the wonder of justification by faith alone (3:21–5:21), to the everyday experience of the Christian life and the lifelong process of sanctification by the Spirit (6:1–8:39). The famous “golden chain” of Romans 8:29–30 lays out the marvelous, unbroken sequence of God’s care for his chosen people from eternity past to eternity future:
those whom he foreknew he also predestined….And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.
Foreknowledge, predestination, effectual calling, justification, and glorification—and we may pause to ask about sanctification. But in Nicodemus-like fashion, might we forget to even ask about regeneration?
As J.I. Packer wrote in 2009, “Regeneration, or new birth, meaning simply the new you through, with, in, and under Christ, is a largely neglected theme today.” That neglect, says D.A. Carson, may have been “owing in part to several decades of dispute over justification and how a person is set right with God.” Carson continues,
We have tended to neglect another component of conversion no less important. Conversion under the terms of the new covenant is more than a matter of position and status in Christ, though never less: it includes miraculous Spirit-given transformation, something immeasurably beyond mere human resolution. It is new birth; it makes us new creatures; it demonstrates that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation. All the creedal orthodoxy in the world cannot replace it.
How then does regeneration relate to our often-rehearsed “order of salvation” (Latin ordo salutis), which lays out the precious array of saving graces that are ours in Christ? How do we who love the Reformed emphasis on justification (and sanctification) think about the essential grace of the new birth, with the balance and health it brings to the whole of our theology?
New Life in the Soul
First of all, we don’t blame Paul if regeneration occupies too small a place in our thinking. After all, we clearly find the concept of new, God-given spiritual life elsewhere in his letters.
In his greatly celebrated lines to the Ephesians, he moves from human depravity (2:1–3) to God himself taking the initiative to “ma[k]e us alive together with Christ” (2:4–5), which then issues in the faith (2:8) through which Christ’s people are saved. And memorably in 2 Corinthians 5:17, Paul exclaims, literally, “If anyone is in Christ—new creation!” Paul also rehearses this new creation in us in Galatians 6:15 and in “the washing of regeneration” in Titus 3:5.
Elsewhere in the New Testament, James draws on new-birth imagery in saying of believers that God, of his own will, “brought us forth by the word of truth” (James 1:18). Peter too, echoing the accent on divine initiative, praises God the Father as the one who “has caused us to be born again” (1 Peter 1:3). Like James, Peter also mentions the eye-opening word, the gospel, through which God works: “You have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Peter 1:23).
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The connection between these two passages is transparency. David chose to be honest and open about his sin—can’t get much more open than writing a song about it. And Philemon was forced to be open and honest about his need to forgive Onesimus.

A friend of mine started a church in Canada years ago that God blessed with many conversions. It became over 500 hundred attenders that were mostly new believers. Laura and I were able to do two marriage conferences there over the years, and it was so encouraging to see how teachable and hungry the people were. Often what we taught was the first time they had ever heard it, and they just assumed that if the Bible says that, they need to obey it. It was so much fun.
This same pastor friend said that one time they started a small group for men struggling with pornography. Again, lots of new believers who don’t know how church is done. They don’t know they are supposed to pretend they don’t struggle with lust. The church announced it and put a sign up on the church bulletin board and MEN SIGNED UP! I cannot imagine that happening in the churches I’ve known. Most Christians are way too private about their spiritual lives, and especially their spiritual failures. Would men sign up at your church where others could see their names?
I’ve been thinking about two passages in the Bible that seem to have a commonality that I never noticed before. Psalm 51 is a familiar psalm that we recognize as David’s song of repentance after his sin with Bathsheba. I’ve read it many times for my own soul’s benefit, and I’ve pointed others to it to encourage repentance.
But recently I thought about it as an example of David’s transparency about a major failure. The superscription says David wrote it after Nathan came to him after he had gone in to Bathsheba. The superscription is not subtle—
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