Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast. You send us the questions on your mind, and longtime author and pastor John Piper opens his Bible and finds answers for those questions. And speaking of the big questions in life, there’s one major question facing every college student, and that’s the question of major. What direction to go in life, what field to pursue, what college, what vocation — all of those things.

Many high school and college students seek to make that decision simply based on money. But for Christians, the money decision is a secondary one, leading to today’s question from a young woman named Kerri. “Pastor John and Tony, thank you for the Ask Pastor John podcast. I have listened to every episode. And most of those episodes while walking my dog, to the point that my dog gets super excited every time she hears the intro jingle! My question for you, Dr. Piper, is this. When deciding on a college major, how much should future income factor into the decision? What other general guidelines and factors should be considered by a young Christian wanting to not waste his or her life in the vocation he or she chooses?”

I have a very personal stake in this kind of question because I do serve as the chancellor and as a professor at Bethlehem College & Seminary here in Minneapolis. We have a college of a very particular kind, and I feel that sense of responsibility to help parents and help young people decide if this school is possibly the kind that they would benefit from by attending.

What I’m going to say doesn’t relate only to our school but to education and vocation in general, in the hope of helping young people or even older people, as we’ll see — I think people are making midlife changes about education and vocation all the time — decide what kind of education and vocation to pursue. So, let me start with five observations that put this question in a certain context.

Five Observations About Education

First, most of the world does not have access to the kind of education assumed in the question about choosing a major. Most of the world moves from family to a rudimentary, basic education of reading and writing and math (if that), and then into some kind of apprenticeship, or simply into the family occupation. Higher education, as we know it in America, is simply not an option most places in the world.

Second, even in developed countries like America where higher education exists, only about 62 percent of high school graduates go to college. That’s a lot of millions who don’t. There are all kinds of paths into useful vocational life through trade schools, technical schools, or on-the-job learning. So, I don’t assume in answering this question that everyone should go to college.

Third, for those who do go to college, the choices are very many. There are huge universities with hundreds of majors. At the University of Minnesota, a mile from where I’m standing right now, there are 150 majors in eleven colleges, many of them tailored precisely for specific kinds of vocations. And then there are smaller — like two thousand or three thousand — liberal-arts colleges, which offer a blend of general education and vocational specialization. And there are a handful of colleges like ours: very small, with a focus on more classical education with a view to building a kind of person whose maturity and character and habits of mind and heart fit them for a life of wisdom and wonder — we like to say — and fruitfulness for Christ in any vocation.

Fourth, we should always remember that a decision at age seventeen about college or major or vocation does not mean you will have the same job for a lifetime. The average American changes careers three to seven times in a lifetime. Many people in midlife decide to go back to school. This is one reason we put such an emphasis at Bethlehem College on the kind of habits of mind and heart that will bear fruit in all vocations, because students may think they know what they’re going to do five years from now, but they don’t know what they’re going to do twenty years from now. But they will be a kind of person twenty years from now, and we would like to help that be the right kind of person.

Fifth, there is no sure connection between choosing a major and earning a certain level of income over a lifetime. Some specialized majors do open doors to higher-income professions. That’s true — like medicine, say. But far, far more influential, in general, in a person’s success and income are character traits: initiative, discipline, self-control, ambition, creativity, relational wisdom, vision, analytical skills, problem-solving insight, integrity, faithfulness, steadfastness. Give me a person like that; they will do something with their lives, and they’ll probably be well paid for it too. Some of those traits come from our genes, our parents’ genes, but some are learned and refined with good teachers and life experience.

Besides thinking about income, Jesus says, “Seek the kingdom first, and all these things will be added to you” (see Matthew 6:33) — the practical necessities of life. So, I would say don’t think income. Don’t make it ever a deciding factor in choosing a major or a vocation. Make it way down the list of your priorities when making those choices.

Five Guidelines for Choosing a Major

So, with those five observations setting the stage, here are my guidelines for those who are choosing a vocation or a college or a major, who don’t want to waste their lives but make them count for the glory of God.

1. Aim at God’s glory.

Let’s start right there with the glory of God. The Bible says, “Whatever you do,” — choosing a school, choosing a major, choosing a vocation — “do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). Or, “Do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus” (Colossians 3:17). One way to turn this guideline into a question would be this: When you consider a major or a possible vocation, do you get excited about the ways you could glorify God or make much of Jesus in this major or in this vocation? Or do you have to bracket that whole question because it bothers you; it just gets in the way? That’s not a good sign.

2. Pursue personal holiness.

Since the Bible is clear in 1 Thessalonians 4:3 that “this is the will of God, your sanctification” — your holiness, your godliness, your moral rectitude — do you have hesitations that this major or this vocation might compromise or hinder your sanctification, or do you get excited about how this path might advance your own holiness, your pursuit of godliness?

3. Consider your gifts.

Do your intellectual, emotional, and physical abilities — call them God’s gifts that define much of who we are — fit this major or vocation? The biblical analogy here is the body with many members or parts. One person is a hand, another is an ear, another is a nose. We are all so different by God’s design, and we should not try to be what we aren’t, and we should try to know the unique way that God has made us to be and then ask, “Does that fit with this major or this vocation?” I don’t think God made round holes for square bolts. He wants there to be a fitness.

4. Ponder your desires.

Very closely connected with those gifts is the question of your recurrent desires. Now, I don’t mean flash-in-the-pan desires right after a conference or something, but ever-returning desires. They just crop up over the years. They seem to be circling back because there’s something in me that makes me this way. I am assuming that these desires are growing in the heart that has a passion for holiness and for the glory of God.

Now, I know not all desires are good guidance, but many of them are. The psalmist prays that God would incline our hearts for guidance (Psalm 119:36; 141:4). In other words, “Give me desires, God. Incline my heart for the discovery of your ways.” So, as you submit your entire life to the glory of God, what desires keep growing up in that soil? What kind of activity do you feel at home in? My mind, my emotions, my body have come home.

5. Pay attention to needs.

Let the needs of the world have their proper effect on shaping your education and vocation. Of course, the needs of the world are spiritually and materially immeasurable. You can’t be led by all of them. So, here are two ways to put that last question in order to make it livable, I think:

What needs of the world are you moved by over and over again? How has God wired you to respond to the needs of the world? What kind of good do you repeatedly feel drawn to do for others? That’s one question.
What connections do you see between your gifts, your at-homeness, and the needs of the world?

Bible, Fellowship, Prayer

So, those are my five guidelines for choosing a major, choosing a vocation, or thinking about the future of your life and how to spend your time so as not to waste it. And as you ponder them, do it in this way: Be saturated continually with the Bible. Be embedded in a healthy church that counsels you, surrounds you, helps you recognize who you are and know what your gifts are. And finally, be continually in prayer. God won’t let you waste your life if you seek him like this.

Do you ever feel that you are carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders? That the responsibilities, duties, and burdens of life press upon you with their almost intolerable reality?

“The weight of the world” might refer to your vocation, to the calling that you have in life. The pressure of a calling can feel crushing. There aren’t enough hours in the day. There aren’t enough resources available. The possibility of failure is real; it looms on the horizon. You feel pulled in too many directions, and at some point you’re going to break.

“The weight of the world” might refer to the burdens in your family. Parents feel the enormous gravity of raising children, of having the responsibility to shape and mold the souls of our kids. We want so much good for them. We long to give them everything they need. And again, we feel our limits. We can’t change hearts. We can’t protect them from everything. We are neither omniscient nor infallible.

Sometimes “the weight of the world” is simply the sheer gravity of existence, of reality. We are mortal. We live in a world where death is certain until Jesus returns. More than that, we live in a world where eternity hangs in the balance. Heaven and hell are real, and everyone we know is journeying toward one or the other, toward eternal joy or eternal misery. In his inimitable way, C.S. Lewis expressed this kind of existential burden in his sermon “The Weight of Glory”:

It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. (45)

A load so heavy that only humility can carry it — what does this mean? And how can we grow in the humility necessary to carry the vocational, familial, and existential burdens that we face?

Heavy and Growing Burden

In my own life, especially in those moments where the burden feels greatest, I find myself returning to a few sentences in Lewis’s novel Perelandra. It may be odd to find solace in a science-fiction novel, but Lewis is a master of embedding truth and comfort in stories.

The novel is the second in Lewis’s Ransom trilogy, in which the hero, Elwin Ransom, journeys to the planet Perelandra in order to stave off disaster. The novel is Lewis’s variation on the temptation narrative of Genesis 3. The Queen of Perelandra is tempted by the Unman, a human from earth who has been possessed by a demonic power. The Unman attempts to draw the Queen into disobedience to Christ (called Maleldil in the novels), appealing to her imagination to elicit a tragic act of rebellion to Maleldil’s law.

The variation on the temptation narrative is the presence of Ransom. He is on Perelandra not merely as a witness, but as a participant. He is an intrusive third party, and he feels the burden of preserving the innocence and righteousness of the Queen in the face of the Unman’s lies and deception. For days he attempts to argue with the Unman, countering his lies with truth, only to see the truth twisted to serve the Lie again. His burden grows as he sees the Queen’s imagination clouded by the lies and her resolve weakening.

Then, one night, Ransom encounters Maleldil himself and comes to realize that he is not there to argue the Unman into submission, but to engage him in physical combat — to fight him and kill the body that the devil has possessed and is his only anchor to Perelandra.

‘Be Comforted, Small One’

With the burden of Perelandra’s future resting on his middle-aged shoulders, Ransom submits. He attacks the Unman, wounding him, and then pursuing him across the oceans, until the two are pulled beneath the waves and cast ashore in a cavern beneath a mountain. In the end, Ransom kills the Unman, but only after enduring a tremendous crucible — the combat itself (in which his heel is wounded), the descent beneath the mountain, and then the long, arduous ascent out into the light.

After his journey, Ransom finds himself in a great mountain hall, speaking with two eldila, angelic powers who serve Maleldil. In the course of their conversation, Malacandra, the eldil who rules Mars, informs Ransom that “the world is born to-day.” The Queen has passed the test, and the King of Perelandra has passed his own as well. As a result, “To-day for the first time two creatures of the low worlds, two images of Maleldil that breathe and breed like the beasts, step up that step at which your parents fell, and sit in the throne of what they were meant to be” (169).

Hearing this, Ransom falls to the ground. The weight that he has borne is too much, and he is overwhelmed by the burden. And the burden not just of the responsibility but, apparently, of his own success. It is at this point that the angelic power speaks the words that have been such an encouragement to me when I feel the weight of the world.

“Be comforted,” said Malacandra. “It is no doing of yours. You are not great, though you could have prevented a thing so great that Deep Heaven sees it with amazement. Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit on you. Receive and be glad. Have no fear, lest your shoulders be bearing this world. Look! It is beneath your head and carries you.” (169)

Great Comfort of Smallness

Here is the paradox of comfort that Lewis offers. On the one hand, Ransom really did have a responsibility. The burden of fighting the Unman rested squarely upon him. It lay within his power to embrace his calling, or to shrink back. And yet, after completing his task, at the moment of triumph, the words are clear: “It is no doing of yours. . . . He lays no merit on you.”

“Resting in our smallness, we are delivered from fear, lest our shoulders should bear the weight of the world.”

The comfort offered here is the comfort of smallness. And Lewis offers it not only to Ransom, but to the reader. Ransom is not great. Neither are we. Everything we have is gift, and therefore we ought to receive and be glad. Resting in our smallness, we are delivered from fear, lest our shoulders should bear the weight of the world. This is the humility that keeps our backs from being broken by the weight of glory.

Bear Your Load with Hope

Lewis is not the only one to comfort us in our smallness. King David too offers this comfort in Psalm 131. David’s heart is not lifted up, he says; his eyes are not raised too high. His mind is not occupied by realities above his station (Psalm 131:1). In humility, David refuses to carry the weight of the world. Instead, he comforts himself in his smallness.

I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me. (Psalm 131:2)

“Bear the load that is yours with humility, like a weaned child, as one who hopes in the Lord forevermore.”

A weaned child does not attempt to bear the weight of the world. A weaned child is content in the arms of his mother. He seeks no merit; he labors under no delusions of grandeur. He simply embraces his smallness with gladness.

And so, when I feel the weight of leadership, or teaching, or pastoring, or parenting, or the sheer weight of existence pressing upon me, like David, I seek to calm and quiet my soul. In the face of lofty thoughts that are too high for me, in the teeth of turbulent passions and emotions, under the weight of reality, I say to myself,

Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit upon you. The weight of the world is not yours. It was borne by another, by one whose bloody shoulders were able to bear it — up to Golgotha, into the tomb, down to Sheol, and then out, out again into the light of resurrection. Have no fear, small one. Bear the load that is yours with humility, like a weaned child, as one who hopes in the Lord forevermore.

What’s the most unusual holiday tradition in your family? One of the more unusual ones in mine is to eat haggis for breakfast the day after Christmas. As if the culinary onslaught the day before wasn’t enough, here we are, barely minutes into the morning, ingesting offal, suet, and oats (with a fried egg on top).

It may not be a common tradition, but it is a telling one. It’s one of the few tangible reminders that my family has Scottish roots. At some point in the early twentieth century, the family made its way down from north of the border, and ever since we’ve all found ourselves being born in southeast England. It wasn’t a decision I was involved in, obviously. And given the choice, I’d probably have preferred to grow up around the rugged hills of Galloway with a lilting Scottish accent.

The fact is, much of our lives is shaped by decisions made by our forebears. The choices of previous family members have determined many details of our lives even before we’ve begun deciding anything. It’s not always comfortable to think about (we prefer to think we are masters of our own lives), but it’s incontrovertibly true. We find our lives to be, in many ways, the product of other people’s choices.

And what’s true of our physical family is also true of our spiritual family. One of my Scottish forebears made a decision, and ever since, successive generations have been born rooting for the wrong side when watching Braveheart. And one of my spiritual forebears made a decision that has meant we all were born very far from home.

Corruption in the Family Tree

The apostle Paul summarizes the defining moment this way:

Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned. (Romans 5:12)

The first part describes what happened historically: through one man disobeying God, sin entered what had been a pristine world. The second part helps us see what was happening theologically: all of us sinned. Paul is not just saying that Adam kicked off a trend, like that ice-bucket challenge a few years back, where someone started it off and eventually everyone ended up doing it. No, Paul is saying something more profound and tragic:

By the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners. (Romans 5:19)

By Adam’s act, all of us are constituted sinners. His sin made us sinners. Not just in status, but in our very nature. We’re not born neutral, and then discover sin and consequently become sinners. We’re born sinners, and that’s why we sin. We can’t do otherwise. This is the doctrine of original sin, and it often gets bad press.

Gift of Original Sin?

The doctrine of original sin goes against so much of our instinctive Western individualism. It can feel unfair. But just as my eating fried sheep’s offal every late December is tangible evidence of my family background, so too the propensity of all of us to sin is evidence of where we come from. Original sin might be a hard doctrine to accept, but it’s one of the easiest to prove. There are around 7.7 billion pieces of evidence for it walking around the planet today.

“Original sin might be a hard doctrine to accept, but it’s one of the easiest to prove.”

If, however, we deeply accept what the Bible tells us, the doctrine can transform us for the better. Most importantly, we will cherish what Christ has done for us all the more. This is Paul’s purpose in Romans 5 — to show how Adam’s actions are a photonegative of Christ’s. We were in Adam, made sinners through what he did. But by God’s grace we are now in Christ, made righteous through what he has done.

When I first became a Christian, I was barely aware of how deeply rooted sin was in my life. The more I’ve come to appreciate this, the more I’ve realized just how much Jesus achieved on the cross.

Seeing Others Through Adam

But original sin hasn’t just deepened my appreciation for the cross; it’s changed how I see other people. Properly understood, it should make us more compassionate. The very part of this we often find difficult — our helplessness through Adam — can soften our hearts to one another.

Adam’s sin makes all who succeed him sinners by nature. The presence of sin in our lives is inevitable. We can’t help it. It doesn’t mean we’re not responsible, or that there aren’t consequences for our sin, or that God isn’t right to condemn and punish it, but it shows just how helpless we all are apart from Christ. We’re sinners and can’t be otherwise. When we see another lost person sin, we’re watching them be the only thing they know how to be. It doesn’t make it less wrong, but it makes it all the more understandable. We can’t snap ourselves out of this. We can only be reborn out of it.

This shapes how we see all of humanity, even at its ugliest. It explains the world to us, showing us how even with unprecedented wealth, education, and technology, we can’t seem to get our act together as a species. We may be cleverer, healthier, and cleaner, but we’re not better. We see the ongoing pattern of sin, that inherent Adamness, repeating itself in each new generation. No human advances will get us out of this.

This doesn’t mean we don’t do what we can to encourage social reform or pursue justice. God’s common grace means there are ways we can restrain aspects of our sinfulness. We rejoice over efforts to abolish trafficking, racial discrimination, and abortion. But we do so knowing the deeper issue hasn’t been resolved: sin is native to us, and sinners are going to sin.

How Original Sin Warms a Heart

How does original sin make us more compassionate? We see opportunities in nearly every area of life. For instance, parents, this doctrine teaches us that your child’s sinfulness isn’t just the result of your imperfections as a parent. Even if, somehow, you’d made all the right parenting choices at every moment along the way, your child would still be a sinner.

“The doctrine of original sin makes the gospel all the more urgent, and all the more precious.”

I’m not a parent, but I encounter plenty of sinners. A pushy driver cuts me up in busy traffic: fine — it’s just a sinner being a sinner; no need to get upset. My wallet gets stolen: I’ll cancel my cards and make whatever arrangements need to be made, but I’ll also pray for the thief — he or she needs the new heart only Jesus can give. I meet someone with highly complex issues that has made him or her hard work to be around — I’ll do what I can to understand what’s going on under the surface, but I can feel assured that I already know what’s most deeply needed.

Every person I meet, no matter how different from me culturally or ethnically or economically — this lens of original sin helps me to understand what that person most needs deep down. However bewildering another culture may be to me, the underlying superstructure of the human heart is the same. Our birth certificates may state that we were born in London or Peshawar or Madrid or São Paulo. But spiritually, we’re all born in Adam.

The best-raised child will still be fallen. The most advanced human civilization will be no less sinful than the least. It makes the gospel all the more urgent, and all the more precious. Every human I set eyes on today (including the one in the mirror) has the same ultimate need and helplessness. By nature, we’re all descendants of Adam, whatever is on the menu for our post-Christmas breakfast.