A powerful question was asked recently: How does God give us a job? This provoked quite a lot of thought. Here are some results.

1. God causes us to understand that we ought to work for a living. He does this in many ways.
1. He sends people who tell us this.
2. He causes things we want to be visible around us, things for which a job is necessary.
3. He causes things to happen to us, which motivate us to seek to be valuable to others, valuable in ways in which they will want to pay us.
4. When we choose to do evil instead of good, when we choose to be a source of harm and not a source of value, He brings punishments of all kinds, to motivate us towards the good and away from the evil.
2. God gives us little good things to do to help people.
1. He does this by sending people who ask for things, or by otherwise making us aware of His desires for others that we could fulfill.
2. Some of them would pay a little in money, some of them won't, if we do them.
3. God causes us to be aware of goodness, in both physical, spiritual, and emotional results, of these things we do.
1. He causes us to recognize how good it is when people congratulate us on doing a good service.
2. He causes us to know His good feelings about us.
3. He causes us to have good feelings ourselves.
4. As He makes us better at doing good, He gives us bigger things to do.
5. Eventually God decides that it is time to give us what we would call a "good job".
1. He gives us a thought as to something we could do to help His work in the world, which someone in the world would pay for, enough that we would call it a "good job".
2. He motivates us to acquire whatever proofs of knowledge, skills, and/or understanding which an employer He would have us work for, will ask.
3. He motivates us to offer ourselves in service to the purposes of others, in order that all might benefit. Materially, the business owner benefits first, and then us.
6. God also sometimes decides that it is time for us to learn more goodness, often because we have falsehoods in ourselves which need purging through pain and prayer. In these circumstances, He may take our job away from us, and require that we go back one or more steps, in order that we may learn to do them better the second, third, or more times. He has told us to pray to Him for help: He has told us to ask Him to change us, in order that He would make us more useful to Him.
7. In all of this, as in all things which God calls good, it is God who does the most important things, it is God who deserves all credit and glory and honor, and it is God from whom all power and ability comes. But He desires us to do some things too, as He makes possible. He will grant us our desires to the extent that we throw out our own desires and replace them with His desires. The extreme example is the crucifixion of the Lord. At first He did not prefer to be crucified. Then, when His Father made it clear that there was to be no other option, Jesus made it His desire to be killed in shameful and painful fashion, and His desires were granted. This is just as it is written; we need to desire to be crucified with Christ.

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