This post is the first of a four-part series excerpted from Dr. Leah Zuidema’s article on how God’s good design of limits can help orient our teaching to promote flourishing within our callings and among those we serve. The full article was originally published in Integration, an online journal of faith and learning, on September 5, 2025.
Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going to work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.
—Romans 12:1, The Message
My career in education began in a high school English classroom, where I spent my first four years before moving on to college teaching. Travel back with me, if you will, to that first year of teaching. A year earlier, I had still been in college—where evenings meant staying up late to watch a movie, hang out with friends, and engage in the kinds of conversations that only college students have, debating life’s important questions. But one year later, in that first year of teaching, my evenings looked different: I’d work up until dinner, eat quickly, and promptly fall asleep on the couch while “reading.”
This rhythm didn’t just define that first year. It returned every time I taught a new class, which seemed to be every year, and soon, it became a habit: stacks of papers, high-energy days, the evening blur of reading, lesson planning, and grading. Teaching was invigorating and meaningful, but by the end of the week, I was usually spent.
The patterns I describe are all too common among educators. Early mornings, late nights, and weekends devoted to preparation, instruction, and evaluation—all contribute to a sense that one’s time is continuously claimed by the role.
In light of this, a passage from Romans 12 offers a compelling lens through which to reflect on the vocation of teaching. The apostle Paul’s exhortation, particularly as rendered in Eugene Peterson’s The Message, invites us to consider our daily habits:
“Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.” (Rom. 12:1, The Message)
For those who teach, everyday ordinary life is deeply intertwined with work. Teaching shapes how we spend our time, our energy, even our thoughts. So, when Paul urges us to offer our whole selves to God, is he suggesting that we eat, sleep, and breathe our work? Is that what it means to place our lives before God as an offering?
Observing those who seem to give every moment to their work makes it plain that round-the-clock work isn’t what we are called to. If we try this approach, we may find ourselves drifting into one of two extremes. It’s possible that we might become teaching superstars— committed, successful, and admired. But beneath it all, we may also carry a subtle Savior complex, tinged with a sense of martyrdom: “Without my sacrifice, students wouldn’t have learned.” Or the other extreme is also possible. We might give so much time and energy to our work that we end up depleted—shells of ourselves, going through the motions, spiritually dry, even resentful. We begin to feel enslaved to our work, rather than called to it.
Here’s the tension: We want to be effective in our teaching. But what does that really mean for those of us in Christian education? Let’s look at Romans 12 again, now from another translation:
“Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.” (Rom. 12:1, NIV)
Or to paraphrase: “Offer your whole selves to God.” Thus, when we read the full verse from the NIV, the deeper question becomes: What does it mean to offer our whole selves to God when we do so in view of God’s mercy? And perhaps more provocatively: What if effective teaching is not about doing more?
Theological reflection: Reframing effectiveness through a Biblical theology of limits and calling
It would be easy to read Romans 12 in isolation and think that we ought to focus solely on our work. But that’s not quite right. To understand what it means to offer our whole selves to God, we need to read Scripture in harmony with Scripture. When we offer our whole selves to God, we must begin with this question: Who is our Creator calling us to be?
It’s true that work is creational—something God instated before the fall. Work is part of his design for humanity, and therefore, it is very good. As we read in Genesis 1:27–28:
God created humankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them,
male and female he created them.
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply! Fill the earth and subdue it! Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that moves on the ground” (Gen. 1:27-28, NET).
Immediately after we learn that we are made in the image of God—and are to reflect him in the work he gives us—we learn something stunning about the character of God: He set down his work, and he rested.
God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all their multitude. On the sixth day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation. (Gen. 1:31-2:3, NRSV)
God rested, and he commands us, his image bearers, to rest as well. This divine rhythm of work and rest is not just a suggestion; it is built into the very structure of creation and the covenant life of God’s people. The Sabbath is not merely a pause in our productivity; it is a spiritual practice with deep theological significance. The Sabbath is not the only time we are called to rest, but it is a weekly reminder of how to order our days and our years, our lives and our hours. Sabbath is more than Sundays. It is a reminder that God calls us to rest.
Editor’s note: In the principles and passages that Zuidema will share in the next post, we will see four key dimensions of God’s call to rest: its necessity even in the busiest times, its justice in protecting others, its role in reminding us of who sanctifies us, and its function as a covenant sign of God’s love.
