The four Gospels are not biographies of Jesus, written to tell us all about His life, but they are summaries of His life designed to make the case that Jesus was truly the Son of God who died for our sins and rose again. Unlike a biography, the Gospels skip over most of Jesus’ life, most notably the 30 years or so between Matthew 2:23 and 3:13. In one verse He’s a toddler and in the next He’s an adult beginning His public ministry.
What happened in the meantime? We don’t know much because the Bible doesn’t say much. Jesus most likely worked as a carpenter[1] in Nazareth most of that time. But, while we don’t know what He did, we get a sense of how He did it.
At the end of Matthew 3, Jesus goes to John the Baptist to be baptized, and when He comes up from the water, “the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.’”[2] In this revelation of the Trinity, the Father says He is “well pleased” with the Son, Jesus, and the Spirit confirms.
Note that the Father said He was “well pleased” before Jesus had done anything in His public ministry. Since God knows the future, He may have been saying He was “well pleased” with Jesus’ whole life, but those there would take it to mean His life to that point. The period of Jesus’ life that we know so little about. What Jesus did in those 30 or so years was pleasing to God the Father.
What does this mean for us? Most of us don’t have a full-time ministry, but spend most of our time doing other, sometimes mundane, things. Most, or all, of our lives are more like the 30 years missing from the Gospels than they are like Jesus’ 3 or so years of ministry. But since the Father was pleased with the first 30 years of Jesus’ life, we also can fully please God without dedicating ourselves to a full-time ministry. Lay people aren’t second-class citizens in the kingdom of heaven.
But also, if Jesus pleased God at all times, including His work as a carpenter, to be like Jesus we need to please the Father in not just our acts of ministry, but in all of life. In how we do our jobs, in how we treat our family and neighbors, in how we do everything.
If we want our Lord to say to us “Well done, good and faithful servant,”[3] we must follow Colossians 3:23 – “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.” All of our activities can please the Father, even the most mundane things.
Driving Toward the Morning Sun 