Garden City by John Mark Comer
Week 5: Chapter 4 — East of Eden
Read Chapter 4 of Garden City. Primary Scripture: Genesis 3.
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The world as God designed it didn't last — and the fall of Genesis 3 has left its fingerprints on everything, including our work. This week, Comer helps us name the ways sin has twisted what was meant to be a joy into something frustrating, toilsome, and even idolatrous.
Discussion Questions
6 questions1.Comer describes the fall not just as a moral failure but as a vocational failure — Adam and Eve abandoned their calling to rule and protect the garden by failing to guard it against the serpent. Does that framing change how you understand the gravity of what happened? Why or why not?
2.After the fall, God's words to Adam in Genesis 3:17–19 introduce 'painful toil' into work — thorns and thistles, sweat and futility. Comer distinguishes between work itself (good, pre-fall) and the painful toil that now accompanies it (a consequence of sin). How do you experience that distinction in your own work life?
3.Comer identifies two primary ways sin distorts our relationship to work: we either underwork (laziness, passivity, escapism) or we overwork (workaholism, identity-through-achievement, the restless pursuit of significance). Which of these two distortions do you most recognize in yourself?
a.What does your specific version of that distortion look like on a typical week?
b.What do you think is the deeper fear or longing that drives it?
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