Proverbs 10.4-5
“A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich. He who gathers in summer is a prudent son, but he who sleeps in harvest is a son who brings shame.”
The message in this passage is that a strong work ethic is productive, but laziness leads to poverty and shame. Work ethic is a consistent theme in Proverbs because God designed a world where work matters. Work is how the world works.
Because this is such an important topic, we are going to focus on it for the remainder of this week.
God created man and placed him in the physical world for the purpose of overseeing and managing the world that the Lord had created. This was God’s purpose for man, and we could call it The Prime Directive.
God created man in his image, which provided man with the unique attributes to fulfill The Prime Directive. The plan was for man to be a steward of planet earth on behalf of God the Creator; that is, man was to be God’s earthly representative.
Fulfilling The Prime Directive required that man understand the laws and mechanisms of the physical world. In order to manage and oversee planet earth, man must know and understand how things function in the field, the forest, the factory, the family, and the fellowship. Man must know and understand the physics, the biology, the chemistry, the botany, etc. of the world that God had created and commissioned him to oversee. To put it simply and directly, in order to fulfill The Prime Directive, man must be knowledgeable and skilled.
The work you do every day matters. God created you, redeemed you, and sends you into the world to be a worker. The Lord calls you into relationship with him that you might serve his kingdom purposes through your work.
There are four ways that our work serves God’s purposes. Our work is:
- Creative. Through our work we bring order and beauty to the world. We create. We build. We compete. We manage. We organize. We have dominion. Like the God who created us, we are creators.
- Productive. Through our work we produce things that are necessary and helpful for people and society. Through our work we feed, clothe, house, warm, protect, heal, support, entertain, communicate, transport, etc.. Work is how the world works.
- Redemptive. Through our jobs we display what the redeemed life looks like when it is “at work.” This is vitally important, because too often people think of the redeemed life as an “at church” thing. But God’s design, and the call of Christ, is primarily about the redeemed life at work. Many have forgotten that the church isn’t a building, it’s a community of people. It is the Body of Christ. We are the church. On Monday morning, the church “goes to work.” This is God’s design.
- Restorative. Through our work we are agents of renewal in a broken world. Sin and death entered the world at the Fall. Death distorts. It breaks. Christians work to reverse the effects of death. We renew and restore. We apply principles and practices and processes so that things (and people) work better and are more productive.
A strong work ethic should be a cornerstone teaching of every church, and the followers of Christ should be committed to diligent, disciplined work.
Dorothy Sayers spoke to this some years ago when she wrote: “The church would tell a drunken carpenter to stop getting drunk and come to church on Sunday. That is fine, but the very first demand that his religion makes on him is that he should make good tables. What use is his piety in church attendance if he was insulting God with bad carpentry?”
In the kingdom of God, work is a strategy that we employ in order to fulfill God’s command to have dominion as his representatives on the planet. One of the most important things we do as followers of Christ is our daily work.
Work isn’t just part of God’s plan. Work is the heart of his plan. The Lord made it crystal clear that we are to work six days, rest and restore on the seventh day, and then get back to work again.
Trust God and do the work.
