Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / June 28, 2020 | [re]START - Restart Work

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June 28, 2020 | [re]START - Restart Work · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hi everybody! How you doing?
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: So as you can tell, we're in this cool restart series this summer.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: And um we were.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: And this morning, our topic is and number four is restart work.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so I decided to give credit where credit is due for this message.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh oftentimes for messages that I've preached on the topic before I try to read a new book or something previous week.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: This turns out to be, this book I read this week is my book of the year so far, first half of the year.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: If you're looking for a terrific book, Tim Keller always writes good books.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh to my surprise, this is my favorite book of his that I've read, so I recommend every good endeavor.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think uh wrote that got on the website uh something like this, but I don't want to go back to work.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Be honest now.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that how you feel?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: At first, working from home was so weird, right?
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Then it became not that bad.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: And finally it became this is so convenient, I never want to get back.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when the boss called to say, y'all get back here right now.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: And some of you have serious mixed feelings about that.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Some of you have been back to work for maybe a month, but either way, I have a message, an email, a text message actually from God to you this morning from the book of Second Thessks.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to open up to Second Thessalonians, feel free to do that.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'll go ahead as you're doing that.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: And loads of articles.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this one from this last week, coronavirus.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Do I have to go back to work after lockdown?
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because one of the concerns we have about going back to work, of course, is the virus.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not just uh the convenience and ease of working at home, but uh we're a little nervous as everybody says it's time for America's Main Street to go back to work and so forth.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: So uh, and the reason I picked the text of all of the texts, the half a dozen texts I could have picked in the Bible, good texts about work and the value of work and purpose of work, I picked uh Thessalonians because here you had a church of people, you had a bunch of people in this church who were saying the same thing as you hear today.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to go back to work.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the Apostle Paul primarily writes his letter to the church at Thessalonica.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's called today Thessaloniki, it's the capital of northern Greece, it's the first place I go to.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: We go to, those of you who've gone with me have gone to when we take our Greece tour, beautiful city, uh city of over a million today, back then much smaller.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: But uh these people in what is today a real business city were saying, I don't want to go back to work, some of these Christians, and the reason they were saying it was, if you read the book, they were saying, it's the end of the world.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Somebody said the rapture's already happened.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, if the raptures already happened, I mean, why go to work if the world is ending?
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna sit at home and prepare for the second coming, for the return of the Lord.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: And since we're the spiritual ones, would the rest of you bring over some meals to us, you know, while we're being spiritual?
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why in this book you have this very famous text, the one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's our text, Second Thessalonians 3, 6 through 15.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Umbarrassing story, but when I was a teenager, I decided not to go back to work.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Meaning I decided not to do chores in the morning.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: So the typical thing at our home uh on the outskirts of Portland was I lived in a small farm, and because we had so many kids and we had a really tiny home, uh there was a shed out uh connected to the garage, and my brother Steve and I slept in that shed.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: And we had beds and everything, and uh and a wood stove.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we were fine.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean, so we slept out there, and in the morning about 6:30, my dad would leave the house if we were awake, which we almost never were.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: He could hear the door shut, uh um, and then you could hear the buckets clanging or whatever, the milk buckets as he was walking out, and and the trail to the barn led right by our shed where there was a window, which is just merely feet away from where I was huddled up under 12 blankets, and my dad would always step over, and he had knock on the window, and he'd said, uh and he said, Time to go, time to get up.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I always did that, but you know what happens when you're a teenager, you should get a whole lot smarter than your dad, and you realize that he's using you and you're just a slave, and this is totally unfair, you know.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: So um so I decided one morning to just roll over and catch some more Z.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: And because I didn't get up, my brother Steve, who's a year and a half younger, he didn't get up.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so my dad milked the cows and fed the chickens and uh gave grass to the bunny rabbits and collected the eggs, and we only milked the goats at at night, so um, so you know, and he gave milk to the calves and whatever else he had to do, you know, because we weren't out there.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: So we wake up and we go in and the milk's already in the house, and we were heading for the stove to get our mom always made oatmeal every day.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And dad said, no, not this morning.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: No, no oatmeal.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's okay for Steve.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Steve didn't care about breakfast anyway, but I breakfast is my favorite meal, always has been, always will be.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I missed that, but you know, the sleep was really worth it, and so he did the same thing the next day and the next day.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the problem is you never won contests like that against my dad.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't beat us, he didn't do anything like that, but then you know, then again he started there were some meals we were missing, and then he started dipping into my piggy bank.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: He said, Well, basically you're hiring me now, and so I'll just take a quarter.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: A quarter back then was huge money, especially if you didn't have a job, which I didn't as a freshman in high school.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: So started taking a quarter out, then I went down to zero after several weeks.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, though I wish I would like to say that I learned the lessons of the glory of work and the honor and integrity of work from this chapter, that I came back to do chores for noble reasons.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: I did not.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: I did not.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: I came back to work so that I wouldn't go in debt uh to my dad and so that I could get oatmeal again.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: So um, that was an embarrassing story, but that's my story of how uh I resisted going to work.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: And this morning I want to share with you uh what we learned, six lessons we learned from 2 Thessalonians 3, 6 through 15 about work.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now the text goes, I'll just read it really quickly, if you have it in front of you, and then I'll analyze it really quickly, and then I'll give you the lessons as quickly as I can.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it goes like this.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now we command you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, notice all three uh the names, Lord Jesus Christ, not very common, to keep away, so this is the authority, figure is Christ, and here comes the command.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is a very strong word in the New Testament, often used of a general to his troops, things like that.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: We command you, brothers and sisters, these are Christians, right?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the name of our Lord, to keep away from every brother or sister who's idle and doesn't live according to the tradition received from us, which he's gonna tell us that is in four verses.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: So he says, in other words, don't hang with, don't buddy up with people who are unwilling to work, okay?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: For you yourselves know how you should imitate us.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: So we're the example.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: We were not idle among you, we did not eat anyone's food free of charge.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, we labored and toiled, working night and day, so that we would not be a burden to any of you.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: And notice they did it not with some, you know, IT job or whatever.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: They did it with their hands.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: They did it with uh with making tents.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: So let's not look down on people who use their hands to make a living.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that we don't have the right to support, but we did it to make ourselves an example to you so that you would imitate us.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm, didn't he say that before?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, when we were with you, this is what we commanded you.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: This was the tradition.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: If anyone isn't willing to work, he shouldn't eat.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: For we hear that there are some among you who are idle.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Said that before, too.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: They are not busy, but busy bodies.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: That was clever.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now we command and exhort such people by the Lord Jesus Christ, again, all three words, to work quietly and provide for themselves.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: But as for you, brothers and sisters, don't grow weary in doing good.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Second Thess 3, verses 6 through 15.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: If anyone doesn't obey our instruction, take note of that person, don't associate with him, said that before, too, so that he may be ashamed, yet don't consider him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: All right?
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: So he's made it really clear, and I want to tell you the reason it feels very repetitive is this is one of those special passages that it's clear Paul worked on for a while to make it really beautiful.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's very it's a literary beauty, it's called in in Greek study a chiasm.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: That means it's sort of like a swan on a water where the first half of the passage is then reflected backwards in the second half, verse six, reflected in verses 10 through 15, verses 7 through 9 is in the middle.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Let me show you what I mean.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: In verse 6, we have the authority figure, the Lord Jesus Christ.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: We have his command, work, and don't hang around with non-workers.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of the passage, we have the authority figure, the Lord Jesus Christ says, work and don't hang around with non-workers.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: The next section, 6c.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is we got unwilling to workers, people who are unwilling to work.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's also verse 11.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: 6D.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: The rule is you don't work, you don't eat.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: And he repeats that in verse 10.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: In verse 7 through 9, we're setting an example.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: We'd like you to imitate us.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now that's your seminary moment this morning, all right?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: It just shows you that the Bible is not some slapdash book.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: It is carefully written.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was thoughtfully written by terrific writers, by intelligent people that has a message.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the message is please follow my example.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Work is important.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: All right?
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just summarize that here.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: The verses I put them under, and so I've already done this.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Don't hang with non-workers, the problem, the unwilling to workers.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: So don't work, don't eat.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the example, Paul and his team.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: Good, I just saved a lot of time.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: So now let me get to the six lessons.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: All right, because this is what really, really galvanizes me.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: And the first two lessons we learn from this passage, right, is number one, work is a good thing, and number two, but we grow weary of it.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: That comes from verse 13.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: For we hear there are some who are idle.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: As for you, brothers and sisters, do not grow weary in doing good.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: One of the major points of the Bible about work that starts at the very beginning of the Bible, is that work is a good thing, right?
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Work is a good thing.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: From the very beginning, you see who working in the Bible?
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: G-O-D God, right?
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: He says twice, I am working, I am laboring, and then every single day he steps back, takes a look at what he's done, and he says, even if I say so myself, that there is good work.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: He takes delight in it.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then he comes to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1, 1st chapter 28, and the first thing he ever says to them is, I want you to work with me.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to join me.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: I work, you join me, rule over and subdue the earth.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now the earth was not something that you needed to spank down or pave over at that time.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: It was a paradise.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: So what he seems to mean is be a gardener.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: You need to cultivate it, you need to till it.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: And listen very carefully.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: There was no golden age of leisure followed by work after the fall.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's not true.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Even in paradise, God always intended there be work, and you and I will work in the future paradise, in the new heavens and earth.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: God will have jobs for us.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because work is a good thing.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Work is part of who we are.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's as innate to us as eating, as sex, as leisure, as as prayer, as anything else.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, it's so natural and so normal for you to work, and it is such a God thing because God works, and God says, I'd like you to partner with me in this whole process of work, that it's it's really crazy for us to sometimes hear ourselves saying that work is, quote, a necessary evil.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes we find ourselves thinking of it like the ancient Greeks did.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: It is a demeaning necessity.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: We have to do it, but none of the other ancient religions, none of the other ancient peoples considered work a good thing.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: None of them have a had a God who created the earth by working.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: None of them.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: They all were in leisure, they all, the earth, the universe came out of a huge conflict with other gods or something.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: The Bible's utterly unique in that it says God created this beautiful garden that we have, this whole universe, this ordered thing, and he did it by working, then called us to work because work is a glorious and a good and a fulfilling thing.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I didn't realize that when I rolled over in my bed.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: I never once thought that going to work was a good thing.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now, later on in life, as every time I would go home 10 or 20 years after that, after I was working here, I would walk into the living room where my dad was.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: To be honest, there was a lot of guilt there because of that summer and of other times where I was reluctant to work.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd say, Dad, what do you need done around the house?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: And even when he was old, even when he was in his mid-80s, when he could hardly work, I said, Is there something you'd like to do outside that I could help you with?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: And he grinned and he had a wood chipper, and he and so we slowly walked out so that he could put some wood in the wood chipper, because I had realized by then that work was a good thing, it was a fulfilling thing, it wasn't something that was demeaning or to be avoided, it was a God thing.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: And also I felt a little guilty.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: So so uh work is a good thing, work's a glorious thing, and and and we used to know that in our country, right?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh do you remember this movie?
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work, we go.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: You don't, the seven dwarves, you you don't remember that.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, so this does have uh a resonance in the in the ancient myth of our of our society.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I like what somebody said the privilege to work is a gift, the power to work is a blessing, the love of work is success.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: So let's change our minds about work.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: And when people imply that the only reason for work is one, to get an income, and two, to get to the weekend where we can spend the money to go on cruises or have leisure.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Remind yourself that that's not a Christian or a biblical view of work.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: A biblical view of work.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, God thinks work is so special special that he didn't say work one day and then rest six.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: He believes we can do a lot of work.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so he says, work six days and rest one.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's God's priority.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: Rest is vital, rest is important, leisure is important, leisure is just sitting back and adoring what God has done, but work is fabulous.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the great writer, she writes murder mysteries, novels, Christian writer Dorothy Sayers put it this way in her book on work.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: The Christian understanding of work is you do not work to live.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: You live to work.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's the medium in which you offer yourself to God.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the second problem balances it off.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is we grow weary of work, says verse 13.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason we grow, we have a number of reasons we grow weary of work.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes our work seems utterly pointless.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Oftentimes it seems fruitless.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: It does not seem to get anything done.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: We have the lack, we find we have the lack of ability.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: We start our work life when we're young, when we're, even before we're a teenager, sometimes we have this dream that we're gonna change the world.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: We have this dream that in our work we're gonna shape things, we're gonna make the best movie ever, we're gonna craft the best table ever, we're gonna, if we're a city planner, we're gonna, we're gonna plan the best city ever, if an architect, we're gonna, and we have these dreams, and then we find out to our frustration as we go through life, and all of you know exactly what I mean, if you're over 40 years old, you find yourself frustrated.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: You find that you were unable to accomplish your dream.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: You didn't have the intellect, you didn't have the opportunity, you didn't have the chance.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: You you you this high goal that you have you found you couldn't accomplish.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: Or perhaps there was a conflict that you were in a business, you were in a workplace, and the boss just didn't like you.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, there that this was the place where you had an opportunity, but somehow you were undercut, or some other bad circumstances, there was an economic crash in the country, or COVID came along, or whatever.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: And as a result, our hopes and our dreams they crumble, and we find ourselves like an Ecclesiastes going, it's vanity, all is vanity.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we find ourselves growing very tired of work, and that's when we tend to come out with you know things like, I hate work, I don't want to go into work anymore.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Some people, that's when they quit work.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: There's a great story about this that I'll try to make quick, but uh one of my favorite, okay, my favorite author, as you know, is uh is a Britisher uh named J.R.R.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Tolkien.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: So he lived in the early part of the 20th century, he fought in the First World War, and and he was a professor, uh uh English professor at at Oxford.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: And um, but he had this vision uh in the 1920s.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: He's he thought he he had his dream of creating a whole new world that had never been done before.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: What he wanted to do, he he had this vision of creating this ancient, this story, which would be the first great English uh mythological tale.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and uh he was an expert in Beowulf, but he thought something more modern.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so he created in his mind this whole world called Middle Earth, and he decided he needed to do it right.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: So he he worked for years to create back histories of characters and so forth, and and so he had it, so he had the geography and he had back history, but he wanted to learn.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: He created entire languages so that the elves and the dwarves would have different languages and so forth, and he worked on this and worked on this.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: And in 1930, he came out with, he started working on The Hobbit.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Took him several years, about four years to finish, came out with this little book, which is really book one of four books of the Lord of the Rings.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it's very simple, sort of a children's tale.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: But that was just book one, and then he began moving into the tale that we know of, the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And he labored on that and found himself at times throwing away everything he had done and starting over, because unfortunately, he was a perfectionist and he found this work more and more frustrating, and he was scared to death as the Second World War came along, that either he would not survive that war or that the war would would ruin everything, and that he would never finish this project.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: And and he writes, he wrote in his diary and so forth, and told one of his best friends whose name was C.S.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis, that he was he was just terrified.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: He said it was a numbing, the numbing possibility that I will never, ever finish my life's work and my life's dream.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: And uh as this was going on, and he felt he felt as though his mind sometimes wasn't moving him forward, and he had way too far to go, and he he despaired of it, and that was a dreadful and numbing thought.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: There was a tree right down the street that his neighbor lopped down, cut down to the ground, and and he uh began thinking of this work of his as his internal tree, which soon uh at his death would in a sense be lopped down because he'd run out of mental energy and invention, and he and and and he thought of uh so so overnight, worried about this, I'll move the story along.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: He he came up with a story, and when a magazine wrote him the next week asking if he had any stories, he sent it in with a little with a little uh title called Leaf by Nigel.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: Nigel was an artist in his story, an artist who had a dream.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: A dream of creating, of painting a beautiful tree with beautiful leaves.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: And beyond that tree would be a bright kingdom of water and mountains and everything.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: But the whole thing was the tree and Niggle, uh, but the problem is his name was Niggle.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: Niggle means to uh to sort of not do work, you're sort of unproductive in your work if you if you niggle around.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: So the the this was significant because Tolkien felt that he was a little bit of a niggler.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: He was he kept throwing things away, he was a perfectionist.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: And in this story, uh in this story, uh Nigel, who was Tolkien himself, knew uh had this flaw of being a perfectionist, and he couldn't get to the tree itself.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: He just kept focusing on one leaf.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: And he kept making that leaf better and better and fussing over that one leaf.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: And in the story, Leaf by Nigel, Tolkien writes that Nigel knew that he had a long journey to make, and he didn't want to go on that journey.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, the journey scared him, and that journey turns out to be the journey of death.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that necessary long journey was coming, and he was stuck on this leaf, and he was so frustrated with his work and with his career, the fact that his dreams were not coming true.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: He knew he had to die, Nigel did, but he he decided I have to get this one canvas done.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: The canvas that filled a whole wall of his house, he had to have a ladder up to work on even this one leaf.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason uh that he couldn't get it done, though, is again, he was too perfectionist.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: He was just working on this one leaf.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: But the other reason was that when anybody knocked at the door and asked him to help for any reason, he would always leave and do that caring work of charity.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden there comes a knock on the door, and it turns out it's time to take his long journey, that is death.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: And when he realizes he has to go, and he has only finished one leaf, he bursts into tears.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: Oh dear, said Niggle, beginning to weep, and it's not even finished.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: And after his departure, after his death, the people who bought his house noted that on his crumbling canvas only one beautiful leaf was left.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so they put it in the town museum and they labeled it Leaf by Niggle, where very few people saw it.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that for Tolkien is a picture of the way you and I live, with high dreams but frustration, which stops us and causes us to die, oftentimes unhappy.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'll finish the story later.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: So uh points 3, 4, 5, and 6 turn this whole account because they tell us there are four great reasons to work.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: Number three is we work to provide for our legitimate needs.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: If anyone isn't willing to work, he shouldn't eat.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: And this is supposed to remind us of God's command after the fall to Adam and Eve, saying, you're gonna have to sweat from now on to eat.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: But Proverbs promises, if you do sweat, I will provide for you.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: So you and I go to work to provide for our legitimate needs.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the most important reason why we work.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: But it is a reason why we work.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Calvin Miller, I think uh the old writer liked to tell the story of a king who called together all his wise men, and he asked them to come up with a compendium, all the wisdom that had ever been uh been you know been invented.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: And they came back after 12 years with 12 volumes.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, That's too much, too much.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to read that much.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: Come back with less.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: And they kept coming back, and he kept saying, I want less, I want it shorter.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: And they finally came back with one line, and their one line of the compendium of all the world's wisdom over all of history was there's no free lunch.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: And and that is uh supposed to be funny, but not very funny.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of those preacher jokes, but but Calvin Miller told it, and the point is that we do go to work to provide for our legitimate needs.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now, number four, though, more importantly, we work for the Lord Jesus Christ.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: Notice, notice the rare use of all three names here, Lord Jesus Christ, because he's the commander-in-chief of the armies, he's our authority figure, he is the one that we report to, and if he says you're getting out of line, you're getting out of rank, by not working, you are uh you are going AWOL, then we need to listen to that, and we need to realize that we are not only working with God as a gardener in God's garden, right?
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: But also we have a manager, we have a boss.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: Our true boss is not the one that we go report to every week.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: Our true boss is the Lord Jesus Christ.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: Crawford Long, if you've been to the US Capitol, you know, there's a uh sort of a rotunda where every state gets two statues, and one of the two statues uh for Georgia really just uh just shocked me to see this, so that I took a photograph of it.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Crawford Long is the guy, the MD who in the early 1800s invented ether.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you had surgery done, like your tonsils taken out in the 1950s, like I did, you got ether.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: They put this thing over your head and you passed out immediately.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he invented that, but he said, My profession is to me a ministry from God.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that's the point here.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: You work for the Lord Jesus Christ, the job he's given you does not matter whether it's an intellectual job or a job with your hands, because remember just a moment, remember that in the garden, what God did is work with his hands to create Adam and Eve, right?
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: Dug in the dirt.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: And when God came to earth in the incarnation, Jesus came as a what?
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: As a carpenter.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: And when Paul worked, Paul worked as a tent maker.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: We have this awful idea that somehow professional jobs are more important than, let's say, you know, sweeping jobs, or the guy, or the people who every week clean this church, or whatever else.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: This idea that somehow there are sacred jobs versus secular jobs, or professional jobs versus unprofessional jobs, or or higher jobs in God's kingdom is not true.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's it goes against Calvin, it goes against Luther, it goes against the Bible.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so, whatever your profession is, it's a ministry from God.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: And in Exodus chapter 31, God says, I have picked out Bezalel and Oholiah to create the tabernacle.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: I've given them a spirit from God, the spirit of wisdom, so that they can go and cut down a tree and they can fashion it into boards and then they can put gold on it and they can build a tabernacle.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, no matter what job you have, it's a ministry from God.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: Number five of six, we work for our own selves in a way.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: We work for our own integrity.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: For we read they're not busy, but busybodies.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: The point of this is that you you create a better person in yourself when you work.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: You create character for yourself and and people who don't work, and you see it, those those of us who have non-workers, unwilling to workers in our family and our friends, and all of us do, right?
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: Who have taken the opportunity with our well-developed uh government care system nowadays to just stay home or not work.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: And you see a couple of things.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: You see that they're not happy people because work is a good thing, and you also see that um that their character gets uh gets into stasis.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't develop the way it could if these, and I'm talking about unwilling to workers, not unable to workers, but unwilling to workers if they don't work and deliberately stay home.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh, the problem is that they don't develop character.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I um I remember going home to Oregon one time, grabbing the newspaper and saying a horrible story about a Christian man uh named DeWitt.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh de uh uh DeWitt Finley, age 54, who had just died.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: Or actually his body had just been found.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: DeWitt Finley had been a fundraiser for World Vision, right?
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: And he traveled the West Coast and he raised money for World Vision, and lately he had also been working for a camping company or something selling campers.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the previous fall, he had decided, as he was driving back to Grants Pass, Southern Oregon, he decided to cut off the Coast Highway and go through the Siskiyou National Forest out there through a back road that was not often taken.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: But he liked to fish and he did some other things.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: So he took this back road through.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: There was a snowfall, he got stuck in his pickup.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: And and apparently, from everything that could be told, he never left his pickup.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: He waited and waited and waited on God and on someone else.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: And he began writing notes in his pickup.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: One of the notes said, I am not in control, God's in under control, I'm just waiting on him, God's will be done.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: And he wrote letters to friends, he wrote letters to family.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the next spring, a couple of teenagers who got their car stuck came across his pickup truck and found as they studied, looked at his body, he'd been inside the cab of that truck for nine weeks, trusting God.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: When if he had gotten out of the cab and simply walked back around the corner a couple of hundred yards, he would have been on drive pavement, could have walked the 16 miles if nobody even showed up back to the town.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: Why didn't he get out of the cab?
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, my I picture, I picture, you know, the angel leaning over heaven and going, Can you imagine that?
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: And one angel going, What's his name?
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: The other one says, uh D Wit.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the guy says, I can name, I can give him a better name than that, no wit, or something.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: And can you imagine him going to heaven and coming to God and going, I trusted you, I waited on you, why didn't you deliver me?
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: And God's saying, What?
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know, don't give me that stuff.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: And there's there's a kind of an unwilling to act, a passivity that we can sometimes think is super spiritual when it's not.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: All right?
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: Work for our own integrity.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: And and um, and all I'm saying here is in this text the word is discipline unruly.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: Discipline is Christian, laziness isn't.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: Finally, we work for others.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: This is this is the heart of the passage, seven through nine.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: He says we weren't idle, we didn't eat anyone's food, we labored and toiled so that we wouldn't be a burden to any of you.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is so huge.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because the question, so so I have the opportunity, as many of you do, to talk to people who are making decisions, talented young men and young women who are trying to decide whether to do this job or that job.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes the jobs are very different.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes they're not in college yet, and they're asking, should I go to Columbia University or should I go to John Brown or whatever?
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: And oftentimes the answer to that question, which has been fueled by the media and by everything they've heard, is that your goal in life must be to be high as high as you possibly can in income and in glory.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, you should always choose the job that will pay you the most money.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's why, what, 70, 80 percent of Ivy League graduates go into the, you know, Wall Street type of investment and banking business because they're paid an insane amount of money in their very first year out of school.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then 10 or 20 years later, finding themselves, some of them dissatisfied, they leave and they go do something that's meaningful.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the decision you have to make.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: How can I make the most money versus how can I be of greatest service to other people?
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's the question you and I need to ask ourselves because that's why Paul gave up so many opportunities to work night and day so that he could serve other people.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: What is it that you can do that will serve the most people for the glory of God in a frustrating world where work sometimes seems to be pointless and fruitless and it's oftentimes frustrating?
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, first of all, you say, I need to realize that work is a good thing in and of itself, and it helps my character, it grows me and it serves the Lord Christ, and I'm partnering with God in this thing.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: And my goal is to serve other people.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: My goal is always to look outward, and we've discovered the glory of that again, the joy of that during the lockdown.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: Am I right?
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: Haven't you found that in your neighborhood, as in mine, people are going around saying, Do you need some food?
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to the store.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: Can I help you out?
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_00: Can I save you a trip?
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's been so much fun to do that.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: We've gotten so many calls at our place from people saying, Well, we're going to help out this family.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: You want to join us, or we're going to we're going to take some furniture over here, or food.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a wonderful thing.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure it's happened to you.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: And part of that fits in with the fact that the work that most glorifies God is work that's done for other people.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: So back to the story to close.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: So uh the story doesn't end with Nigel's death.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: According to the story, Nigel gets on a train and he's going toward the uh the outskirts, he he, and the train lets him off on the outskirts of the uh heavenly kingdom.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: And as he gets off the train and he begins to walk into the uh part of the of the kingdom, all of a sudden he looks and there is his tree.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he's astounded.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: Before him stood the tree, his tree finished.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: He raises up his hands and he says, It's a gift.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: See, what Tolkien was doing was preaching to himself as well as to all of us in this little story, saying that though your work seems utterly frustrating and you never get it finished, and you never achieve in all of your life what you really hope to achieve, none of us do.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, one of my hero who used to preach here anytime I could get him, hadn't Robinson, one of the ten great preachers in America, according to Time Magazine, as he was dying, told his daughter, How I wish I would have done something meaningful in life.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because most of us, no matter how famous or how matters, no matter how successful you are, no matter what you do in life, and everybody else thinks that you know you're amazing, you feel, you're going to feel dissatisfied.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: And yet the Bible says, you know what?
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: Everything you have done, that you've done for me, that you've done to serve others, all of your noble work, I want to tell you, says Paul, your labor is not in vain.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the Lord, there really is a tree.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: All of those dreams that you've had that drove you into a job that you've sometimes delighted in, sometimes not delighted in, those things will come to fruition in the paradise in the future where you and I will continue to work for the glory of God and for other people.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_00: But there's really a tree that will reflect all you've done, no matter how meaningless it has seemed in your life, how frustrating it may seem right now, how pointless it may seem.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: You may want to just roll over and stay at home, but God says, don't do that.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: Find a job.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's better if you can find a job that fulfills your gifts in a wonderful way, but if you can't, if it's a tedious job that's utterly repetitious, do it for me.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_00: Partnering with my Father God in gardening, in culture creating.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: Serve me as your general, as your commander.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: Do it for others, because I'm telling you, it's not in vain.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: One day you'll get to the kingdom and your tree will be there.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: Bow your head with me in a word of prayer.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, thank you for the joy and the glory of work.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: We thank you for putting us on this earth and then telling us that one of the ways that we are the happiest is when we have work.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: We are even more happy when we work with you and for you and for others.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: Bless us, Heavenly Father, as we restart this part of our life in Jesus' name.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for coming.