Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

We begin today a new sermon series with a title that I got off the internet. It’s not my making, but reworking work. I like that. Revisioning work might be a name that I would have come up with, but then it kind of makes it all intellectual. So, reworking work, I think, is a good way to think of this. And so, I’ll begin today and then next week I’ll be out of the pulpit for a week and when I come back, then we’ll continue with this new series on work and today we’ll begin by looking at Exodus 20:9-11 which is the fourth commandment.

So please stand and our consideration today is God’s work in ours. Exodus 20:9-11: “Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work. You nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for bringing us again to this text quite familiar to us. Bless us, Lord God, with insights from it and the other texts we’ll look at to help us go into the work week tomorrow with new eyes, so to speak, or eyes that are refreshed with a knowledge of your work and ours. In Jesus name we pray. Amen. Please be seated.

All right, I’m going to make seven fairly simple, quick, obvious points, and that’s all we’re going to do. But I think that within the context of these seven points, really two things is what I hope to come out, most dramatically or not dramatically, but profoundly. I think profound means under the foundations. So under the foundations of our consideration of our work week, okay, are these two truths.

And the two truths are that our work is significant and essential to who we are. We’re made to work. And then my second point will be that work has eternal value. And I think if we go into our tasks tomorrow, our work week tomorrow with those two truths solidly in place, that we’re not working, you know, so we can stop working when we retire or we can do this or that or we’re not working just because we hate it and it’s just a job.

If we can get rid of those thoughts as we go to our work week tomorrow morning, then I’ll be a happy man. And if we can add on to that whatever we do during the day has eternal significance, then I’ll be even happier. So those are the two kind of major points. And along the way, we’re going to make seven kind of obvious points, but points that are important nonetheless.

Now, you know, we have grandkids in our house and you know, I thought, you know, this is so significant and I’ve done such a crummy job of sort of teaching them the truths that we’ll begin to talk about today. Children, you know, a lot of your lives are spent doing tasks and work. Some you get paid for, some you don’t. And your parents assign that to you. Hopefully, after today’s sermon, when you do your task or chore tomorrow or sometime this week, maybe the Holy Spirit will bring some of these texts to mind and help you realize the significance of what you’re going to do.

You know, I don’t know if this is really appropriate, but you know, I was thinking, do you like to play God? Well, there’s a proper way to play God. And what I mean by that is we’ll see, and we’ve already seen in this one text that our work is connected to God’s work. So, when we’re out there mowing the lawn or doing the dishes or whatever it is or going to our jobs, whatever we do, and children, all your chores and tasks, you are really being full imagebearers of God at that point. You’re acting like God in a proper sense, not in a sinful way.

And I think that, you know, if we keep that thought tethered to what we do in labor, it is transformative. I think it’s transformative. So let’s begin. The first point I want to make is that God is a worker. A significant point. Obvious. But our text just told us that in six days he made and connected to that and we’re supposed to do all our work and labor in six days because God worked for six days. So obvious from the text and what it’s telling us is God is a worker.

Now this is seen clearly also in the creation account in Genesis 2:1-3 we read this: “Thus the heavens and the earth and all the host of them were finished and on the seventh day God ended his work. That’s the normal word for work in the Bible. And God rested from his work which he had done. And he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. And then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it because in it he rested from all his work which God had created and made.”

I don’t know if that’s three or four times direct reference to the word work. God is a worker, right? The creation account tells us more than just God spoke and everything was made boom like that. It has a series of actions that God is engaging in. God worked and he worked and he worked some more. So in the creation week, we have an image of God. And one of the first things the Bible wants us to know about God is not just some abstract truth. He’s the creator. That’s significant and very important. But as we read the opening pages of the Bible, the first thing we learn is God is a worker.

Now that is significant as we’ll try to draw out in today’s sermon. God is a worker. It’s significant to understand that what reality is, right? The Bible tells us what reality is. And we have various images of God and various false religions have images of God, static, not working. But the Bible tells us the reality is that God is a worker. And he does some very laborlike work in creating the world, right? He forms it, he fills it, he ites it. You know he’s very much like a gardener and then man made in the image of God is specifically a gardener to carry on that task.

So what we have at the beginning of the creation account here is that we worship a God who works. He plants things. He waters things. He separates things, right? When he forms me, separates things in the creation work. He fills them. He plants them, right? He’s a fish farmer. He’s an agricultural farmer. He creates. He works and puts in crops, grows the crops up, provides a watering system for them, lays out the lines of the watering system. You can think of it that way, but he causes a mist to come up, right? We know that. So, he’s doing all these tasks and my point is a simple one here.

We read this stuff and somehow we end up putting it off into some abstract kind of myth or something truth. We call it truth, but we don’t see the significance of it for our world and for our lives and for who God is. And so reworking work begins by making sure we know who this God is, whose word we are reading. And what we find, you know, in the very opening pages of the scriptures is the revelation that God is a worker. We are a result of God’s work. We’re the work he delighted in. He took clay and he fashioned it, right? I mean, he’s a potter, so to speak. He forms us out of the earth clay. And then women are formed from the side of men and he forms that into a woman.

So God is, you know, very concretely a worker. He creates, not only does he create things, but as we’ve just sung, he provides for those things. And in scripture, this is the doctrine of providence, right? We believe in God’s providence. Providence just is a little longer term for providing. God’s a provider. And so his work, his creative work, you know, ends on the seventh day. But Jesus told us in John’s gospel that my father is working and I work. That God can remain. So it isn’t that God was a worker until the creation was made and now he’s no longer a worker. He just sits around. No, the psalm we just read and sang tells us that God continues to work in the present tense. He’s doing all these things, his acts of providence, as we just read.

He sends the springs into the valleys. They flow among the hills. He puts out an irrigation system, so to speak. A lot more sophisticated than ours, but that’s what he does. He sends the rain. He’s directly involved in it. Verse 10 of the psalm he just sang says they give drink to every beast of the field. So, not only is he watering the earth, he’s giving water to the animals that he’s created. He’s providing drink. He’s providing vegetation. He’s being a farmer, so to speak, which involves lots of different tasks.

The wild donkeys quench their thirst. By them the birds of the heavens have their home. They sing among the branches. So God provides a home for the birds. He’s a homebuilder. Okay? And it’s not the way we quite the way we do it, but that’s what he is. He’s a home builder as well. These are all in the present tense. These declarations in Psalm 104. Not that he did this once. He continues to do it. He’s a worker.

He waters the hills from his upper chambers. The earth is satisfied with the fruit of your works. You see, when we read psalms like this, we’re not supposed to abstract it out and well, you know, it’s all just an image or a symbol. Well, the symbol means anything. It means he wants us to think concretely about the God that we serve. That he is a worker who created things through work and he sustains things through work. He does these things. Okay? He’s actively involved.

Now, in a couple of weeks, we’re going to talk about how in many ways he’s using you to do these things. Do you have a cat at home that you give water to? Right? Do you have pets? Do you make birdhouses? Well, you’re imaging God in this. You see, this is what he does. And he and we are being trained to do this work like our dad does the work. But he remains a worker. And he’s very much involved in the so-called acts of providence.

He causes the grass to grow for the cattle. So, you know, he’s feeding the cattle by causing grass to grow, vegetation for the service of man that he may bring forth food from the earth. So, the fact that we bring forth food is a result of God’s work that enables us to do it. Okay? And now man is brought into this picture, right? Man has a job. Man has a task. The animals will be fruitful or not be fruitful. The animals multiply, right? But they don’t have a specific task that resembles God’s task. We do. And in this psalm, it brings us into it.

Then he provides vegetation for the service of man that they or mankind may bring forth food from the earth. So now God brings forth food for the animals and we bring forth food. You see work and work. Our work is founded in God’s work. And then it goes on to say, “And wine that makes glad the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread which strengthens man’s heart.” Well, here we are, right? This is sacramental language we know. But and so it ties this Lord’s table to these great truths that God is a worker and he is sustaining us as well and he does work in the world and we’re to do work.

The trees of the Lord are full of sap. The cedars of Lebanon which he planted, he planted these trees. When you read these psalms, think about it. God is working. God is a worker. We’re told that right off the bat in the Bible. And then we’re told in this psalm in many places that God works. He continues to work. Well, we just read this, but that we just read this psalm and sang it. But it would be good for you to consider it, to think about it later at home to remind yourself again and again of who this God is that we serve.

Talks about the young lions going after their prey. This is the providential acts of God. As I said, there’s much more we could say about this psalm, but you I think you get the point. And if you read this psalm in that kind of concrete way, thinking of it as a description, job function, at least part of what jobs, God’s job description looks like, then it takes on a whole different sort of cast to us.

Right now, these same truths are echoed in Psalm 65. Psalm 65: “Praise is waiting in you, oh God, in Zion, and to you the vow shall be performed, oh you who hear prayer. To you all flesh will come. Iniquities prevail against me. As for our transgressions, you will provide atonement for them. Blessed is the man you choose and cause to approach you that he may dwell in your courts. We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, oh God, your holy temple.

By awesome deeds and righteousness, you will answer us, oh God of our salvation. You who are the confidence of all the ends of the earth and of the far off seas, who established the mountains by his strength, being clothed with power. You who still the noise of the seas, the noise of their waves and the tumult of the peoples. They also who dwell in the farthest parts are afraid of your signs. You make the outgoings of the morning and evening rejoice.

You visit the earth and water it. You greatly enrich it. The river of God is full of water. You provide their grain. For so you have prepared it. You water its ridges abundantly. You settle the furrows. You make it soft with showers. You bless its growth. You crown the year with your goodness. And your paths drip with abundance. They drip on the pastures of the wilderness. And the little hills rejoice on every side.

The pastures are clothed with flocks. The valleys also are covered with grain. They shout for joy. They also sing.”

Now, that’s an interesting psalm. It ends with a lot of the same kind of imagery and language of God as worker providing for us, softening the ridges, planting things, causing them to grow. You know, the earth just springs up with abundance. When that gardener is at work, when that husbandman is doing his thing in the earth, tremendous vitality springs forward. But the psalm began with discussions of sinfulness and forgiveness and what is going on in the holy temple in worship.

I think we’re supposed to be connected to the idea part of our salvation is being reconnected to the idea of who God is in his work because you’ve been made to leave this place today and tomorrow morning to go work. And so he wants this connection made and that psalm is a wonderful example of the connection between what we do in worship preparing us to understand what work God is doing which results in our work and in the midst of all of that kind of in the center of the psalm what he’s talking about is all flesh will come to God so he ties evangelism right the discipling of the nations to the work of God and as a result by way of implication our work in the world as well it’s of a piece in that psalm okay.

So first of all the Bible says God’s a worker. He worked in creation. He does works of providence. He is presented with, you know, very bright colors painted for us as a worker.

Two, man was made in God’s image. Therefore, man is made to be a worker. And actually, man is made to be God’s worker. Right? So, we’re made in God’s image. And the fourth commandment, see, we always think about it in terms of cessation of work on the Lord’s day. Okay, fine. But you know, it starts with positive things that we’re supposed to do. Six days you shall labor and then enter into rest. Why? Because God labored six days and entered into his rest.

We’re going to talk about that rest. And apart from labor, I don’t think rest is possible because if we look at what God did in his rest, what did he do? He looks at his work and says, “Wonderful, very good.” He delights in what he created. And if we’re not creating anything and if we’re not working, it’s kind of hard to delight in what God’s created. But he wants us in our leisure to enter into a delightful contemplation of the work of God and our work as well.

Getting a little ahead of myself, but in Genesis 2:15, we read this: “Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it.” So, we know this. We know we’re given a job, right? We have this job and it has two basic functions and this is the sort of labor that God calls us to do. But he commissions us to carry out his work.

Genesis 1:28: “Then God blessed Adam. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”

So God sets up the world. He works and creates it. He’s going to continue to work and provide for it. But he calls on us to continue the work that he began in the work of the creation. We’re to take the garden and then work in the world to produce gardens out of the untapped potentiality of the created earth at that time. The earth wasn’t all a garden. There was this garden here. And why was the garden there? Because God’s a worker. And he planted it and he watered it and he did it. He put it together. He knew what he wanted to draw when he wanted to. He knew the plans he’d drawn up. He does it. Creates a garden. And then he tells us now using that same basic model, go into all the earth and subdue it. Rule over it. Rule how? Rule for him.

We’re made to do work as God’s image bearer. It’s the essence of who we are. To work to work. That’s who we are. That’s what we’re created to do is to work like God and to be his people in the context of the world. This is significant when he says to subdue the earth. I think this means to bring out its potentiality. As I say, the world was not fully developed. God wanted it matured, but he wanted us to do it and delight in it the way he created the model and delighted in it. And so God sets it up for us to do this work.

Psalm 127 says this: “Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it. Unless the Lord guards the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.”

Now, what that clearly is, and I know we we have our ways of looking at that, but what I’m suggesting from this verse is that our work is tied inextricably to God’s work. At least if it’s going to be productive and effective. If we’re going to build a house, God’s building the house. That’s what it says. When we’re building a house for God, the Lord’s building the house. When we exercise dominion and subdue the earth, the Lord is exercising dominion and subduing the earth through us. We’re created for that task.

We build houses and God builds houses and that work is going on together when we’ve been redeemed by the blood of the savior and see work as it really is. we carry. So if we go back, we wanted to go back to the psalms we were just looking at when it says God does these things. How does he do it? How does he soften the furrows or feed the cat?

Well, an awful lot of that he does through you because that’s what you’ve been created to do. So, when you go give water to the cat, think of the psalm that we sang today. Think I’m doing a godlike function here and you know, unless I see my work related, unless I see this related to God, I’m going to have no real understanding of what I’m doing. But once I see the connection to God giving water to the cat, right through me as his fingers as Martin Luther would say that I’m one of what Luther called the masks of God.

I’m one of the mechanisms and one of the people that God is using to do his work in the world. When you see that, well, then you’re going to water the cat a little differently, I think. Right? You’re going to do it a little better. You’re going to do it a little more compassionately. You’re not going to, you know, curse the cat when you have to go out there and do that job for him. That’s not what God would do.

And when you mow the lawn, right, you’re out there accomplishing, you know, the kind of agriculture that’s talked about by God in the Psalms we looked at. And he’s using you as the means to accomplish it. You’ve been made for that very thing. You don’t want to get work over so you can get to something else that’s more important. Now, there is leisure and the commandment we read of course has that. But look at the ratio. 6:1 to leisure. Now, that’s the rule book. And if that’s the way God says we should do it, that ought to be about the ratio that we have as well.

So, don’t try to get work over quick so that life can become leisure all the time. I’m getting a little ahead of myself, but the point here is that we’ve been created, Adam and Eve were created pre-fall to be workers. Okay? And so, the third implication from this is that work is not a result of the fall.

I think in two weeks I’m going to talk on Jerusalem, Athens, and work. And Jerusalem and Athens is kind of the metaphor that’s set up to talk about what the Bible says versus what Greek philosophy says. We as a culture have deep roots in Greek philosophy. Christianity sort of grew up with an inner mixture of Greek thought, right? And so this is really an important part of who we are is we tend to think whether we like it or not or whether we know it or not like Greeks.

And so I’m going to spend you know one week talking about some of that some of that the contrast that the Bible draws between itself and other such ideas. But right now I just want to mention that to the Greeks their history begins with the golden age when there’s no work no work and so work comes in as a result of a problem or a disjuncture in what happens there okay work is extraordinary to the history of the world and so it doesn’t begin with work paradise is you sit around like the Eloi in the time machine is the true the fruit of the tree, you know, some kind of paradise like there were no works being accomplished and that’s where we’re headed.

If that’s where our origins are, that’s kind of where you want to get back to or progress to. And if that’s the case, then if you think that way, if that’s infected your thought when you go to work tomorrow morning, well, you’re just, you know, putting up with something that’s a result of a problem. But the Bible says, no, that’s not reality. The Bible says the fall when we are in paradise and is paradise and it is delightful. Right? That’s I want to make sure I make this point before I get to the second point.

Paradise is great. Paradise is enjoyable. Paradise is delightful. But in paradise, Adam and Eve are mostly working. They find delight in that work. Right? The fall changes work. And as we get through this series, we’ll talk about implications of the fall and why work can seem so unbearable, you know, even though it’s this wonderful blessing from God. And high privilege for us. We’ll talk about the effects of work and work is affected by the fall the effects of fall rather on the work but understand here at the foundational level that work predates the fall. It’s not a result of some problem. It’s not some kind of you know plan B for God and men. Okay, well they fell so I’m going to have to have do some work now. No, not like that at all.

We’re created to live in paradise in relationship with God and one another working as we do that. And so this is why it seems like, you know, when heaven and earth are joined together, they’ll continue to be work. So, Greeks would say no. All too often we think no, and so we sort of put up with our work because it’s just sort of something we got to put up with. It’s a necessary evil. It’s a problem that we just got to abide with.

Dorothy Sayers, this is, you know, as you probably know, much of this series, the series is in these sermons is inspired by Tim Keller’s book, Every Good Endeavor. And, you know, I’ll be using that book a lot as well as other resources. But he has some excellent quotes about work in this book as well. It’s another good source. It’s one of the reasons why it’s a good book is it’s a source to direct you to other books about work and Dorothy Sayers you know, most famous for classical Christian education kind of bringing that back the lost tools of learning in I think in the 40s in England but she wrote a book called The Creed or Chaos and she had a chapter called Why Work and here’s what she says in that chapter what’s the Christian understanding of work it is that work is not primarily a thing one does to live but the thing one lives to do you don’t do it to live you live to do it okay.

It’s not something that we get out of the way so that we can then live or enables us just to keep eating but rather we live to do work. It’s what our calling before God is. Okay. Is to do this. She goes on to say it is or it should be the full expression of the worker’s faculties. the medium in which he is most effective at his work. So we’ll talk about that in a little bit. But it it becomes then the place where the way God made you individually finds its expression is in that work.

She goes on to say that the habit of thinking about work as something one does to make money is so ingrained in us that we can scarcely imagine what a revolutionary change it would be to think about it instead in terms of the work done itself. Well, that’s certainly true, isn’t it? So often we work till we can get money so we can support ourselves and that’s all twisted around. God uses some of the financial realities to guide and direct our vocation. But you know that’s not at all why we work or it shouldn’t be why we work. We work because God has called us to exercise dominion and to be his imagebearers. We work because he works. We work because we’ve been redeemed so we can get back to our original calling of doing work for the glory of God. And it’s the work itself that is the focus or should be the focus of our lives. Okay.

She goes on to say, “I believe there is a Christian doctrine of work very closely related to the doctrine of the creative energy of God and the divine image in man. The essential modern heresy being that work is not the expression of man’s creative energy in the service of society, but only something one does in order to obtain money and leisure.”

Okay? So, that’s not who we are we don’t work to obtain money and leisure. Well, in a way, the leisure thing is significant as the fourth commandment tells us, but it’s not the kind of leisure of inactivity or devoid of a consideration of one’s work that is envisioned in American culture today.

So, work predates the fall. Four, work is basic is a basic human need. Now, if this is true, God’s a worker. We’re workers made in his image to do his work. And three, that work predates the fall. Work is found in paradise and in paradise-like situations. Then the implications of that are that work is absolutely essential for our well-being. You know, the term human flourishing is a buzzword these days. I like it. People should flourish, right? And human flourishing is directly related since these other truths are true to our work. You can’t flourish as a person without work. I don’t believe it’s possible.

Okay. And you know lots of studies done on this but work leads to depression. Absence of work leads to depression. It leads to lethargy sloth. A basic human need is the need for man to do work. We we’ve been reviewing starting to review our internal benevolence guidelines, right?

And so in our guidelines it says that if you’ve got an able-bodied guy then one of the first the first line of defense against difficulty in providing for his family is gleaning work. And in the Old Testament, this is what it was, right? I mean, most of the time most of the needs of the poor would be provided through gleaning. You would let people glean corners of your fields. And there’s ways to make application of that today. The Salvation Army was founded on the gleaning principle. But you know, significant to that, I think we can we can we can talk about gleaning as political conservatives, right? What do people deserve? Well, if they’re not going to work, they don’t really deserve anything. So, and we kind of take that attitude and there’s a little bit of that in the Bible, right? Guy won’t work, shouldn’t eat.

But I think that if you understand the significance from cover to cover the Bible of work in terms of our human existence and what we’re called to do, gleaning keeps someone working. It keeps them with a sense of purpose. Purpose for their lives. It’s good for people to work. It’s not some, you know, punishment imposed so that we won’t run out of goods and services if everybody stops working. It’s well, it’s to human flourishing. It’s to the well-being of people to work and to do stuff and to be to be effective in that work.

Now, if you think about that, right, there are let me let me mention just a couple we’ll talk more about these things in the future, but just a couple of things, right? One reason work is so good is because it connects you to other people. When you work, you’re always working for somebody. If you’re own businessman, you got a clientele you’re serving. Work always connects you to other people. Work is essentially serving other people. Now, that’s good for us. Our sinful bent is, you know, incurvatus in se as Augustine said, we’re curved in on ourselves and work forces us outside of ourselves. So work is good for us and good for human flourishing. It’s a basic need because we need community. We need people. And so work does that. It helps us to serve other people.

Work helps us to identify our gifts and abilities. Kids, this is one reason why your parents gives you tasks and chores. They’re looking at you. You’re growing up. They want to help give you some advice on vocation. And as you do chores and tasks of varying kinds, it helps you to identify your particular gifts and abilities so that you’ll be more successful and more satisfied in your work. Work helps us identify who we are. Okay? We don’t sit around, you know, naval gazing and thinking what great poets we would be. You know, that’s that’s not how it turn that’s not how it works.

How it works is you do things and the work shows you gifts and abilities or develops them even in you. Got a guy right now unemployed in our church and you know done a job for you know I don’t know years and years and years and that job’s come to an end. That particular task. But you know when that happens to people and it happens a lot in our day and age, what should be done is a careful evaluation of how that work has revealed strengths and weaknesses, particular giftings and abilities so that progress can be made in the next job. He’s even the person is even better at doing because they’ve work has helped them to identify their gifts and abilities.

And kids, you know, this will help your parents and you to identify gifts and abilities. Without work, you know, that’s not going to happen.

Another example, work is connected to is essential for our freedom. Well, that’s weird, Pastor Tuuri. How does work help freedom? Well, freedom is a result of not of no restrictions, the proper restrictions. If Keller uses the illustration of a fish, I’ve used a balloon before, whatever it is. So, you got a fish in water, right? He’s restricted. He has to have water. And I thought about doing this as an illustration up here and I thought, well, you know, like could be arrested for doing it, I suppose. But I thought about getting a goldfish in water and taking it out, putting it up here so you can see it flop around. You know, that’s what freedom without restrictions is. And it’s like franticness for a while, then death.

We need limitations. We need to read the owner’s manual. And the point today is the owner’s manual says you were created as an imagebearer of a God who works. And you’re supposed to work. And so when you work, you’re going to experience the kind of true freedom that work in its proper sense brings.

So there’s all these values to work to the human condition. Now, now, now think about what’s going on in our country, right? Less and less people are working. You know, people have dropped out. There’s a tremendous number of people receiving tax benefits, goods, and services, and not working. I’m not mad at those people. I feel bad for those people, you know, now in some cases they’re actually doing work that’s not being paid. They’re not vocationally they don’t have a paying vocation. But in far too many of our cities, we have a growing enlarging class of people who just get by and have leisure all the time and are not working. And that’s bad.

A a if we can have a public policy on how we handle unemployment and people not working, to have a policy that encourages that or supports that. Right? If you believe what I’ve just told you, what it’s supporting is something that is like watching the fish flop around and die. It’s not good for their flourishing to create a system in which so many people no longer work.

So, so work is basic to who we are as people. Isaiah 48 says this: “Thus says the Lord, your redeemer, the holy one of Israel, I am the Lord your God who teaches you to profit, who leads you by the way you should go. Oh that you had heeded my commandment, then your peace rather would have been like a river and your righteousness like the waves of the sea. Peace like a river. Isn’t that what we want? God says it’s easy. Well, it’s not easy, but it’s here’s the deal. It’s pretty easy. Do what I tell you to do. Read the owner’s manual. Get in line with it. And you know what? It won’t be what Jesus say, ‘My burden isn’t heavy. My yoke is light. It’s freeing to us.’”

And so I think that has direct application to who we are, how we work, and how we see our work. Either kind of grudgingly working, working till we can get out of doing any more work. All these things happen regularly in the workplace, even of Christians. And we’re supposed to embrace our work in God.

Five, God delights in his work. Genesis 1:31-2:1: “Then God saw everything that he had made and indeed it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth and all the host of them were finished.”

God delights in his work. We’re supposed, you know, I I’m the kind of guy at least, I don’t know, maybe not everybody is, but you know, I mow the lawn. I used to mow the lawn. I still do occasionally, but I used to mow a lot of lawn and I’d want Christine to come look at it and delight in it with me. Look what I did. The world looks better as a result of our work, our labor. You know, we want to delight, you know, God does that. That’s a godly instinct at the end of the day to look back on your work and say, “Yeah, praise God. He let me do good work today.” That’s what God does. That’s what that fourth commandment says.

The sort of rest is not simply inactivity. God’s rest on the seventh day is a delight in the in the world in which he’s created. He comes to be with Adam and Eve, right? On the seventh day, He’s delighting in it. He’s resting in it. And so, you know, God delights in his work. He takes great pleasure in it.

And then the implication of this is point number six. Work brings us to true leisure. This is what the Bible would say leisure is a delight in the work that we’ve accomplished for those six days and a delight in the work of others and a delight in the work of God. You know, I know a woman and she’s she’s the hardest worker I have ever known. Work, work, work, work, work. And I always, you know, it’s a it’s a encouragement to me to be more diligent. But she works. And you know, while she’s walking down the hall, she’ll work. She’ll do something to make the world a little better place. Works. And this same woman who works so much so often and so diligently the same woman. I’ve never seen anybody work that hard. And I’ve never seen anybody delight as much as she delights. Enter into leisure as much as she enters into leisure. You know, sitting by a pond, a brook, water outside, just delighting in what God has created and what we’ve created in the context of the environment as people as well.

I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be. I think that work and leisure go together that way. And so we’re supposed to let God delight in our work. And work then brings us to a sense of true leisure. It brings us to contemplate our work and God’s work. And I have a little bit more to say about this at the communion table.

And then seventh, our work has eternal significance. Let me just I’m not going to be able to deal with this at the length I had hoped to, but I think it is very important and maybe I’ll try to do a job of retelling the story in a couple of weeks or in another sermon. But Tim Keller uses this beautiful story called “Leaf by Niggle” in his book to talk about this aspect the eternal significance of our work. And “Leaf by Niggle” was a short story written by Tolkien and submitted to the Dublin Review as World War II was starting to happen. and it reflects really Tolkien’s own life.

You know, Niggle is somebody that is kind of ineffective in getting work done because he’s always getting off into little rabbit trails and stuff, right? So, the name Niggle, the short story is about a painter named Niggle. He wants to paint a beautiful tree and actually a landscape going out to mountains and other trees and he wants to do this. So, he gets this huge canvas in the story, you know, huge canvas to paint this beautiful scene. and Niggle, you know, his name means that he kind of gets distracted and he’s and so what he ends up doing is the only thing he finishes painting by the time death comes to him is a single leaf on the tree that’s supposed to be part of this great broad landscape and all he can get done is the leaf.

Another reason why this happens is he’s got a neighbor Parish. I think that’s the spelling. So parish. So Niggle is in a parish. But in any event, Parish always wants him to do various tasks to help him out. And so that’s another reason why Niggle only gets one leaf done. Plus, he’s just really good at painting leaves. Maybe not so good at painting trees, but he just focuses so much and he attends to the details and he paints one leaf is all he gets done.

And then his neighbor wants him to go out gets some medicine for the neighbor’s wife. I think Nigel catches cold pneumonia and his dreaded great journey of death has come to his door and he’s and he’s like, “Oh no, you know, all I got done was on one single leaf and he goes off.” Now, Niggle is kind of autobiographical to Tolkien because Tolkien had worked for decades on all the background information etc for writing the Lord of the Rings and he was worried that because World War II was disrupting things because he was like Nigel, distracted to various little things and doing tasks for other people, he was worried he would never finish at the Lord of the Rings, right?

And so he saw it as his great tree and he was afraid that like Nigel, he would just paint this one this very small part of Lord of the Rings is all he would accomplish before his death. And actually the story is inspired because Tolkien’s neighbor. There was a tree there that he liked a lot next to him and the neighbor cut it down. And so this is an image of death, loss of vision, etc. Well, so Nigel gets on the train to go to the far away country, you know, the heavenly country.

The train is death. And as a reward to Niggle, he hears two voices. A voice that he refer Tolkien refers to as justice. He didn’t get anything done. He really never really got much accomplished. And Mercy says, “Yes, but he was kind to others and he did his best.” Something like this. And Mercy’s voice, Tolkien says, is gentle but not soft. and so they stop and Nigel gets off the train or carriage or whatever it is, and he looks and he sees his tree.

He sees the leaf that he painted on this tree, this real tree in the heavenly country and he sees his leaf, he sees the beautiful tree, he sees the landscape, the mountains off, right? And he’s just delighted, okay? Because he had brought some of that heavenly reality into earth. We pray that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And Niggle’s painting was found after his death in the story and it was hung in a museum and a few people saw it, right?

But it was only a leaf. And so he died not thinking he was going to he had done anything effective. But what he had done was brought into his work an aspect of eternal truth and reality. And Keller makes the point this really is like all of us. We’re all like Nigel, right? we all have ideas that we want to accomplish when we’re young and we get involved in a career and we want to accomplish things there and we never really get the whole landscape or usually even a tree done by the time it’s time to get on the carriage and head off to the heavenly country.

But the point of the story for Tolkien was that even the smallest of our labor done for the Lord and done out of an understanding of the things that I’ve laid out in this sermon has eternal significance. It’s part of the eternal reality. It’s bridging heaven and earth.

Now, Christian men and women, that’s what we should think of tomorrow when we go to work. It’s not We’re not and I’ll talk more about this in the future, but you know, it’s not like heaven comes to earth, right? The earth is renewed. What you do in terms of the development of human flourishing in this place through your work tomorrow and that’s what you’re engaged in. You may not understand the landscape and your little leaf and relationship to it, but that’s what you’re doing. And that work has eternal significance. The Bible says your labor is not in vain. Your labor in Christ God isn’t going to destroy the creative labor that you’ve accomplished in your work.

God didn’t destroy Niggle’s leaf. He showed him the reality of that leaf in the heavenly country. So our work, you know, God wouldn’t call us to this work if the whole point was it’s pointless and it’s going to be burned up at the second coming and nothing remains of it and it’s just what we did here to dog paddle away the time and feed our family while we work. God would not have given us as imagebearers of him. The primary task of work which he has if that was the case. He gave us that task because he wants his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. And he wants you to do it through mowing the lawn, giving the cat a drink, creating a program that will do things that nobody else has ever done, taking care of the shipping so that people can get their food.

Think of all the hands of God through people that are involved in the production of what we have these simple gifts before us here, right? That’s what you’re going to do tomorrow. You’re part of that great landscape. And as we work for God and embrace his calling at the foundation of reworking our work, this vision that God is worker and we’re his worker, now we’ve got meaning and significance and purpose when we get up tomorrow morning.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the delightful truths about yourself revealed in the scriptures and how they help us to understand how to flourish as people. Bless us this week, Lord God, in our work. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.