Dennis Tuuri

Let our handiwork be established by God. To that end, we return now to our series on work. This is the seventh sermon on work. And today, I want to talk about work and competence. We’re going to drill in a little deeper on a topic that was covered earlier when we talked about work as service and love to our neighbor.

So we’re going to turn to Proverbs 22:29 for the sermon text, and we’ll be talking about work and competence.

Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Proverbs 22:29. Do you see a man skillful in his work? He will stand before kings. He will not stand before obscure men. Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for your text today. We pray that you would open it to our understanding by your Holy Spirit. We acknowledge that apart from your spirit this does us no good. So we pray that your spirit would do his work in us individually and corporately together, now that we would see in this text a tremendous admonishment to competence, skill in our work as a root cause of exercising dominion over the nations. In Jesus’ name we pray.

Amen. Please be seated.

So what we’re going to do is talk about competence a little bit by way of introduction. Then we’ll look at the text and try to draw out what you might miss in a casual reading of those two verses—or that verse, rather. And then we’ll apply this, and we’ll try to do so along with our children. And then at the end, talk about some characteristics of competence that hopefully will be helpful to us each as we look forward to the week that opens up to us today.

So competence is a thing that is badly needed in the world today, and it seems like it’s become more and more rare. There are more and more attempts in the workplace specifically to define competencies, to try to achieve competence, to try to achieve training for employees that are already employed in building competencies, and then the application of those competencies in the workplace. There’s a lot of actual discussion about competency, and you know, part of what we’re going to have to do today is help you to understand how I’m using the word.

A competency is skill or training in a particular area that allows you to do a job. So, you know, as we look at pastoral candidates, there are competencies we look for. But competence is also, in its original meaning, and I think in a lot of ways today, competence is not just being equipped for work, but actually competently carrying the work out, which involves a lot of things, right? It involves a spirit of wanting to do things to begin with—stepping up. It involves a set of abilities and a growing set of abilities.

It involves, you know, what we would call ongoing development or ongoing training in a particular task. It involves diligence, faithfulness, and as we’ll see at the end of the sermon today, really the only way to be competent in a biblical sense is having relationship with the God who is all-competent. And so, like our work is tied to God’s work, competence is a term we use in Christian circles and in the scriptures to define really who God is, and then who we’re to be in relationship to God.

So God is the source of competence. That’s a very important point we’ll dwell on at the end of this today. Competence refers—we’re talking about it primarily in the context of a series on work and vocation. So we’re talking about competence in terms of work. But competence really, if you think of it the way I’ve just described it with these component elements, can be seen in several directions, right?

So there’s competence or incompetence in relationships. And what we’re told by those that measure such things is that our day and age in the last couple of decades have seen a radical drop-off in what we could say is competence in social skills, in relationships. And so, you know, it’s very important to recognize as we come to the table here at the end of our service, there’s a competency that we’re being trained in—in terms of social relationships—as well as in terms of our work.

And competence relates, you know, to a wide variety of specific areas of endeavor. All of our lives are involved in work in various directions, and so competencies are necessary for all of those. You know, marriage is an example. So, you know, when we work with people at RCC who are going to get married, we go through premarital counseling with them, which is just another way of evaluating competence in terms of marriage and then trying to build in competencies for marriage.

Marriage is not an easy task. And so to make a marriage successful, both at its beginning and throughout it, there should be an attempt to build in competencies for marriage. It may be an odd way that you’ve never thought about it before, but the point is training is important and ongoing training is important as well as you build a marriage. And you know, so often we think of that as only for people that are not doing well, but you know, it’s like in the workplace—ongoing professional development is an important part of who we should be in our workplace and it is an important part of what we are in our social relationships, including marriage as well. And maybe you haven’t thought of it that way before, but to be competent and skilled in marriage is not just a given—it takes commitment to God, all these characteristics we’ll talk about in a couple of minutes, and it takes ongoing development of competencies in relationship.

Now, as I said today, competency is kind of a rare deal. And you know, there was a book years ago by a guy on education, and he said in the book that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, right? So we have a situation where competency gives us a tremendous opportunity as Christians to be effective in our culture-building tasks through our workplace and other places, because there’s so much incompetence.

Any degree of competence is usually recognized and developed, and you become increasingly people that stand before rulers or kings, as today’s text tells us. Even in that political series House of Cards, Frank Underwood, talking about someone that he didn’t necessarily agree with, that character says, “Competency is such a rare bird in these woods. I always admire it when I see it.” I probably should have tried a southern accent. I won’t. It’s a rare bird, okay? And so people admire it when they see it. And so if we become a people increasingly of competency, we’ll have great effect in the context of the culture.

Now, all too often it’s the reverse though. I don’t know if you know it or not, but both because of other reasons but actually some factual reasons, Christians are seen as less competent, right? Franky Schaeffer, who has all kinds of troubles, but he had a good book years ago called Addicted to Mediocrity. And in the context of the Christian church, what he was saying in terms of the arts but also in lots of other areas—we’re sort of addicted to mediocrity, right? So we like those bumper stickers we used to like: “Please be patient with me. God is not finished with me yet,” or something like this. And so grace—and some people would say cheap grace—but a grace that overlooks all faults can lead to a Christian church that is addicted to mediocrity. That’s anything less than competent. And so, you know, how many sermons, you know, are spoken today in terms of being competent workers in your vocations? Not that many. Because it’s sort of like we don’t want to judge. And as a result, we have kind of a problem with it.

Competency is composed of several elements. Faithfulness is one of the specific elements of competency. If you don’t get to work on time regularly, okay? And if you’re not faithful in the task that you do at work, you’re not a competent worker. You’re not a skilled worker. You won’t stand before kings. Well, you might in some odd way. You’ll probably stand before a judge at some point in time, but you won’t have the kind of influence that Proverbs 22:29 speaks of.

Faithfulness is critical to competence. Faithfulness in small things, including timeliness, okay? Diligence—working hard. We’ll look at some verses in a little bit about diligence, but it’s quite obviously very connected to being competent. If you’re not a diligent worker, if you have periods of slothfulness or sluggerliness and don’t have a heart that makes you engage in your work tomorrow morning when you get there, then you’re not a competent worker.

You won’t stand before kings, and the church will be poorly represented by you. Paul said that the people that he wrote to were his letters, and we’re God’s letters to the world. That’s who we are. We’re a representation of God for good or ill. And when we are not timely in our work, when we’re not diligent in our work, when we don’t complete tasks that we’re committed to do and just bail on things, we are a very poor representation of a competent God and a competent church that God has called to himself.

Training is important. You know, when we began 30-some years ago, we were the homeschool church. And one of our early phrases that I heard from George Grant was, “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly,” which is another way of just saying if a thing’s worth doing, you just got to do it. Whether you think you’re competent or not, you got to do it. But you got to try to improve. That’s true of your abilities, right?

Unfortunately, that phrase is all too often true of the Christian church in general—doing all kinds of things poorly that we don’t have to do poorly. Training for vocation in this case, for marriages, for church involvement, whatever it is—training is an important aspect of competence. Competence does involve competencies, and competencies should grow as you mature and develop in a vocational track.

So training is an important part. And the last element I’ll mention here as we begin this discussion of competence—I don’t know the word for it. There must be a characteristic, a character quality—but maybe volunteerism, which I preached on, I think, last year: step-up-ness, right? You step up. You’re a step-up person, guy or gal. You’re a step-up person, right? In other words, what I’m getting at here is one of the words for leaders in the Old Testament was someone who was simply willing to get involved.

So part of competency: you may be the best trained. You might actually be diligent. But if you don’t step up to take on a task, you’re not competent anymore, right? That’s part of who you are. You can’t really develop competencies if you don’t engage in a particular task.

As a pastor, one of the things I’ve sort of bemoaned, and I blame myself—I don’t know why it’s happened—but you know, we have had now a series of things going on that people no longer step up for. Maybe it’s because we’ve gone from 100 to 250 or whatever it is. I don’t know. And it’s okay with me if things die and resurrect. That’s okay with me. But what’s not okay is if we have actually developed a set of people who no longer are step-up people, who are people who are ready and willing to take up a task and to do it well—competent people, in other words. That would be a problem to me. And I’m beginning to, you know, wonder what it is that we’re missing.

So step-up-ness, volunteerism—the ability to take on a task. I suppose there’s a character quality that I’m just missing it. You know, there are levels of competence, and most of us when I saw this slide when I was doing my research on this, the slide went from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to then conscious competence and then to unconscious competence.

So the idea is that when we begin—for instance, when a lot of people get married—they have unconscious incompetence about how to have a relationship with someone. They just do. They’re drawn together for whatever reason, usually hormones in the case of the guy, at least. And this is what happens. And then within a few years or maybe weeks, depending on the couple, they develop conscious incompetence.

Right now they know they’re incompetent at this thing, right? And if they’re a godly Christian man or woman, they’re going to seek competence. See? And then they’ll start to work differently in the context of the relationship. They’ll have moved from unconscious incompetence—we didn’t know what we didn’t know—to conscious incompetence: now we know what we don’t know. We don’t know how to get along with this person. To conscious competence: now we know there are certain skills and competencies the word of God teaches us about that we begin to work into our relationship. And then after you’re married, you know, 30, 40 years, you probably have, for the most part, unconscious competency. You don’t think about her so much anymore. You’ve developed a whole series of character traits and abilities and skills that create competency in relationship, and you don’t have to be all that conscious of it anymore.

So that’s kind of the way we normally move through things, and probably the same thing’s true in terms of our workplace. So in these various spheres, this verse—although I’m going to apply it directly in the context of a series of sermons on vocation or work in the workplace, or your primary job of being a mom or a wife—it really applies to all kinds of relationships and spheres of influence.

It’s a basic characteristic of a godly Christian. And if you’re not competent in these different spheres, then you know, you should at least go away today becoming aware of or conscious of your incompetence. That’s a good place to be, because that means then you’re going to do something about it. And if you are conscious about your competence, then you know, develop—that’s what competence means. You know, what we’re going to approach here in a minute is a proverb, which is not a command, right? It doesn’t say do this. Well, it sort of implies it, but it says: do you see a man skilled in his work? He’ll stand before king. Not before obscure men. So it’s not a command, right?

However, there are other places in the scriptures where this actually is a command. For instance, in Romans 12, as I mentioned last week, after the whole work-worship thing, it then starts to talk about your gifts in the body. And then it says in verse 11 that we’re not to lag in diligence. We’re to be fervent in spirit, serving the Lord. That’s a command to competence, okay? Diligence, fervent in spirit, having a step-up attitude, developing competencies to do the things that God has called you to do, whether it’s in the body or in your work or in your family or your neighborhood, whatever it is—that’s serving the Lord. Serving the Lord is shorthand for competence, what we could say. And it is a command to us.

Ecclesiastes 9:10 says, “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might. Okay. Do it with all your might.” Whatever your hand finds to do when you go to work tomorrow, when you get up and start working with the kids, or when you get up and get the kids off to school and then you go about whatever else you got to do tomorrow—whatever your hand finds to do, do it. Ecclesiastes 9:10 says with your might, do it competently. Okay? Do it competently.

As I said, this will get us a long way in the culture. Billy Joel has frequently been quoted to say that he’s merely competent at what he does. But he says, “In an age of incompetence, that makes me extraordinary.” Well, the same’s true of us. We can, we will be seen as extraordinary if we simply become competent Christian men and women in our vocations.

One of the great joys of my life this last week was to think about each of my kids and how they have these characteristics of diligence and volunteerism and timeliness, of faithfulness. And they’re doing it in small things in their various careers, and as a result the Lord keeps moving them up. Moving them up, my head. So that’s the way it works, and it is important to us in terms of child rearing, of course, as we’ll mention in a couple of minutes.

Okay, now let’s talk about the text itself. So Proverbs 22:29. Look at it. It’s interesting, you know, like one of the values of slowing down instead of reading through your Bible all the time at a fast clip is to think about things. Look at what it starts with: “Do you see a man skilled in his work?”

Now remember, Proverbs is a father to a son, or you know, the people that are becoming kings—son of a king, in the case of Solomon here. And this is one of the proverbs. At the heart, the middle of Proverbs are the 30 sayings of the wise, and the first ten sayings have to do with work. And this is in that line of sayings about work. And so it’s given to young people. And so if you’re a young person here today, the first thing you’re supposed to be motivated to do is to look or perceive skilled persons—competent people around you.

This word “see” is not the ordinary word. It doesn’t just mean “look.” “Oh, do you see that? Oh, you see that?” No, it actually can mean—it actually can be used of revelation from God. So to see a thing is to understand something from God’s perspective, and to sort of—it’s like a sharp word. It’s not the normal word for see. And so the idea here is to begin with: to train our children and ourselves to actually try to discern competent men in our settings and surroundings.

Remember, we’re made as imitative creatures, right? We’re all involved in mimesis, or imitation. And that’s a good thing. The world says that’s insincerity. Well, we’re created beings amongst a bunch of other created beings. Paul, for instance, in the New Testament, commands us to be imitators of him and the people that read him and to be imitators of the rulers, et cetera, et cetera. So this is who we are. So the first thing you want to do is you want to be able to discern a skilled worker. Okay?

Now, that means you’ve got to kind of know what to look for, right? And that leads into these set of qualifications—or rather, characteristics that I’ve talked about: faithfulness, diligence, volunteerism, whatever it is, step-up-ness, whatever word you want to put on that, and training, okay? Faithfulness, diligence, step-up-ness, training. And so, you know, the young son and us as we read the proverbs are exhorted to look for something. Do you see? Do you perceive? Do you know the difference between a competent person and a skilled worker and an unskilled one? Well, you may not, right? You may have unconscious incompetence on this task. But the first task is a motivation to the young son and to us. The way we’re going to become competent in part is by discerning competence in our settings. Okay? So that’s where this text starts.

Then it goes on to say: “you see a man skilled in his work.”

Now this word “skilled” is a kind of difficult word. It is used—this particular word used maybe four times in the Old Testament—and most people find its etymology in the word for speediness, right? So do you see a man who’s quick at his work? And now, of course, it doesn’t just mean quick; it means really good at his work. And this is what, for instance, Bruce Waltke and other commentators have called an etymological fallacy about this word.

You know, Hebrew is kind of a difficult language. It’s an ancient language. It’s kind of hard to figure out exactly what some of these terms mean. And this term has similar terms in other languages of the time. And commentators think that’s probably a better place to look than its closeness to a word meaning speed—a different Hebrew word. So probably this word, for instance, in Syriac and Arabic, this word means “able,” “skillful.”

In Old South Arabic, it meant “craftsman.” In Ethiopic: “experienced” or “learned.” So those are the connotations of the word as it’s related to words in other languages. And that’s probably what we should see here—not just speediness, but a skillfulness. Competence again is the word that some commentators use to sort of sum up all these things. So this—we’re supposed to be discerning someone who is competent, who is skilled and good at what they do. Okay, good at the context of what they do.

And then what does it say about this man? Well, it says these kind of men in their work—he will stand before kings. Now, again, here we—the meaning isn’t apparent when you first read it over, but basically this word for “stand” is the word that you would use to stand before someone you’re offering your services to perform a task or job or to accomplish a mission.

This isn’t the standing at the end of your mission. This is the standing at the beginning of the mission. Okay. So what does it mean? Somebody who’s competent—look out for that guy. Watch him. And the reason why is because he will increasingly have opportunities to stand before powerful men, including the king himself. He’ll be able to do work—his vocational skills—for the king himself. And it isn’t even king, is it? “Stand before kings”—plural.

So a competent man will actually, you know, work up the chain of success, so to speak, and he’s now engaging in contracting his services internationally with a series of kings. Now, clearly there’s more than just commerce being talked about here. And clearly what we’re being told is that if we want to stand before the nations of the world and disciple them, right?—that’s our job—then we want to be competent at what we do, right?

And if we’re competent at what we do, we can anticipate that there’ll be opportunities, at least for some of us, to literally stand before international rulers. And for those of us who don’t do that, we’ll stand before other sorts of rulers. The point is here: this is a strong inducement to a postmillennial perspective to accomplish that. Not through what we just did last Tuesday, as feudal as that is here in this particular state.

Wow. It’s amazing, isn’t it? Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on that because it’s so depressing. Actually, it isn’t. Tremendous election for the country. Do you know that there are 98 U.S. legislative bodies in the country? You know, most of them have two chambers, but not all of them. So there’s 98, and 67 of those bodies are now Republican. You might not have heard that. You might have heard about, “Oh yeah, they got the Senate.” It was much deeper and broader than that. And I’m not a Republican party fanatic, but in general these days, the Republican party platform seems to line up with some significant biblical principles. So I mean, it was not depressing.

In our particular state, the Democrats got increased majorities in the Senate and the House, et cetera. So here it’s like: what are we going to do? We don’t know. But even here, why did that happen? Incompetence is why it happened. We had two shots at significant office with the guy I’m going off on a tangent, but it relates. Why didn’t—you know, kids get beaten? Because we had a man who, while competent at what he does, his technique of campaigning stressed none of that. And what people saw in Kitzhaber’s opponent was incompetence, and they didn’t want to vote for that no matter how much they thought Kitzhaber was bad. And the same thing’s true of the McKelly-Webb race as well: incompetent campaign, run horrible campaign.

And while we had an election in which it was possible to actually see some more things going on here in Oregon, we missed it. But in any event, the point here is that competence in our vocations—primarily—is what’s going to result in discipling the nations.

I think you can make that connection here to the kings and the nations. So this text is really quite interesting for us, and it pushes us in a direction where we really stress competence in the context of our work.

And then finally it says: “he will not stand before obscure men.”

So in other words, unknown man of no importance or value in the context of a culture. He won’t be continually working just with those elements. Competent men will be promoted. That’s always true. This proverb tells us, and that is particularly true where, you know, guys like Billy Joel accurately say that in a land of incompetence, just ordinariness will be seen as great competence and genius. So we’ve got a tremendous opportunity here to do work that is significant for world-building, culture-serving others, and for actually evangelizing or discipling the nations as well.

So that’s the text. Let me read a summary of this text written by Bruce Waltke in his commentary on Proverbs. He says, “The didactic saying, not an admonition—it explains something—aims to motivate the son to become competent in whatever commissions he receives in order to rise to his greatest social and economic potential in the service of kings.” Good summation. That’s what we’re called upon to do.

In Proverbs 18:16, it says, “A man’s gift makes room for him and brings him before great men.” If you put this proverb together with our 22:29 proverb, what’s your gift? It doesn’t necessarily just mean—it’s not even necessarily primarily talking about a gift to a king, although that can be useful. It’s interesting that the biblical theology of gift-giving is important. But I think if you put these two together, the greatest gift you give to your nation or to the discipling of the nations is to be competent. That’s the gift you give to the king that results in you having more and more commissions from a broader audience. How you work up the chain, so to speak, to have influence in the context of the world.

What are you going to do with that influence? What we said last week: don’t be conformed, but be transformed. Now, this is very important stuff, right? And it’s very important stuff for raising children. And of course, if you think about this at all, immediately certain characters in the Bible should come to mind, right? I mean, Joseph. This is what he was: he was a competent guy, gifted and called by God. That got him enviously sold him to slavery. But what did he do there? Pout in the prison cell? No, he was diligent. He saw opportunities. He took advantage of those opportunities. He served Pharaoh in his house after that, and he served him in the state. And if you read carefully the story of Joseph this afternoon or this week, you and your children go through it, you’ll see increasing levels of promotion for Joseph from Pharaoh until finally he’s got the signet ring and he’s basically, you know, Pharaoh’s right-hand guy. And he doesn’t got to worry about anything because he’s got a guy who is competent, and that competency has earned him rule over the entire world—is the picture—because Egypt then feeds the world.

So one of the ways to teach our children competency and the significance of competency are these Bible stories, right? All kinds of them. You know, Ezra is a skilled, competent scribe, and as a result, he gets promoted. Nehemiah is skilled at what he does for the king, and as a result, in his prayers his competence is directly related in the story of Nehemiah to the increasing responsibilities that he has.

Another grand story to go over with your children is the book of Daniel. You know, we tend to think of that maybe not quite in connection with competency, but one of the first things we’re told about Daniel and his compadres is this. Give me just a minute to find the right sheet here. In the opening verses of the book of Daniel, we read this of Daniel and his compadres that were taken into captivity:

They were youths without blemish, of good appearance, and skillful in all wisdom, endowed with knowledge, understanding, learning, and competent to stand in the king’s palace. So these guys were well trained. Oh, and it says “competent” specifically in language and to teach them the literature and language of the Chaldeans. They had specific competencies in language, but there was far broader than that—their training. These were the best of the best. And when the best of the best are described, who will then influence not just Nebuchadnezzar but successive rulers, right? Who will stand before them—either the rest of these guys or Daniel in the personification here, the one guy whose story this is all about ultimately—the way he goes from ruler to ruler to ruler, even being drugged out of obscurity by Belshazzar and then becoming ruler, you know, with the successive emperors? All this is based upon the fact that he—the beginning of the story tells us—these are competent guys. That’s why they’re going to stand before kings.

Now I said that competence is faithfulness and diligence and equipping, and competence involves increasing training. What did Daniel do when training was presented to him and his fellow exiles at the king’s university? “Oh no, I can’t do that. That’s a kind of land-grant college or something. I can’t do that. No, no, no. That’s a pagan school.” No, he didn’t do that. He made sure at the beginning of that the king knew—the emperor knew—his commitment to the God of gods, who God was. And then he did the training, and the indication from the text is he comes out of the training the top of his class—these guys, right? He was competent, and he sought increasing competencies. And the story of Daniel, like the story of Joseph, is one in which you read over and over again: he’s standing before this guy, now he’s standing before this ruler, now he’s standing before this ruler. It’s just a picture, an illustration of Proverbs 22:29.

Not hard to teach kids about this stuff if we got our heads screwed on straight. If we recognize this isn’t some sort of just miraculous promotion of Joseph or Daniel or Ezra or Nehemiah or any of a whole host of other people. These are men that the principle of Proverbs 22:29 is being played out with. And our kids cannot be expected to have influence in the culture in which God has placed them without being competent—without being faithful and diligent and having a spirit of wanting to work and step up to help out when help is needed, without having a commitment to being trained and having ongoing training in whatever task they’re called to do.

Without all of that, our children cannot expect to be leaders in the context of the culture. This is God’s way. We are his letters to our culture. Our children are our letters that we send out into the world—or God sends out. And if those letters are incompetent, then they will stand before obscure people. The only commissions they’ll get is in relatively unimportant tasks that they have to do.

Now, faithfulness means that if you stand before an obscure man at the beginning of your career, you do it. You do it as well as if you’re doing work for a king, right? You’re always working for God. Do it with all your heart. Be diligent. Be faithful. Be timely. Don’t slough off. Don’t you know, think it’s an unimportant task. Every task is one given to you by God that he expects you to be competent, faithful, diligent, timely, and prepared to do and increasing in preparation for it.

You know, one of the ways you teach kids is when they’re real little. And this song we sang at the beginning of our worship service—you old-timers will remember that we’ve talked about this before—and a number of several families at least here, including our family, used to sing this in the morning with our kids when they got up. And they’ll remember what this is about, right?

Shake off dull sloth and joyful rise.

We had our kids do that when they were little. They loved it. Well, as they got older, they weren’t quite so in love with it. But the point is this is one by Bishop Thomas Ken, who gives us the “Praise God from all Blessings Flow” at the end of this—wrote these verses for morning. He had another set of verses for lunchtime. He had another set of verses that you would sing at night, which would remind us about death, right? And so we would—I never really found a complete set of the lunch ones—but we would do this always, you know, frequently in the morning, sometimes in the evening. We would sing these verses. And what’s, you know, what’s the first thing he tells you here to—that we’re training our kids in? “Shake off dull sloth.”

Sloth is a killer. Sloth is the opposite of competence. It’s the opposite of diligence, right? And one of the first lessons to teach our children—we can use these Bible stories. That’s great to get the general idea in their head. But then we have got to start training them in the specific characteristics or attributes of competence, including diligence.

Let me read a couple of verses here. You know them, of course. You know them.

Proverbs 10:4: “He who has a slack hand becomes poor, but the hand of the diligent makes rich.”

Right? Quite easy to understand that. We don’t want to understand it in our day and age because we don’t want to be diligent. We’re tempted to slothfulness. There was, you know, we just passed a ballot measure about marijuana. Will that increase diligence or slothfulness? What do you think? You know, it’s clear where our culture is headed.

Proverbs 12:24: “The hand of the diligent will rule, but the lazy man will be put to forced labor.”

Are we the tail now and not the head? Why is it? Because we haven’t been diligent. I think it really comes down to almost that easy of a statement for the Christian church in America. We have taught a sort of easy believism and a sort of mediocre approach toward life. And your vocation has been just sort of something off here to the side you do so you can just get by. We have these Greek notions, right? And we’ve tried to get rid of these as we go through this series. And what have we ended up with? We’re the tail and not the head. We’re being, you know—it’s we’re the one group in the country that it’s okay to make fun of. The one group.

Proverbs 13:4: “The soul of a lazy man desires and has nothing, but the soul of the diligent shall be made rich.”

Right? So the key to satisfaction is not figuring out an easy way to get things, but to be diligent, to be faithful in small things. What did our Savior tell us? He tells us in Matthew 25:21 in this parable. He says, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You were faithful over a few things. I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your Lord.”

Do you see? So, you know, so often we’re like, “Okay, so if we’re faithful in small things, we enter the joy of the Lord. It’s all over. The work’s over now. Now we get to bask in the presence of God.” No, he says, “I’m going to take—if you’ve been faithful in small things, I’ll make you rulers over larger things and enter into the joy of your Lord.” What is the joy of God? What’s the source of satisfaction to a person? It’s work well done. It’s competence. It’s diligence. It’s faithfulness. It’s stepping up, folks. That’s what’s good.

You know, I went to that Ligonier conference. I remember I mentioned it last week. You know, one of the repeated messages throughout that conference, whether it was workshops or plenary talks, is key to operating successfully through a loss that God has brought you through. It’s serving other people. It’s not letting yourself turn inward and collapse interiorly. It’s working outward. It’s helping other people. That’s how you move ahead.

I read a couple of articles this week, including a tract from Jay Adams. It’s on the foyer table—on depression, right? Tremendous increase in depression in our world today. And you know, Jay Adams—it’s funny reading the Jay Adams stuff because it’s probably, I don’t know, 30 years old or more. And it doesn’t have all the modern kind of niceties and hand-holding and stuff that goes on. Adams just sort of goes for the jugular when he talks about this stuff.

And what he says is, you know, if you’re slothful, if you don’t do tasks, that leads to depression. And if you just get up and do the things you’re supposed to do, then you’re not going to be clinically depressed. Now, you’re still going to be blue. You’re still going to have problems. He’s not talking about that sort of stuff, but he says in terms of the great bulk of modern-day depression that’s treated with drugs—now, there is some brain chemistry stuff that is true—but a great bulk of it will be fixed, but at least with a number of people, they just start doing things, okay? They turn away from themselves.

You know what it’s like, right? I do. Get up on a day and maybe it’s a day off on Monday and I don’t know what I’m going to do, and “Oh, I just deserve a break today,” you know, and go to McDonald’s or whatever it is, and I should do this for the house and that for that. No, I had a great Monday this last Monday. You know why? Because as soon as I got up, I started calling people. I called my insurance company because trees came down and tree limbs came down in my backyard. I got a window guy out to fix a broken window that had developed in one of our areas. I made several calls like that. I called the tree guy to take out a huge maple tree we’ve got. And I felt so good about myself, you know, halfway through the day. I thought, “Yeah, this is a great day.”

Yet, we don’t really understand what we need a lot of times. And what we need—what will produce satisfaction, what will give us the joy of the Lord—is competence, faithfulness, diligence, stepping up to do tasks for other people. That’s the joy of the Lord. And as we do that, he’ll give us greater responsibilities to do, whether it’s in our work or church or family, and that’ll be enhanced joy from the Lord.

So you know, service—now the source of all this is the God who is competent—capital C—right? And he is the source of our competence. As one commentator put it, “You will always be competent why you are dependent on God, knowing following Jesus, which is what our lives are about. We’re disciples of Christ, and we follow him. Now, Jesus is a reflection of the pure competence of God. And to the extent that we stay close with Jesus and walk with him into whatever we do tomorrow, we’re going to increase in competence because his paths overflow with blessing. His paths overflow with competence.

In 2 Corinthians 3—and now this is the Holman Standard Bible translation of these verses—he says: “It’s not that we are competent. This is Paul talking about the task of evangelism and discipleship. “It’s not that we are competent in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our competence is from God. He has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the spirit.”

So Paul, in looking at the apostolic office, said, “Who’s ready for this stuff? Nobody. But God, who is the source of all competence, makes us competent to do the tasks and callings that he has given us to do.”

I mentioned earlier being letters from God. 2 Corinthians 3:1-3. “Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need some letters of recommendation to you or from you? So, how do you know if somebody’s competent? Letter of recommendation. We got a candidate we’ll be talking to this Thursday for the associate pastor job from Scotland. And we’ll look at his references, right?

He goes on to say, though: “You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, whether written rather on our hearts, to be known and read by all. And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the spirit of the living God.”

You see, that’s who we are called to be. The source of competence is our relationship with the triune God who is all-competent. And as we follow in that, we become competent. And then we are these letters, these representations of what Christians are all about. They’re not to be seen as mediocre people.

If we’re unfaithful in small tasks, God help us. God chastise us if we’re not diligent in doing our work tomorrow. If we’re not faithful in following through on tasks we commit to do, whether here in the church, in our homes, at our workplace. If we’re not timely in our faithfulness—to get to work on time, or even a little early—and in completing a task well done. If we don’t have a desire to serve, to stand before rulers, superiors, desiring a commission that we can serve that person in our workplace. If instead we want everybody to serve us, if we are those kind of people, and if we’re people that don’t ever step up unless somebody really pins us to the mat to make us do something—if that’s who we are, we’re a letter of a different God because we’re following a different God.

God is a God of competence, faithfulness, diligence, training, step-up-ness. That’s who God is. God has called us to be his letters to the world.

Jesus Christ in Luke 19:13 says that he called ten of his servants, and this is a parable again, but it has application. He delivered to them ten talents and said to them, “Do business till I come.” You’re here as people who have been called to be disciples of Jesus. And he has given you talents. He has given you competencies. He has given you these things. And he says, “Exercise those gifts and abilities that I’ve given you with all diligence, being fervent in spirit. Be competent as letters of the Lord Jesus Christ tomorrow when you go to the workplace.”

Jesus says in John 12:26, “If anyone serves me, let him follow me. Where I am is competence. There my servant will be also. If anyone serves me, him my Father will love.”

The standing before king before kings is ultimately a picture of the right relationship we have to the King of Kings, and through him to the Father. And as we move in competency, then God blesses us with his blessing as we stand before him. That’s what we’re here today to do. We’re here today to mature in our competence. He’s here today to give us more gifts and talents so that we would be competent, so that we would enter into the joy of the Lord tomorrow by being faithful and in greater and greater responsibility.

So we would commit ourselves and commit the training of our children to competency in everything that we put our hand to do. Let’s have that attitude as we come forward with our tithes and offerings.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for today. Thank you for who you are, Lord God. And thank you for the wonderful way you impart these gifts to us of faithfulness and diligence, training us for particular tasks, giving us an attitude that wants to volunteer, shoot our hand into the air when something needs being done. Help us, Lord God, to be people known as those that just do it. Bless us, Lord God, with competency this week, that we might be effective letters from you. In Jesus’ name we pray.

Amen.