Wisdom and Work

You know, we have plenty of things that we say today. Many hands make light work. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Easy come, easy go. You know, he’s as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike. That’s maybe not one that’s that memorable, but we have all these funny little statements that we just say and we just spit off easily. And yet these proverbs are like that. But these proverbs, again, are different, because they’re biblical proverbs. They convey God’s wisdom. They’re inspired by the Holy Spirit through these authors like Solomon and a few others. They tell us about the wisdom of God and how he wants us to live.

It’s also important to note that the proverbs are not guarantees. We should understand what genre of Scripture we’re reading. They’re not a promise in every single case scenario. They’re not meant to be. Again, they’re meant to be proverbs. They’re not promises. They are generally applied wisdom that is true. Like I said, if we say many hands make light work, too many cooks spoil the broth, well, which is it? They can’t both be true. Is it too many or too few? But the idea is that no, they both can be true, depending on how we apply them, what the circumstances are. So that’s true of many of the Proverbs. There is wisdom and there is truth in them all, but we don’t see them as absolute guarantees in every single case scenario. But they are true.

So again, like I said, we’re going to look at wisdom and work. Wisdom and work. And the proverb gives us three calls for us to live by. Firstly, don’t waste your life with laziness. Second, go and learn hard work. And lastly, go and work for the glory of God.

1 Don’t waste your life with laziness

So firstly, don’t waste your life with laziness. Don’t waste your life with laziness. Let’s see what God’s word has to say through these proverbs. So Proverbs 6, and we’ll read from verse 6 down to 11:

Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest.

How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you arise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man.

This sluggard that we see here is somebody that appears and reappears throughout the Proverbs. You may be wondering, okay, so what is a sluggard? You could probably think of an animal with a very similar name, and that would give you an idea of what a sluggard is. The name comes from the same root word as slug. So a sluggard is somebody who’s sluggish. They’re slow, they’re lazy. They’re somebody who’s slow to get work done. One of the commentators talked about honey. If you get a big jar of thick honey and you unscrew the jar and you start to slowly pour it out, the way it slowly oozes out of the jar and you can’t even catch it and it goes everywhere, that’s the idea of something that’s sluggish.

Now I don’t know if you’ve heard this story before. This is supposed to be a true story, but I’ve heard it used for the US Navy and the Royal Navy, so I don’t know, but we’ll go with the Royal Navy. Apparently one of the captains of a Royal Navy ship was witnessed by fellow sailors. He got up and he was eating his breakfast first thing in the morning, barely awake, barely had his eyes open, and he was eating his bagel. He sat down in his usual comfy chair, but as he sat down, the morning sun was beaming through the porthole right onto his face. And he, with this zombie-like face as he was trying to eat his bagel, didn’t want the sun. So what he was witnessed doing was calling the ops room and saying, “20 degrees port side,” and he moved the entire ship, thousands of tons of steel, hundreds of sailors, just to get the sun off his face, rather than just getting up and sitting in a different chair. That’s laziness. I mean, that takes the trophy of laziness, and apparently this guy is a legend for being so lazy.

But that’s an idea of laziness. I want us to realise it doesn’t necessarily mean being physically slow. I know plenty of people who are slow, they work at their own pace, and they’re very hardworking. They’re not lazy. So it’s not the idea that we all need to speed up and have a heart attack. It’s not about being physically slow or physically fast. The idea is that this person is lazy. They don’t want the work, basically. They often make the soft choice, they take the path of least resistance, they want to do the bare minimum that they have to do.

And because we do underplay laziness, we do take it quite lightly. But God doesn’t take it lightly. To God it is a serious sin, because he sees what it causes. He sees the consequences of laziness. And also it’s because it’s opposed to the way God has made us. He’s designed us. It’s opposed to the way that God wants us to live. And ultimately it’s a serious waste of life.

Do you see this lazy person? We’ll look through just some of the examples of how the sluggish person is described, the things they’re marked by, as we look at a few other proverbs. One of the things we see is that they waste opportunity after opportunity. You know, their life’s motto is maybe tomorrow, maybe tomorrow, and they essentially just live a life of maybe tomorrows. Proverbs 12 says, “those who work the land will have abundant food, but those who chase fantasies have no sense.” So they’re also marked by living their life chasing fantasies, you know, daydreaming, or just seeking worthless pursuits. And the proverb says that that person has no sense. Again, they’re wasting the life God has given them.

Or maybe you can relate to the sluggard down in verse 9, where it seems their greatest battle is with their duvet every day. In verses 9 and 10, “How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you arise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest.” And Proverbs 26 also says, “as a door turns on its hinges, so a sluggard turns on their bed.” In fact, if you want to turn to Proverbs 26, this is just another section that’s dedicated for a few verses to this sluggard. Proverbs 26:13. Proverbs 26:13.

The sluggard says, there’s a lion in the road. There’s a lion in the streets.

As a door turns on its hinges, so does a sluggard on his bed. The sluggard buries his hand in the dish. It wears him out to bring it back to his mouth. The sluggard is wiser in his own eyes than seven men who can answer sensibly.

So again, we see there that he begins by saying, there’s a lion in the streets. There’s a lion in the street. What’s he talking about? Well, the reality is there’s not a lion in the street. What he’s doing is he’s making excuses. He’s worried about the danger that’s out there, the consequences, the risk that there is out there of actually getting up and taking an opportunity, doing something. He doesn’t want to take the risk. He doesn’t want to leave his comfort zone. That’s what’s happening.

And if you want to go back to your passage in chapter 6, again, this person seems to love their bed. Now, we all should enjoy our bed. There’s definitely a right place for going home, going to our bed when we’re tired. And we should always be thankful, genuinely thankful to God that we have comfy beds, we have a roof over our heads. The idea is, is this something that we just live for? That we can’t wait to just be in our beds and we never really want to get out from under them? Or maybe more appropriately, because not many people had sofas in their day, maybe it’s more appropriately the sofa. Do we spend too much time on the sofa? Do we crave time on the sofa? Proverbs are saying this is not good.

The other thing we see in the proverb is that they can’t even seem to make up their own mind. They can’t make a decision. You see there in verse 9, it says, how long are you going to lie there? You know, when are you going to get up? And it’s like there’s no answer. You can just imagine them shrugging their shoulders. When are you going to get up? A lot of teenagers do that as well, but this is the idea that they can’t even make a decision.

Now don’t get me wrong, this lazy person that’s described here, this sluggard, might get a bit of a burst of energy. They will get a little bit of an impulse now and again. But what we see in the Proverbs is that when they do, they don’t usually finish it. They give in or they make excuses. They don’t really stick to things. We even saw it in Proverbs 26, it spoke about them putting their hand in the bowl and it wore them out to even bring it back to their mouth. That’s a pretty extreme example of laziness. But the idea is that they don’t finish things, they don’t see things through.

Now I hope, in the nicest way, that this all hurts a little bit. I hope this is making us all feel a little bit uncomfortable. Because there is a sluggard in each one of us. We may not be, our whole lives may not be characterised by this, but there is a sluggard in each one of us. It should make us a bit uncomfortable. Because we know this, don’t we? There is a voice of laziness in the back of our heads. You know, when you have things to do and instead I’ll just grab my phone and start scrolling or doing something else on my phone. Or I have something to do and I’ll grab something to eat first. Maybe you know you have a tough conversation to have with somebody and, actually, I’ll take care of this and this and this first. Basically procrastinating.

Because you see, the lazy person doesn’t always look like a slug. But I want us to realise this. Laziness is actually very easy to hide. Laziness is actually very easy to hide, especially with hustle and bustle and busyness. How often do we do ten other things and yet neglect the most important thing that we’re supposed to be doing that day? Or put it off?

So overcoming laziness involves overcoming that immediate feeling of what I want to do in the moment, what feels good in the moment, and looking instead to what is important. There are a lot of these proverbs that talk about this, and it’s about looking to the future. You see this idea of looking to the future, planning ahead, again overcoming what feels good in the moment by doing what is right in the moment.

And we see this. Proverbs 31 is a great example, the virtuous woman. She looks to the future, she plans ahead. It says she laughs at the winter, the snow to come. Her family are clothed, she’s not afraid of these things. And even Proverbs 20 talks about the sluggard, that they don’t go out and plough in the autumn, they don’t work the fields in the autumn, and yet they go and they look for crop in the summer, and they have nothing. So there’s this idea of needing to plan for the future, to do what’s important in the moment rather than what we feel like doing in the moment.

So Emmanuel, instead of living with this idea of maybe tomorrow, remember that laziness today brings pain tomorrow. Laziness today brings pain tomorrow. God doesn’t want us to do that. He doesn’t want us to waste our life with laziness. And we’ll continue to go on to see.

2 Go and learn hard work

So next, the next call that Proverbs gives us is the call to go and learn hard work. Go and learn hard work. We want to read from verse 6 to 8. It says:

Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest.

So this lazy person is called to go and look at an ant. Kind of a bit humbling, isn’t it? Humble yourself, go and look at an ant, consider her ways, go and learn from the ant, go and learn hard work. There’s a guy on YouTube that I found in all of my research for this sermon who does things with ants. He sets them little puzzles and problem-solving things. He’ll fill a wee trench with water and all of a sudden the ants can’t reach the rest. And you watch them all scurrying along and getting a leaf or a stick and they make a bridge over the water and they all go over the water, or they make a bridge out of themselves. All these little problem-solving things, it’s amazing, it’s quite fascinating to watch if you’ve the time. But it’s a good idea of being able to see how ants work without anyone coming out and giving them instruction.

What we see from the ant is that they have their own self-motivation. They all have this little inner drive within them. It says, “without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer.” The ant doesn’t need someone with a whip. They don’t need somebody constantly nagging at them to get them to do things. You don’t see them clocking in and having to clock out and going off behind a corner to have a smoke break. They just keep doing what they’re doing. They have this inner drive. So you learn from the little ant inner drive, hard work, and again this idea of future planning. We see it’s gathering bread, it’s lifting the crumbs that we drop in a picnic or something. And they gather it up for harvest. So we can learn from the ant in this inner drive, this hard work, this planning for the future.

And you might be thinking, okay, this is good, work is important, I should learn to work, but why? Why is it so important? Well, friends, as shocking as it may be, God made us to work. God made us to work. Work is actually a good gift from God. He didn’t place Adam and Eve in the Maldives, you know, on a hammock drinking margaritas on a beach somewhere. He put them in a garden to work, to tend, to grow things, to take care of it, to rule over his creation. But of course we know that the fall came, that sin entered the world, and the ground was cursed. Work was cursed. Work became harder, it became corrupted. Our attitude to work became corrupted. But the mandate is the same. We are still to work, we’re still to produce, we’re still to create. It is still a gift, but it’s just harder now.

And as I was thinking about this, I realised there are so many parents, so many kids in our church, and I think it’s important for us to realise that parents, we should example this to our kids and we should teach our kids to work. Men, work hard. Don’t neglect your family, work hard at home too. Work hard and teach your sons to work. Ladies, work hard, teach your daughters to work. We need to learn all of this to teach our kids to work. I was listening to an episode by a guy called Jonny Ardavanis. I would recommend it, and it’s literally called Teach Your Kids to Work, and it’s well worth looking at if you’re a parent.

But basically the idea is, we need to forget about the idea of, okay, but my kids have all their lives to work, let them be children. Yes, they do, yes, let them be kids, of course, let them enjoy their childhood. We’re not sending them down to mines or to a factory somewhere. But we want to teach them what work is, that it’s a gift from God, how we’re to work, why we’re to work. Teach them from a young age. We don’t want them to just play and be entertained all of their childhood until they’re 17, 18, and then they become miserable most of their waking life because they know they have to work. We want, from a young age, to get the toddler to pick up their toys, the six-year-old to set the table, as imperfectly as all that will be. Whatever age, cut the grass, help with dinner, give them little things to do.

Probably more challenging, because we’re good at giving jobs to others, is that we need to set an example of that as parents, to work hard and not to grumble and complain when we do have work to do, but to show that we should do it heartily and enjoy it.

Because the second greatest commandment is what? It’s to love our neighbour. That’s our second greatest commandment. But do you realise that work is a form of loving our neighbour? Work is a form of loving our neighbour. When we work and when others work, we’re producing something, we’re providing a service, we’re achieving something. We all have electricity because somebody’s had to work at that. We have milk in our fridges because somebody’s got up and milked the cows. The fact that there’s food on the shelves of the shop is because a lorry driver brought it there, and everyone in the production line. You know, the builder had to build our houses. We can drive somewhere because a mechanic fixes our car, or somebody builds the roads. You know, you want a coffee, you can go to a barista, he’s going to make you a coffee. Work is actually helping others, it’s serving others, it’s loving our neighbour.

But even now, as we sit here, there are people working in the crèche looking after kids, in children’s church. The musicians came, they prepared, they practised, they’re here. The sound guys at the back, they’re working. Those who set out the tables, hoovered, tidied up, the electricity’s on, the heating’s on. All of those things are work, and yet they facilitate this. By working, we’re loving our neighbour, and we’re caring for one another. Because again, work is a gift from God.

So we want to learn hard work. But again, not just to work hard, but why we work. And what we’ll see next is what will truly motivate us to work hard, and how to work. And that is working for the glory of God.

3 Go and work for the glory of God

So our next call: go and work for the glory of God. Go and work for the glory of God. If you want to look at verses 10 and 11:

A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man.

So once more we see this person living a life of a little, a little bit more. A little bit more sleep, a little bit more slumber, a little bit more of this, a little bit more of that. And yet a little over everyday choices, well, it’s not a little anymore. It leads to a lot. It leads to an entire change of direction of life. It leads to so many important things that are left undone, unachieved. Lost, wasted. Again, we see the need there at the end, and want will come upon them like a robber, like an armed man. So basically, the consequences of that life will come crashing down on them.

But what we see is that this is not true for the one who works hard for the Lord, who commits their work and their ways to him. If you want to turn to Proverbs 16, verse 3, it’s the last place I’ll get you to turn to. Proverbs 16, verse 3. It says:

Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established.

Commit your work to the Lord and your plans will be established.

So our relationship with work, our relationship with our plans, should look different. It should be given to the Lord. We work for the Lord. We work and lay all of our plans in his hands.

You know, a few hundred years ago in Europe, Europe was mainly under Roman Catholicism. And at the time, there was a very strict divide between what was seen as the sacred and the secular. There was the sacred and the secular. There was the clergy that were up here and everyone else was the laity, they were down here. They were seen as lesser, less important. Your work, what you did, wasn’t as worthwhile. It wasn’t as holy. But what the Reformers did, part of it was they brought back what Scripture teaches about work, what Scripture teaches about vocation, the priesthood of all believers. They taught the idea that the shoemaker was as important as the priest or the reverend or the minister, the mother raising her children was as important as the judge. Whatever it was, they’re equal in worth.

This is true. We quite often talk about, you know, he does secular work, or what are you doing, secular work? But we shouldn’t talk about secular work. For the believer, there is no secular work. For us, every role, every sphere that we’re in, every vocation that we find ourselves in is sacred, and it matters to God. It matters to God. For the believer, all work is sacred. It’s like we saw, if we commit our work to him, it’s not in vain. If we commit our work to him, he establishes it. He blesses our work.

You know, 1 Corinthians tells us, “so whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all for the glory of God.” And we read it in Colossians at the start, that as we are to serve our earthly masters, whatever way that works out, we’re to serve them “not by eye service as people pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord.” We do often forget this as Christians, don’t we? We do forget this. We can be caught up in just the mindset of the world that wants us to just do what work we have to do to get by. You know, then we can just live for leisure, live for the evening, live for the weekend, where we think that work is just something that we have to do.

Now again, like we said, work is corrupted by sin. Work will be difficult. Our hearts have been corrupted, and our attitude to work. The people we work with aren’t always the easiest to get on with. But work was always meant to be, and is, a good gift from God. There’s so much dignity and satisfaction and so much good for humanity that is achieved in the purpose of God-honouring work. Joel Beeke actually said, work is better than play. What he meant is you can go and you can enjoy yourself, but when you work, you achieve something, you’ve made something, you leave with a sense of satisfaction and purpose. He says, work is better than play.

But when we think about it, God is a God that works. God is a God that works. God creates and sustains all of life. He recreates every person who comes to him. He works in and through all things. He listens to our prayers. He answers our prayers according to his will. God designed work. God designed rest. But like God, we’ve been made in his image, which is why we should want to create and design and build and fix things and help people and serve others. It’s why we want to make the most beautiful painting for his glory, or build a building for his glory, or make the best coffee for his glory, or sell a phone, or whatever it is that we do. We want to do it for his glory. He’s made us to create and design and work.

And I want us to realise that in glory, in heaven, we’re not just going to be floating around on a cloud for all eternity. We’re not just going to be in an endless choir for all eternity. I may be speculating a bit, but I think that we are given new bodies. There’s a new heaven and a new earth. I believe we will be working, we will be producing, we will be learning, we will be creating, and we will be doing all of that in perfect harmony, the way it was always meant to be, giving glory to God. We’re made to work for him. These are wonderful things. So you can see why laziness wastes it and distorts it, and why God sees it as a sin, why it is serious to him.

So just to conclude. As a Christian, whether you’re feeding a baby or changing a nappy, again, a lot of mothers with a new baby, you’re maybe used to being busy, working hard, and you’re at home and you’ve been in the house all day and you just think, I have all these tasks I want to do, and you feel unproductive. Yeah, what you’re doing is the most productive thing. God has given you the gift of a little child that is totally dependent on you for its existence, and you’ve given yourself to that child. So whether you’re doing that, whether you’re digging a ditch, prescribing medicine, teaching children, printing, accounting, fixing things, selling things, designing things. Maybe you’re in retirement or thinking about retirement. How can you use that to work at stuff, to invest in relationships, to serve? Whatever we’re doing, it is so important to the Lord. It is so important.

Because this is 90% of what Christians do. It’s 90% of what Christians have always done, is work at things, is do things that seem like just ordinary secular things. If it’s 90% of what Christians do in our waking day, then of course to God it is extremely important. He calls us to do all of it wholeheartedly, and to do it for him. And in that, to be a witness to him. To be salt and light wherever we find ourselves.

Emmanuel, your danger and mine is probably not that we’re all going to become beggars or die in poverty, or that we’re going to be this person who just always lies in their bed all day. Our danger is that we’ll become, you know, decent, respectable, but mediocre, half-hearted Christians, where our years are mainly given to other things. Again, the sofa, TV, phone, putting things on the credit card and worrying about it later, procrastinating. Just thinking of maybe tomorrow. That’s our danger, just going through the motions, and wasting the life that God has given us. We don’t want to be just mediocre, half-hearted Christians all our days, but rather to work excellently at what’s in front of us, to work wholeheartedly for him. And again, that looking to the future, planning practically, yes, in this life, but looking to the future of what’s ahead, looking to the reward that is in him.

So again, for Christians, the opposite of laziness is not just work hard, but work hard with excellence, with gladness, with purpose. With joy, as if Jesus himself asked us to do it. Because he has. He has. We all need the help of the Lord to do this. By doing it, we’re loving our neighbour. We’re bringing ultimate glory to God our Father. Amen.

Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word. Lord, we know that this is something that is very practical. Lord, it’s something we don’t always think about, and yet, Lord, it is the most of what we do day to day. We pray, Lord, that you would shape our thinking by your Spirit, that you would help us to be less like the sluggard and more diligent in our work, that we would work wholeheartedly, that you would shape our thinking, Lord, to work for you, to work for your glory, to love our neighbour, to see the good gift that it is. We thank you that you are a God that works. We pray you would help us to be faithful in all that we do, and that we do it all for your glory. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.