Community Covenant Church - Sunday Celebrations

August 20, 2006

Work: #1 – Intended & Rejected

Genesis 1:26-31; 3:16-24

Two quick stories:

Maria Brunner's husband was unemployed, so she found herself supporting him and their three young children by cleaning other people's houses in there town of Poing, Germany. Despite his unemployment, Maria’s husband somehow managed to run up quite a number of unpaid parking tickets. The bill totaled nearly $5,000. Mr. Brunner kept the tickets a secret from his wife, but as the owner of the vehicle, she was ultimately held responsible. Maria’s income from house-cleaning could not pay the fine, so unless her husband come up with the money, she faced the possibility of spending three months behind bars in the local jail.

In the midst of this dire situation, perhaps you can relate with, or at least appreciate Maria's reaction. For she declared,

"I've had enough of scraping a living for the family…. As long as I get food and a hot shower every day, I don't mind being sent to jail. I can finally get some rest and relaxation."

Police reported that when they went to arrest Maria, she seemed really happy to see them. . .and repeatedly thanked them for arresting her." The police also noted that while most people taken into custody hide their heads in shame, Maria "smiled and waved as she was driven off to jail."

John Beukema, Western Springs, Illinois; sources: "Family of the Week," www.timesonline.co.uk (5-15-05); "I’m Ready; Let’s Go," (Modofoed)

Story #2

Two ministerial students from Birmingham, Alabama, were doing summer evangelistic work in a rural area near Montgomery. One hot day they stopped their car in front of a farmhouse and proceeded up the path through a gauntlet of screaming children and barking dogs. When they knocked on the screen door, the woman of the house stopped her scrubbing over a tub and washboard, brushed back her hair, wiped perspiration from her brow, and asked them what they wanted.

"We would like to tell you how to obtain eternal life," said one of the student.

The tired homemaker hesitated for a moment and then replied, "Thank you, but I don't believe I could stand it."

Source: Derric Johnson, Easy Doesn't Do It, (Y.E.S.S. Press, 1991), p. 217

What do these stories have in common?

Two people whose lives have been taken over by their work. One preferred jail to work, while the other used humor to suggest that she saw death as a blessed relief from the life she was living.

Can you relate to these women? Has your work so defined your life in negative ways that jail or even death seem like good solutions?

When asked about their attitude toward “work”, Americans have definite opinions:

In Stud Terkel’s bestselling book Working, he summarized early on that:

This book, being about work, is by its very nature, about violence – to the spirit as well as to the body. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.” (p. xi)

A recent report from CareerBuilder.com stated that "nearly one-in-four workers say they are currently dissatisfied with their jobs." Also according to this same report "Six-in-ten workers say they plan to leave their jobs for other pursuits in the next two years."

Citation: http://careerplanning.about.com/b/a/047245.htm

Those six-in-ten are probably not going to jail, or to heaven in the next two years, but they are planning to go somewhere else... to some other work arrangement, because what they are presently experiencing is work which neither satisfies them nor fulfills their goals.

For scores of people, “work” is in many ways a four-letter” word. But despite what people say, God offers us good news;

For while work is viewed by many at a curse or penalty to be endured in life, it was God’s intention, and is His plan for our future, to experience work as a gift and blessing in this life.

Over the next two weeks I want us to consider a Christian understanding of work. This week I will explore God’s intentions as seen the creation account, as well as our current status defined after sin had its effect on our work. Next Sunday I plan to bring insights from God’s Word that will help us all to move toward the blessings God intended us to experience through our work. Again, this week we do a “reality check” and define our situation. Next week, a practical application of how God is redeeming “work” for those who trust in Him.

1. God defined “work”.

As we gather to seek truth about “work”, let us then open God’s Word to understand how God originally defined our work:

Genesis 1:26-31

26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."

27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."

29 Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. 30 And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food." And it was so.

31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.

In Genesis 2:15, amid a second creation account which places a greater emphasis upon the relationships between God and humanity, and between man and woman, we hear again what we might label a condensed first “job description”.

The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden

to work it and take care of it.

From these two passages in Genesis, what can we conclude about humanity and work? Very simply, we can conclude that God calls us to work in partnership with Him.

Imagine this truth for a second. You were just created by God, and immediately you were given responsibility. This Almighty Being has laid this new, pristine, unpolluted world at your feet, and declares that He trusts you enough to work it... to “tend to it”, to “care for it”... to “rule over it”... to “subdue it”.

God doesn’t set you up to be 1 of 10 “apprentice” wana-bes, competing week after week with other contestants to manage a new Trump tower construction in Chicago, or supervise a Trump development in Hawaii. God places you in his perfect garden and says “reflect my image”;

- be creative; multiply and fill the earth! Raise children,

love grandchildren.

- organize things; name the birds and fish, the livestock and other critters that scurry along the ground; bear rule over them

- Discover fruits and vegetables; pretend you’re Emeril Lagasse and craft some recipes.

In the beginning, our work reflected the very image of our creator, for our work not only helped to provide for our needs, it looked to the future and the needs of others who would “fill the earth”.

While we are certainly not God, God calls us to work in partnership with Him, and in so doing we find great purpose in our work. What we did contributed to life. We planted the seed, God made it grow, and the world was fed. Basic but purposeful.

And yet, it was shortly after God’s invitation to work, that everything changed;

2. Our Sin warped our experience of “work”.

Ben Patterson, author of Serving God, as well as an excellent small group Bible Study on the subject of “Work”, summarized our present work dilemma:

Before the Fall, work was a freedom, a gift, a “may” (not a must), a “blessing” (not a curse), a way of enjoying communion and partnership with God. After the Fall, work became contractual, a bitter necessity, a sweat-of-the-brow drudgery, an obligation complicated by resistance and opposition, even distress, anxious worry, and death. Before the Fall we ruled over our work;

now we are slaves to it.

Citation: Patterson, Ben, WORK: Serving God by What We Do, IVP 1994, p. 54.

Listen to the description God gives us in His Word, of the world after we fell into sin:

Genesis 3:16-24

16 To the woman he said,
       "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
       with pain you will give birth to children.
       Your desire will be for your husband,
       and he will rule over you."

17 To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,'
       "Cursed is the ground because of you;
       through painful toil you will eat of it
       all the days of your life.

18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.

19 By the sweat of your brow
       you will eat your food
       until you return to the ground,
       since from it you were taken;
       for dust you are
       and to dust you will return."

20 Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.

21 The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. 22 And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." 23 So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

You may ask yourself why I included the curse given to Eve, the woman, along with Adam’s curse which seems to speak more directly to “work”. That is because being “fruitful” and “multiplying” is to it’s greatest measure the work of women.

It is also interesting to note that the same Hebrew word for “pain” in childbirth is used for the “toil” of work – a word that means “labor” or “travail”. (We sensed that “labor” in the words of the women in our opening stories, didn’t we?)

Charles Colson noted in his book, How Now Shall We Live, that “both of the central tasks of human life – making a living and raising a family – are fraught with pain and difficulty”. (p. 384) after human being fell into sin.

The message is obvious; perhaps too simple for many to accept, but we are responsible for taking God’s blessing of “work” and turning it into labor; drudgery; a chore, “toil”, “the grind”.

Donald Miller, the highly praised Christian author of Blue Like Jazz, wrote in another book entitled Searching for God Knows What;

I believe, without question, that none of us are happy in the way we were supposed to be happy. I believe that nobody on this planet is so secure, so confident in their state that they feel the way Adam and Eve felt in the Garden before they knew they were naked. I believe we are in the wreckage of a war, a kind of Hiroshima, a kind of Mount Saint Helens, with souls distorted like the children of Chernobyl. As terrible as it is to think about these things, as ugly as it is to face them, I have to see the world this way in order for it to make sense. I have to believe something happened, and we are walking around holding our wounds.

Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What (Nelson, 2004), p. 87-88

I hope in this mornings message you have seen how very important it is for us to have a correct perspective on work; to understand what was meant to be, to accept why our work falls short these days, but to also recognize God’s activity to help us to again reach the “goodness” He intended for us to experience in our work. For indeed this is a Christian understanding of work, not necessarily shared by other people.



For if we were to contrast our creation according to Genesis with the creation of the first human beings according to Mesopotamian tradition, we would see that in both, the recipe starts with dust or clay, the very earth itself, but it is with the second ingredient that the difference is clearly seen. In the Enuma Elish, one epic Babylonian myth of creation, humanity's dust is mixed with the blood of a demon god killed for his treachery against the second generation of gods. Coming from this point of view humans are demons from their creation. In Atrahasis another ancient Babylonian writing, the second ingredient added to dust is not the blood of demon gods but the spit of the gods, a far cry from the glorious breath of the Creator we have in our scripture accounts! The creation process according to Mesopotamian tradition fits well with the overall low view of humanity professed by that culture. After all, according to Atrahasis humans were created with the express purpose of relieving the lesser gods from the arduous labor of digging irrigation ditches. On the other hand, the Genesis account conforms well to the high view of Scripture concerning humanity. Human beings, male and female, were created in the image of God. Tremper Longman III, Immanuel in Our Place (P&R Publishing, 2001), p. 4

The hope which the Bible gives to Christians, is that despite the frustrations we experience in our work, this was not what God intended, nor what He will allow to continue.

- We are neither the offspring of demons, nor

- the spit of God designed to dig the ditches God didn’t want to dig.

For God’s Word proclaims that our Creator is a God of redemption and forgiveness. Not only have our souls been redeemed for all eternity through the death of Jesus, but all things (including our work) are being reconciled to God; being made right again, through Jesus death.

Colossians 1:19-20

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

Next week we will explore how we can experience the joy God’s originally intended for our “work”, but this week let us simply go in the peace of knowing what God has made possible for His children, for those creatures created in His image, and invited to partner with Him to accomplish the work of His Kingdom. AMEN

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION (r).