Genesis: Rest to Work

Our scripture reading this morning is in Genesis 2.

It's not printed in your bulletin, so uh just listen as I read it.

I'm gonna read uh Genesis two verses four through nine and then verse fifteen.

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, and the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no bush of the field was yet in the land, and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land, and was watering the whole face of the ground.

Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he put the man whom he formed, and out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.

The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Verse 15.

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

The word of the Lord.

So we're working our way through Genesis chapters one through three.

And this morning we are going to be in chapter two, we're gonna be chapter two, probably the next few Sundays.

And there's several different things to look at in chapter two, and one of them is work, career.

And maybe you're here and you're going, like, don't want to hear about it.

Like, I actually really look forward to the weekends and Sundays to not think about work and career.

It's the last thing I want to think about it.

So maybe you're here and you don't like your work.

Maybe you're here you're working a job hoping for another job.

Maybe you're here and you love your job.

Maybe you're here you have no job.

Maybe you're here, you're done working a job because you're retired, right?

But we all deal with this issue of work.

And I want to begin by telling you about my friend named Joe.

And so some of y'all met Joe, some of the men met Joe on the men's retreat uh last uh April, I think it was.

And Joe is an artist.

Joe grew up as an artist.

He's about 30, 35 years old now.

He wanted his art to be in museums and books.

I mean, he wanted to do something that would last.

Like he wanted legacy, is what he wanted with his life.

And he wanted young artists to discover his art, you know, on the walls of museums or find a book of his with all of his paintings, and they would find this book and they would be inspired.

They would become great artists.

And Joe is a talented artist.

And in graduate school, as he was studying art, he became, he he became aware that the worst thing, the worst thing you can be as a contemporary artist is uninteresting.

It's the worst thing.

That's the worst possible thing.

And then what's interesting is about that time he was becoming involved in the evangelical church.

At the same time, he found the same exact thought in the evangelical church.

That the worst thing that you can be as a Christian is uninteresting.

Is normal.

Right?

You've probably heard it.

God's given you these gifts and these talents, and he has.

He has.

He's given you.

So you must change the world with them.

I mean, it is up to you to change the world.

You cannot be normal.

You have to be exceptional in all ways.

And to end up anything less than radically, exceptionally changing the world means you have failed.

Well, that's what Joe was hearing.

Maybe you've heard it, maybe you have it.

And what that is, is basically saying that faith and meaning can't be quiet.

It has to be loud.

So Joe's painting, he's spending 10 hours a day painting with a canvas, he's teaching art to make it all work, to pay bills, but nothing's coming of it.

Nothing's coming of his art.

Nobody's recognizing it.

Nobody's, it's it's not making any progress.

And slowly that pressure is building, more and more pressure is building to be interesting, to be exceptional, and to be known and all of this, to be the bringer of the kingdom is what he was taught he should be.

And so, of course, he can't pull this off.

Because he was figuring out and finding out, you know what, he's just like me and he's like you.

He's just actually quite normal.

But unfortunately, he was taught that normal or quiet is bad.

And so he felt like a failure and he had a lot of shame because nobody knew his work, nobody knew his life.

And so Joe finally began to ponder a career change.

Now, this is this, he said, was almost like a sinful thought because he was a gifted artist.

And so he was taught his whole entire life that you take the best thing that you have and you turn it into your career and you change the world for God with this.

And so the idea that you would take the best thing you have and just treat it as a hobby or something you enjoy, but have a career shift to him, even this thought he didn't know what to do with it.

And so he did what everybody does.

He called a meeting with his pastor.

Help me work it out.

That's what we do.

Even I do it.

I have a pastor.

I call him.

Please help me.

I need help.

And so he sits down with my friend Jonathan, who was his pastor.

He lays it all out.

He says, here's what I've been thinking, here's what I've been taught, here's how I'm reacting to it, here's how I feel, here's what I'm thinking now.

I'm thinking about a career change away from art.

This feels like sin.

This feels like I'm walking away from God's calling on my life, and yet I want to do that.

I feel like I want to just take a break.

And he says, Jonathan, his pastor, told him the most relieving, loving, gospel-filled thing he had ever heard in his whole life.

Jonathan just looked him in the face and said, Joe, if you never pick up a paintbrush again, God loves you.

He said that thought had never really entered his heart.

And Jonathan said, You know what?

You can change careers if you want to.

Your work doesn't have to define you.

You've already been defined by God and Jesus.

And so this was revolutionary for Joe.

He ended up taking a job renovating somebody's bathroom.

Art on the walls of museums, renovating somebody's bathroom.

And you know what's interesting about it?

He loved it.

He really enjoyed it.

So now he sells tubs and showers and installs them, and he likes it.

He likes that it's not permanent.

He likes that it just can be work, right?

Like it doesn't have to mean everything all the time.

But he likes the fact there's some artistry, there's some construction, you're helping people, you're doing something, there's progression to it.

So he likes all of that.

And here's my point to that whole story.

Joe has learned that work has meaning in and of itself.

Just the work.

The work itself has meaning.

Now, I realize that you could find that story appalling.

It's not a glory story.

The glory story is the opposite.

The tub guy, right, becomes the artist.

He suffers, he's installing tubs, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, he's painting on the side, he gets discovered, all of a sudden he's in New York, he's in LA, he's all over.

You know, praise God, it's all because of Jesus, right?

I mean, that's the glory story.

And you know what?

Those stories exist, those stories are good, those stories are filled with good sacrificial lessons and hard work.

Those are good stories.

And you know what?

Those stories are sometimes need to be our stories, even, working out our callings of what we want to do with our lives.

But, but, but, but, it is possible, maybe you're a little bit like a lot of us.

Filled with great gifts and talents and even callings that are working themselves out in a thousand ways in normal lives with normal jobs.

And sometimes you work one job to get to another one, to get to a job perhaps that feels like this intersection of calling and work, and that's fantastic.

And sometimes you know what?

And you know it, work just feels like work.

And sometimes you're asking that question when you're doing that work, does this mean anything?

Like, what am I doing?

Why am I spending my days doing this?

Does this mean anything?

And so we go back to Genesis 2, and Adam's just, and verse 15, the Lord God took the man, put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

He's just gardening.

This is about as simplistic as it gets.

And work arrives before the fall.

So the fall, this is when sin arrives into the world.

Adam has rebelled, Adam and you have rebelled from God in Genesis chapter 3.

Genesis 3 · chapter mention

And so all that self-centeredness, self-absorption, self-redemption, greed, pride, lust, apathy, impatience, all the stuff we know.

We personally know it, right?

That doesn't even exist yet.

And so what we realize, this is point number one, a few points here, what we realize, work in its purest sense is good.

Work is good.

There's just something about work that's good for us.

Now, 2,000 years ago in a pre-Christian world, a little bit of a history lesson here, in a pre-Christian world, 2,000 years ago, there were two sharply contrasted views of work.

The first view is the Greek view.

And the Greek view said that manual work was considered a curse.

Work was demeaning, something to avoid.

There's nothing spiritual about it.

Aristotle said to be unemployed was actually good fortune because you'd have more time to contemplate life.

That was the Greek view.

And then you had this other view, the second view.

This is the Jewish view.

And the Jewish view, the biblical view, was had a high value on work, even manual labor, all work.

The Jewish people saw work as part of God's purposes for people from the very beginning.

It wasn't a result of sin and the world being messed up.

No, Adam was there tending a garden.

By the end of the third century, the church fathers had reverted back to this Greek view.

And what happened over time is clergy became more powerful, this hierarchy of vocation begins, and the contemplative life became the higher order, and manual labor became a lesser job.

Until the 1500s comes around.

In the 1500s, this guy named Martin Luther starts to read his Bible.

He starts reading the Bible and he discovers oh my gosh, I can't believe what we're saying, what's going on here.

Work is actually good.

Luther says, we can serve God through all task and all work.

Elevating contemplative life is false.

And so Luther forms this idea of what he called the doctrine of vocation, which states this, and this is so good for us, which states that the call to love your neighbor, the call to love your neighbor is fulfilled by everyday work, which means to be spiritual.

If you want to be spiritual, you can just work.

That's to be spiritual.

So point number two, responding to our call to love our neighbor is fulfilled by everyday work.

Now this week we gave away a couch at our house, a 16-year-old sofa bed.

Actually turns out to be harder than you think to give away a 16-year-old sofa bed, but we put it up on the Let Go app.

And then Tuesday evening, a guy named Justin shows up at my house to pick up the sofa bed.

And I meet Justin in the driveway.

I'm excited, somebody's going to take away a 16-year-old sofa bed out of my house.

No payment, don't need it, just take it, please.

And I meet Justin.

Justin installs guardrails.

That's what he does with his life.

That's his work.

And so I don't think much about it until the next day I'm driving down the highway.

And I start seeing guardrails everywhere.

And I'm like, that's what Justin does.

Justin installs guardrails.

And I'm going, I'm kind of thankful for these guardrails.

I've never really thought a lot about guardrails, but I'm driving along.

I'm going, there's a lot of guardrails out here, and there's a ditch over there, and there's stuff over here.

I'm pretty thankful.

Now, two days later, after that, I'm driving with my family.

We're driving along the expressway, huge traffic jam, and you know, immediately you're like, hey, check ways, check ways, you know, and so Christy pulls it up because there's an exit coming up.

You're going, we need to get off, and she wants us to get off.

So Wanda Ways, that's what we call her in our house.

Wanda ways, she takes us off, we skip around some side roads, we get back on the expressway, still some traffic, but you can see the break, and we get up there where the accident's at.

Two cars had kind of hit each other, gone to the grass median, and you know what stopped them from going to the other side of the expressway?

Guardrails.

Justin.

Now, here's what I bet.

I'm taking a taking a big guess here.

I'm guessing when Justin installs guardrails, he doesn't think a lot of times how loving of an act it is.

I'm guessing like Debbie in accounting at the guardrail company doesn't work on Tuesday afternoon thinking this is such a loving act for the kingdom of God, for the people of this world.

I'm guessing Doug in the warehouse with the metal.

I'm guessing most days he doesn't think about that.

Then there's the road we were on, if you want to think about the road.

The aggregate materials for the road that get shipped to the road company that puts in the road.

So all the companies that make all the different aggregate, those are all different people that work, right?

And they have all their jobs.

And then the road company that installs the road, you have all those workers.

They use tools like big machines.

You've seen those machines, like gobbling up the old asphalt, putting down the new stuff.

People make those machines.

People make the parts for that go into those machines for the people on the road to build the road.

And not only that, but then there's companies on the other side of those parts that like mine the materials for the parts, for the machines, for the company that installs the road.

And all of these people are working jobs.

And I'm guessing a lot of them don't think how loving an act it is for us just to drive around.

We could do that with a million different things.

We could go around the room and pick your industry and we could figure out all the ways.

All these jobs mean so much.

And most of us just never stop to realize that just work a lot of times is extremely, extremely loving.

Point number three work in its purest sense, oh, this is good, is not about us becoming more.

Right?

Adam in the garden is before the fall.

It's before he felt the pressure to have to be more on his own, right?

Work was just work.

He didn't try to like redeem himself with his work.

He didn't try to add value to himself with his work.

He didn't try to absolve his guilt with his work.

It was just work.

Can you imagine being free from using career and work and status related to all of that and productivity and creativity?

Can you imagine being free from all of those things being a reflection on you trying to be more in this world?

See, work in its purest sense is not about us becoming more.

Now, listen to Paul here in 1 Thessalonians.

There's this passage.

Paul's writing a letter to a group of people who just didn't like the word.

They had gotten quite idle, they didn't care to work very much, and he's writing them a letter about work.

Here's what he says, 1 Thessalonians 4, 9 through 12.

Now, about brotherly love, we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other.

And in fact, you do love all the brothers throughout Macedonia.

Yet we urge you, brothers, to do so more and more.

Now listen to this, verse 11.

Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders, and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.

So to all the voices, right?

Because we hear them, we play them out in our mind, to all the voices we hear, that we have to be more and more and more, and we have to use our work for that.

Paul says, Hey, I got a goal for you.

Make it your goal to lead a quiet life.

You don't have to be a big shot.

You can have a quiet life.

You can work hard.

You can mind your own business.

That would be a good show.

Quiet.

Quiet.

Normal life.

It can be exceptional.

Last point, point number four.

We work from a place of rest, not for a place of rest.

Tim Keller, pastor and author, he says, if you decide to work for either status and money, okay, so if you decide to work for either status and money, either, A, work will become too important.

And then you begin to neglect other things, other priorities.

You lose sight of your family and your friendships, you become an unhealthy person, you're imbalanced, you burn out.

Or B can happen if you work for status and money.

Option B can occur and work's not important enough.

And you become idle, you become bored, you can become depressed.

Now, what's interesting about this is both of these paths are a restlessness of the soul.

The good news is that there is a work that rises out of rest.

It rises out of knowing you are already loved.

Do you remember when Jesus visits Mary and Martha at their house and Mary is at Jesus' feet?

Remember the story in Luke 10?

Mary is at Jesus' feet, resting, sitting.

She's at peace.

Martha is busy, she's working, she's productive, she's using her work to impress Jesus, to impress God.

That's what the story is telling us.

And then Martha gets upset about her sister, right?

Naturally.

And she says in Luke 10, 41 and 42, Martha and Martha, the Lord answered after Martha had said, Jesus, don't you care?

My sister isn't helping.

And then Jesus says, Martha and Martha, the Lord answered, You are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed.

Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.

Now, Jesus is not condemning work or productivity or creativity or your career or any of that.

Jesus is speaking to this busyness.

See, he knows what we need to know.

Only by coming to him can our hearts finally rest.

Only by coming to him do we get on the other side of the fall.

And we won't be perfect with this, right?

I mean, when it comes to career, we failed miserably, right, at using our career to try to justify our existence and ourselves, and then we get lazy with it or become overly focused with it, right?

We're failures before handling our career well.

But when we come to peace with Jesus, with God's provision for us, that He loves us always and forever, and the sacrifice of Christ, when we come and we have rest there, it begins to move us on the other side of the fall where Adam just worked.

That work can just be work.

Author Shauna Nequist, she wrote this book called Present Over Perfect.

And in an interview with Oprah, she was talking about her Christian life, her Christian work just starting to fall apart because she was just pressing so hard, harder and harder and harder and harder, just busier and busier and busier and busier, and she was just physically falling apart.

And so she changed stuff in her life to get a quieter life.

And she says this, I'm playing the long game.

I want to make a difference in the world through my whole life.

What that means is an intact soul.

It's a long-term life-giving relationship with God, is a marriage that can be built over decades, a relationship with my kids that extends into adulthood.

So the work that I do matters to me, but it all has to extend out of the center thing first.

And what she was talking about, that center thing, is being at rest in Jesus.

See, we often run about busying ourselves to feel redeemed and valued from one job to the next, thinking the next thing's gonna do it, the next thing's gonna do it.

And the gospel is that only Jesus can take on our insecurity and our shame and our guilt.

And this is what Christ, the Christ, was about from the very beginning.

This is what he was about.

This is what he was about and doing with Mary and Martha.

This is what the cross is about.

It's Jesus saying, you must rest in order to truly work.

Jesus saying, in me, all your meaning and redemption and peace is found in him.

You can let your work just be work.

So, my brothers and sisters, may you find your quiet in him.

And may your work be fulfilling, but may you already be fulfilled in Jesus' name.

Let's pray together.

God, thank you for the grace you give us that we can come before you knowing we do not handle our work and our careers well.

Often we're quite frustrated.

We feel underemployed, we feel employed in the wrong areas, we feel like maybe our careers didn't matter, and we worry that our career won't matter.

And then we let all this reflect back on us.

And all of this is us not trusting that you give us our existence and value and redemption and meaning.

Forgive us for this lack of trust.

And at the same time, we are so grateful for your graciousness to us that it just reminds us over and over and over again that we find our rest in you, that we have the freedom to find our quiet in you and let you work out our callings in this world, in your timing and in your way, and that our work can just be work.

So, God, we hold before you our productivity, our creativity, and our careers.

May you use them for your glory.

But may we may we be found in your son and the sacrifice on the cross of Jesus for us.

In his name we pray.

Amen.