When Work is Fruitless

Big Idea: The curse of work produces a sort of imbalance of fruit. Because of the curse in Gen 3, our work is filled with thorns, thistles, and we are promised it is going to be hard and fruitless at times. This forces us into a balancing act. We either become dismayed at the fruitless and often futile nature of our work, or we kick against the curse to try and extract fruit from our work at any cost; this often leads to work becoming our idol. How do we find the balance between these two impossible positions? As always, the Gospel points our eyes forward in hope of a day when the thorns, thistles, and futility of work are removed. This encourages us to live with a healthy perspective of work now and a hope in the Gospel and renewed creation.

Briefly recap our work series.

Last week we saw three things that I want to remind us all of:

First, God intended for us to be workers from the very beginning. We had work in the garden of Eden prior to sin, we were commissioned to continue our work after the fall, and we will have jobs and work one day in the new creation.

Second, we saw that all work matters. There is not some hierarchy of work where the sacred work of pastors or church leaders is somehow more important than ‘secular jobs.’ Our work matters not because of what we do, but because of whose image we display through our faithful and integreous work.

Finally, we looked at our work as the theater of redemption. I gave you the pink spoons analogy; that we are to be like the little pink spoons we get at Basking Robins. Little agents of redemption that show the beauty of God’s kingdom through our work. Work is not separate from our spiritual journey. There is no such thing as full-time-vocational jobs in ministry because we are all full-time vocational ministers meant to display and show the world of God’s redemptive plan for the world through our respective jobs.

This week, I want to focus on a fourth reality of work. This reality deserves its own week and we have to understand it before we can begin adopting a new vision for work in the coming weeks. And for this, like always, I have a story I want to tell you.

I think in another lifetime I would have definitely been a carpenter or like an engineer or something. I really like for my work to have a tangible result at the end of the day. I’m as prone to seek out instant gratification and results as the next person so I really like to have something to show for what I have done with my time at the end of the day.

This honestly made my job in the military pretty hard at times because of what my job was.

Explain NDI - Cracks at mach 2.5 bit…(it even says it in the name…if we do our job right, there is no trace of us ever having been involved in the process). That means I really struggled with job satisfaction sometimes.

A really good example of the struggle I faced happened really early on in my career.

Explain over-G and hard landing.

Explain me getting slotted to work the problem for like 2 months to save the Air Force $25K in contractor costs…from which I was given a really awesome award…seems good right…well listen on.

Explain that the pilot did it again a week after the jet was fixed (nothing happened to him because he was a colonel).

They then stripped all the equipment out of the aircraft, tore its wings off, and packed it into a C-17 and flew it to the boneyard… it was all for nothing.

Here is the deal…you’ve all been there. Maybe not the same thing obviously but you’ve experienced the difficulty of work.

Maybe that’s the situation in Afghanistan right now.

Maybe that’s some project you have invested time and energy into for months or even years just to watch all of your progress evaporate with a single decision made above you.

Maybe that’s a person you have mentored and invested in just to see them walk away like your investment meant nothing.

Maybe it’s just the droning on and on of the mundane task day after day, week after week, and year after year. You realize that you are just slowly marching towards death and the career you are in is the vehicle you will ride until the day you die.

Maybe you’ve tried your hardest and given it your all just to find out that you still come up short. Or perhaps you think really highly of your work abilities only to be outperformed by someone who makes it look effortless. What about the feelings that you are indispensable, that your job could never replace you only to find out that the machine won’t even skip a beat the day you leave or retire.

Do any of you have that person at your job that when they are gone productivity shoots through the roof. And you realize the potential of what you could accomplish if that person wasn’t there causing trouble or stirring up office drama. The only problem is that person will never leave that job so you are always going to be stuck with lower productivity.

Honestly, I could go on and on and on but I think you get the idea. Work can just be…bad…sometimes.

I think we need to do a little work around the idea of work being ‘bad’ because that can mean all sorts of things. Like work is evil or something. By bad I mean:

Even though we can pour all of our heart and strength into work it is still riddled with failures, frustrations, and unmet potential.

When the Bible talks about work being “bad.” It uses agrarian or farming terms. The idea being that we can cultivate the ground, plant the seed, water the seed and yet, because of a thousand things beyond our control (pests, drought, weeds, blights or diseases) our garden can still be fruitless despite our best efforts.

And so, I think fruitless is a better term to describe the broken nature of our work.

Let me read you a quote by Timothy Keller about the often fruitless nature of our work because it explains why we have to talk about what we are going to talk about today:

“Work exists now in a world sustained by God but disordered by sin. Only if we have some understanding of how sin distorts work can we hope to counteract its effects and salvage some of the satisfaction God planned for our work.” Timothy Keller

When work is fruitless, it has a tendency to lead us into one of two very bad directions. So, this morning, lets look at what the Bible says about our work being fruitless and how we can avoid the two major pitfalls associated with them.

Briefly explain made in the image of God to be creators from last weeks sermon.

Page three of your Bible is where we mess things up pretty bad and it immediately has effects on our work. Let’s look at the three effects sin has on our world:

Genesis 3:14–16 NASB95

14 The Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, Cursed are you more than all cattle, And more than every beast of the field; On your belly you will go, And dust you will eat All the days of your life; 15 And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel.” 16 To the woman He said, “I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children; Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you.”

Genesis 3:17–19 NASB95

17 Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’; Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you will eat of it All the days of your life. 18 “Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field; 19 By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.”

This passage is commonly referred to as the curse. We need to zoom out and take a 30,000 foot view to really understand what is happening here.

This isn’t so much an evil that was put on creation by God as it is God defining the results of sin entering into the world.

First, God defines the reality of spiritual evil that we will contend with.

Then, God turns from the serpent and speaks to the woman. To see God’s words to the woman as only applying to her is a grave mistake. Not only will we contend with spiritual evil in the world, but our relationships between one another are broken as well. God’s word to Eve is about the power imbalance and resultant problems that cause in all relationships. God also speaks a word about the broken nature of our bodies because of sin. Where once we enjoyed a pain free existence, now that is not the case any more.

But finally, God turns to Adam to define how our relationship with the rest of creation is now broken because of sin. God’s words to Adam were quite literal because he was a farmer. So let’s just think very literally for a second.

For any of you who grew up on a farm, what makes farm work fruitless?

Tell story of me and my friend Craig getting duped to pick purple top thistles from my grandpas hay field for $10 a piece. I really played up the getting paid part and then at the end of a really long sweaty day we were each given ten dollars and I wasn’t sure Craig would ever talk to me again.

For a farmer, its like the entire natural order is working against you as you try to cultivate the ground. Honestly, tilling, planting, and harvesting is a rather small part of what it takes to cultivate a harvest. 90% of your time is making sure drought or disease or pests don’t wipe out your crop or that thorns, thistles, and weeds don’t overtake your field.

Here is the deal though, God wasn’t just speaking literally. God was using agrarian terms to communicate a truth about any work we do in this broken creation. Like a top, our world and all of its systems are spin slower and slower. Things break down. When you couple this reality with the reality of broken human relationships, and a very real spiritual evil that is constantly lurking behind the tall grass to kill, steal, and destroy…our work is seemingly doomed to futility and fruitlessness.

We have all experienced this haven’t we. Yes! We actually have a saying about this…Nothing is ever easy. Or, if it can go wrong it will. Those aren’t sayings that exist in place where things work as they should.

Did you know that this year alone, the United States will spend $10.9 Billion on Intelligent Automation Processes. That is the equivalent of several 3rd world nations combined Gross Domestic Product just to remove the human element from production. Do you know why? Because robots don’t call in sick and when they do break its as easy as replacing a circuit or throwing it away and getting another one. That self-checkout machine doesn’t care if you sit there and scream and cuss it out until you are blue in the face. It also doesn’t need a lunch break. When that robot moving your package at amazon wrecks into another robot they don’t have to worry about a workman’s comp claim.

We have whole careers dedicated to tabulating how much thorns and thistles cost us each year. If you are a business owner, or someone in management, you know exactly what I am talking about. For the rest of us, you feel it to. Just like my story from earlier, the plane is always going to break again. Someone is always going to be negligent. No matter how hard you work, you are going to have to do it again tomorrow. There will always be office drama and drains on productivity.

And so, we find ourselves locked in this seemingly endless two-step-forward-one-step-back cycle in our job. If you do somehow manage to rip all of the thorns and thistles out of your field, guess what…they will be back tomorrow, or next week, or six months from now, or a year from now. They always come back. And if you’ve been around long enough, you know this to be true. And this leads us to the first imbalance that fruitless work leads us towards.

When work is fruitless we are prone to hopelessness.

And hopelessness manifests itself in all sorts of different ways. It comes out as anger and frustration at your job. Anybody ever experienced seasons of that before? It comes out in job dissatisfaction. Perhaps if I just go somewhere else things will be better. Is that true? Perhaps to an extent…but again, if you’ve been around long enough, there are always thorns and thistles with every job. Hopelessness also comes out in quiet despair. You all know of that person at your job, you’ve seen them working at the DMV, or checking people out at the grocery store that have just had the life sucked out of them because they know full well the futility of work and how little they can actually change things and they’ve just resigned themselves to quiet despair at work.

That is one response people have. On the other side of the spectrum, many people respond to the curse by fighting the curse. You are not satisfied with the way things are and so you work harder and harder.

Here is the point and then I will explain what I mean:

When work is fruitless, we are prone to create idols of our work.

We go back to Genesis 3:19 and we do some simple math:

Genesis 3:19 NASB95

19 By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.”

We set up this really simple equation. We create a conditional algorithm commonly known as an if-then algorithm. It goes something like this:

If sweat equals bread then more sweat equals more bread.

And when we apply this equation to real life, if we are not careful, the result is often times idolatry.

Did you know there is actually a story about this in the Bible. Go read Genesis chapter 11 and the story of the tower of Babel. Mankind, by the sweat of his brow masters the new technology of the baked brick. We are effectively fulfilling our creation mandate to subdue and rule the earth by bringing out the potential God placed in the earth for the greatest human flourishing. Instead of allowing that flourishing and the great things it enabled us to experience to point our hearts back to our glorious creator in who’s image we were created, do you know what we did with the new technology? I promise you, I’m not being crass, but we built a giant middle finger to God with it and worshipped our own intellect and accomplishment.

We do the same thing today. We work, by the sweat of our face to make bread. We sacrifice on the alter of career all the time. We sacrifice our efforts, our time, our families, and sometimes even our moral standing for the bread of accomplishment, recognition, the satisfaction of a job-well done, another happy customer, another closed deal, or just money.

When we sacrifice on the altar of career looking for our work to fulfill us in ways that only God is meant to, our work has effectively become an idol.

So, those are the two ends of the spectrum that fruitless work can land us in. I want us to look at a passage in the book of Ecclesiastes that highlights these two tendencies and how we should navigate a course of faithfulness between them.

Now, the book of Ecclesiastes is hands down one of my favorite books in the entire Bible. If you’ve ever read it though, perhaps you are thinking that that is a little disturbing if that’s my favorite book. If you are prone to existential terror or angst then Ecclesiastes is probably not for you.

Well…actually it probably is the perfect book for you but if you don’t want to end up freaked out and in some sort of existential crisis you need to have a few different keys in your hand. Luckily, we get all three of those keys in the first three verses of the book.

Let’s just read it to see what I’m talking about. I’ll give you the keys and then we are going to look at a couple of passages really quick before we close out.

Here it goes:

Ecclesiastes 1:1–3 NASB95

1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. 2 “Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” 3 What advantage does man have in all his work Which he does under the sun?

The first key is in the first verse. How many contributors are there to this book of the Bible?

2! We are about to hear from the teacher but did you notice that a narrator introduced the teacher? in This is critical to our understanding of the book. The teacher is going to go on for the majority of the book and honestly, he gets really dark at times. At the end of the book, however, the narrator comes back in and ties it all together and makes sense of it all. So you can’t read the teacher without the key of the narrator which comes at the end of the book.

Second, is that word vanity. Ask if people have another word there (its also defined as meaningless or futility).

Explain Hevel means smoke…something that looks like it has substance but then when you grab it it just slips through your fingers…its is form without substance.

Finally, is the phrase “under the sun.” At times it can mean things done apart from God or even against God’s law. At all times, however, it is referencing anything done on earth this side of the new creation reality. Let’s look at a couple of passages and you’ll see what I mean:

Ecclesiastes 2:4–11 NASB95

4 I enlarged my works: I built houses for myself, I planted vineyards for myself; 5 I made gardens and parks for myself and I planted in them all kinds of fruit trees; 6 I made ponds of water for myself from which to irrigate a forest of growing trees. 7 I bought male and female slaves and I had homeborn slaves. Also I possessed flocks and herds larger than all who preceded me in Jerusalem. 8 Also, I collected for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. I provided for myself male and female singers and the pleasures of men—many concubines. 9 Then I became great and increased more than all who preceded me in Jerusalem. My wisdom also stood by me. 10 All that my eyes desired I did not refuse them. I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure, for my heart was pleased because of all my labor and this was my reward for all my labor. 11 Thus I considered all my activities which my hands had done and the labor which I had exerted, and behold all was vanity and striving after wind and there was no profit under the sun.

And a little further down in that same chapter he concludes his thoughts about work done under the sun:

Ecclesiastes 2:18–23 NASB95

18 Thus I hated all the fruit of my labor for which I had labored under the sun, for I must leave it to the man who will come after me. 19 And who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? Yet he will have control over all the fruit of my labor for which I have labored by acting wisely under the sun. This too is vanity. 20 Therefore I completely despaired of all the fruit of my labor for which I had labored under the sun. 21 When there is a man who has labored with wisdom, knowledge and skill, then he gives his legacy to one who has not labored with them. This too is vanity and a great evil. 22 For what does a man get in all his labor and in his striving with which he labors under the sun? 23 Because all his days his task is painful and grievous; even at night his mind does not rest. This too is vanity.

Here is what is going on here.

Explain conditional algorithm of the book of Proverbs…if you live with wisdom, life tends to work out better for you.

Explain the cynical almost nihilistic writer of Ecclesiastes who says…not so fast, it doesn’t always work out that way.

Explain how we see keys 2 and 3 through what the teacher says: You might as well eat drink and be merry if you are looking for that to provide a life of satisfaction and substance because if you are reaching for anything under the sun to provide that for you, eating and drinking is as substantive as hard work and wisdom.

Now, to fully understand this, we have to look back at key number one because it is the narrator who brings it full circle. He says: the teacher is right, you need to listen to this guy. Because if you are looking for anything under the sun to provide ultimate satisfaction, fulfillment, and substance, you are going to open your hands at the end of your life and realize it was all hevel (do the hand thing). It was all meaningless!

Actually…if you want to take hold of something with substance, you have to look beyond the sun. Here is how he says that. These are the closing words of the book from the narrator who ties everything together:

Ecclesiastes 12:13–14 NASB95

13 The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. 14 For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil.

God’s judgment is our ultimate reality and will expose the substance or lack thereof in our life.

Like we said last week, it is work done in service to God that has eternal value. We can’t rid the world of thorns and thistles…they just are. There is only one thing coming to remove the curse and that is Jesus.

The Gospel is meant to move us beyond the hopelessness idolatry as we long for life beyond the sun.

See if you can pick up on that hope as I read this passage:

Revelation 22:1–5 NASB95

1 Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, 2 in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. 3 There will no longer be any curse; and the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and His bond-servants will serve Him; 4 they will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads. 5 And there will no longer be any night; and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them; and they will reign forever and ever.

I know this isn’t a how-to guide for how to permanently remove the thorns and thistles and hard labor and broken things from your work. There is only one person who can do that and it isn’t you or me. It is Jesus. And there is good news…He is coming again one day to do just that, to remove the curse. This good news keeps us from falling into the hopelessness of our broken work as we look forward to the hope that is in Jesus and his coming kingdom.

This good news also keeps us from falling into idolatry as we realize that no amount of success, recognition, money, or job satisfaction can do for us what Jesus has already done. No amount of sweat or sacrifice on the altar of work can give you what Jesus has already given through the drops of blood he sweat as he was preparing to sacrifice his own body on the altar of God in the shape of a cross.

We will look at a new vision for work next week and how we should operate in the here and how, but for today, I just want us to close out with a moment of worship and adoration of the one who finished the ultimate work on our behalf. It is that work that we have to cling to as it is the only thing of substance that will withstand God’s judgment one day. We won’t be able to give God our resume or portfolio full of accomplishments, recognition, awards, or 401K statement…all of that is hevel.

Perhaps, you need to follow Jesus for the very first time this morning…invite them to do that as I will be at the back.

Perhaps, you need to worship Jesus with a renewed hope. This life isn’t all there is.

Perhaps, you need to pray in repentance of the ways you have allowed work to become an idol as you turn back to Jesus.

Ethan is going to come and play a couple of songs and I encourage you to either sit and pray or stand and worship as we prepare to baptize a couple of people who have already made that glorious decision to follow after Jesus.

I want you to celebrate like your team just won the superbowl as we baptize these two this morning by the way.

Question 1:

What are the thorns and thistles associated with your work that often make your work fruitless?