The Joy Of Work Completed

Can you imagine what it would have been like to take care of the Garden of Eden before the fall? All Adam had to do was plant & prune & pick.

B. Then Adam & Eve ate of the forbidden fruit. We read the result of their fall in the 3rd chapter, beginning with vs. 17.

“To Adam He said, ‘Because you listened to your wife & 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. It will produce thorns & thistles for you, & you will eat the plants of the field. 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 & to dust you will return.’"

But did you notice? The curse is not work. The curse is the thorns & thistles & pain & death. The curse is blood & sweat & tears, not work.

ILL. Every year some of you become enthusiastic gardeners. You grab your hoes, & with a whistle on your lips, you turn over the ground & plant the seeds. You just know that this will be your year to have a bumper crop of all those great vegetables you love to eat freshly picked from the garden.

But it is not long until weeds have come, & bugs are eating away at your delicate plants, & you’re sweating profusely, & you begin to lose your enthusiasm for gardening.

Work can be fun. But when you put work together with thorns & thistles & other parts of the curse, then it often is not much fun any more.

ILL. I think many people would like to be in the ministry if it weren’t for the thorns & thistles in it. If everybody got along with each other, & nobody ever got sick or died, & nobody ever had any trouble, & we didn’t ever have to raise money for new buildings, they would think that this is the greatest line of work in all the world.

If all we had to do was to preach sermons, & never had to go through the work of preparing them, this would be a great job.

Maybe it is the same in your line of work. If you didn’t have a disgruntled boss always looking over your shoulder, if you didn’t have co-workers with whom you don’t get along, if you didn’t have projects that were so hard, your work would be the most enjoyable thing in the world.

Work without thorns & thistles is fun. But when you put the thorns & thistles in, then it becomes a burden, doesn’t it?

C. When God first made man He blessed him, & made him a partner with God in caring for & tending the Garden. The Bible teaches us that we are also partners with God in the work that we do. In some vocations that is more obvious than in others.

ILL. Think about a farmer. Farmers work hand in hand with God. Farmers this past summer, during a severe drought, learned that lesson all over again. We depend upon God, for we are in a partnership with Him.

In the ministry, all I can do is sow the seed & then wait on the Lord to give the increase. A doctor can perform surgery & remove diseased parts of the body, but then he must wait on the Lord to do the work of healing. And it is probably the same way in your work, too.