Wisdom for Work

Chapter 12:11. Whoever works his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits lacks sense. Chapter 18:9. Whoever is slack in his work is a brother to him who destroys. Proverbs 21:25-26.

The desire of the sluggard kills him for his hands refuse to labour. All day long, he craves and craves, but the righteous gives and does not hold back. Chapter 22:29. Do you see a man skilful in his work? He will stand before kings.

He will not stand before obscure men. And then lastly, chapter 24:27. Prepare your work outside. Get everything ready for yourself in the field, and after that, build your house. This is the word of the Lord.

Now if you take sleep out of the equation, we spend most of our lives working. Whether it's paid or unpaid, whether it's working at home, from home, or outside of home, whether it's blue collar or white collar, unskilled or professional work, cleaning up the dishes, writing lyrics for a song, studying for the big exam. Work is a part of our lives. And the self help literature telling you how to work more productively produces around $55,000,000,000 globally. It's a massive industry.

But did you know that the Bible has a lot to say about work? That's not all the verses from Proverbs, but that's a selection of the proverbs that are about work. You see, work was God's idea. Before sin entered the human story, God designed us to work in creation, and He has a lot to say about how to do that well and effectively. God cares about our work and has wisdom for us about how to thrive in our work, whether your vocation is being a mother, a plumber, or one of these lucky school teachers on holidays at the moment.

School holidays. Man. We'll never, like, give you a break for that even though I know teachers deserve it, of course. It's just an easy joke. Sorry.

I shouldn't have done that. God has something to say about how to work with insight and skill. And the reason we're talking about this is because we're in a series called Proverbs, Sage Advice for a Skilful Life. We're spending seven weeks listening to the sage wisdom that comes from the book of Proverbs, and that Hebrew word for wisdom, it's about skill. It's about insight for living.

God's word can teach us how to live skilfully in His world. Last week, we began the series by looking at square one for wisdom, the starting point, what we call the fear of the Lord. And the sermon's called Wisdom's Worldview because the fear of the Lord is a way of viewing the world, a set of glasses we put on. Great illustration, Tony. And thank you for so generously putting so much effort into the kids each week, make sure you say thank you for those glasses after the service.

But glasses are like that worldview that we put on a set of lenses through which we view life, and the fear of the Lord is a worldview almost. It's a way of relating to God with trembling delight. It's a way of viewing the world. He's designed this world. It's a way of understanding that He sees everything.

He'll bring everything into judgement at the end. If you live like that, with that kind of worldview, it will set you on a path towards wisdom. It is square one for wisdom in the book of Proverbs. But from there, Proverbs delves into lots of different topics, and one of the big topics we find is work. So this week, we're looking at wisdom for work.

Don't be deceived into thinking that the best thinking about work is in a self help book somewhere. Now those books can be helpful, of course. But if God created work, then He knows how it works better than anyone else. We can get supreme insight and wisdom by going to Him before we benefit from other voices. Now maybe you're listening to this and you're like, oh, no.

Sermon on work? I hate work. I don't wanna work. It's boring. I just wanna live for the weekend.

I'm ready to get out of here and just watch that Netflix episode or enjoy the beautiful day and go to the beach. And I wanna say to you, if work is something you dislike, then I actually wanna contend with you that it's not so much a problem with work. There's a problem going on in your own heart if that's your feeling. You see, God created us for work. It's something that can be enjoyable.

And if you really dislike work, if you don't like work, it actually reveals something about your own heart. But the good news is that the Bible diagnoses that for us and shows us how to transform that so that work can increasingly become enjoyable and meaningful. I mean, if you're a full time worker and you're working five out of seven days every week, rather than just living for the weekend and just grinding out Monday to Friday, imagine if work could become more meaningful and purposeful and enjoyable, and that more of the week could be a joy rather than just living for two days of joy. That's something we're gonna look at a little bit as we look at God's wisdom for work this week. So we're gonna get into it, and we're gonna break it down into three sections in the book of Proverbs.

And the first section is this. We're gonna look at how to work well and not so well. How to work well and not so well. In a Forbes article online called 700,000 sickies, Netflix lifts the lid on Australia's binge watching culture. They share that 1,100,000 viewers in Australia say they've called in sick to work, snuck into meeting rooms at lunch, or cancelled a work meeting in order to catch up on their latest episode of Netflix.

The Herald Sun newspaper actually reports on this as a national problem for our economy. At least a million Aussies are struggling with laziness because they're too hooked on Netflix. And when it comes to laziness, Proverbs has a lot to say. Laziness is the biggest work killer according to Proverbs. In fact, Tremper Longman III, he's a great scholar on the book of Proverbs.

He says, Proverbs is intolerant of lazy people. They are considered the epitome of folly. The quantity of Proverbs on laziness and hard work is surprising. One prime example of this comes from something Joanne read earlier, Proverbs chapter 6, where it says, go to the ant, O sluggard, O lazy person. Consider her ways and be wise.

Without having chief or ruler or 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. See, it's quite a humbling thing.

Proverbs kind of makes fun of the sluggard in the book. So it comes across as a little harsh. It's a bit of humble pie in this passage because it's telling you that if you're lazy, if you're the sluggard, it's saying go and learn from the smallest little creature you can find in creation. Go and observe the ant. And remember last week, one of the features of Hebrew poetry in Proverbs is imagery.

This image of the ant, it causes us to slow down and to ponder and to chew on the proverb a little longer, to think about how ants operate. Now from, you know, an ignorant perspective, when I look down at ants, I don't see, like, an ant slave driver telling them to get to work or anything like that. They're just working hard, constantly gathering food, and they're well provided all year long. And Proverbs is telling you to observe their way of living and to put your hand to the plough. In fact, notice the phrase that was mentioned in there.

It's repeated elsewhere in the book of Proverbs as well. The sluggard's view of the world is a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands, just another snooze, just a little bit more sleep, just another episode, just another sick day, just a little bit more. I just maybe I'll just put it off another hour. I'll just put it off another day. And we might feel sometimes when procrastinating or indulging ourselves, it doesn't feel like it's leading to anything destructive.

But the proverb is telling us here it's actually really dangerous because all of a sudden, with just a little bit more sleep, a little bit more slumber, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, all of a sudden, want comes upon us like an armed man. All of a sudden, a thief comes into our house. I imagine it like a bank robbery, you know, violent, shocking. They come in with guns. They hold up the bank and they take everything that they have.

And that's the illustration that the Proverbs are telling us here. It's saying, hey, if you just keep living like this, just a little bit more, just a little bit more, all of a sudden, it will hit you and it will hurt you. In fact, did you know that our best sleep science illustrates this wisdom as well? Matthew Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Berkeley, where he directs the Centre for Human Sleep Science. One of Walker's central findings is that our internal body clock, what's called the circadian rhythm, thrives on regularity and predictability.

Now here's the point. Most of us know that with sleep, you need a certain amount of time. Doctor Walker recommends seven to nine hours, so amount of sleep. But a lot of us don't think about the regularity of our sleep time and our wake time. And Doctor Walker is saying it's important to keep those fairly predictable.

It's good for your circadian rhythm. Your body actually wants to finely tune and adjust to something, and that's why sort of counterintuitively, if you wake up every morning at 6AM for work, but on weekends you try and sleep into 10AM, you're going to feel more groggy and tired. It's actually not going to make you feel more rested because your body clock prefers to have a regular rhythm. Anyway, just an illustration of a little sleep, a little slumber, it just keeps getting harder and harder to break out of that cycle. Sleeping longer isn't necessarily better for us.

Proverbs 6:6 says, go to the ant, consider her ways and be wise. And it is kind of funny, Silas, the ant. I mean, is kind of funny. It's humbling to go to the ant. Now if you work hard with skill, Proverbs says, all things being equal, because remember, last week we said Proverbs are not divine rock solid promises that if you do this, you will get this.

It's more observations of how life and the world works. And generally speaking, all things being equal, this is how life works out if you operate according to these wisdom principles. Now, generally, if you work hard with skill, you'll be sought after for your skills. There are rewards to good, effective work. So Proverbs 22 says, do you see a man skilful in his work?

He will not stand before kings. He will not stand before obscure men. In other words, people will seek after your work, your skills. Proverbs 10:4, a slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich. Wise work has its rewards, just as foolish work has its consequences.

Now, Proverbs doesn't just warn us about poverty awaiting us for those of us who are lazy in our work. It also warns us of other repercussions. For example, in Proverbs 10:26, it says, like vinegar to the teeth and smoke to the eyes, so is the sluggard to those who send him. I don't know if you've sat around a campfire before and it's enjoyable, but all of a sudden the smoke starts wafting in your direction and it's stinging your eyes and eventually you move your seat somewhere else because you don't want to sit there. It's annoying.

It's irritating. That's the image that's being used here. The sage is saying that a sluggard is like smoke to the eyes. That if that's your reputation that you've gained when you get sent to another team or another project, the people don't want you there. It's painful to work with you.

It's counterproductive. And if you're a young person and you're starting out your career, you don't want to gain a reputation like that. It's not going to help you progress. Laziness will harm you personally, but it doesn't just harm you. It also hurts others too.

In Proverbs 18, it says, whoever is slack in his work is a brother to him who destroys. Wow. Okay. That sounds a little harsh. Someone being slack is similar to someone who actively destroys things.

Slackness has consequences for those around you as well. And I think a helpful way to understand this is how the Bible distinguishes between sins of commission and sins of omission. Sins of commission are direct, obvious, active sins like stealing. Sins of omission are sins that we commit when we don't do what we should have done, when we don't take up the responsibility we have, when we don't enter into the role that God's given us, when we don't do the tasks that we should do. Like neglecting to care for the poor, no one's going to know if you're not doing that, but it actually harms the people that you're meant to be caring for.

The sins of commission and omission. And the consequences for the sins of omission might be less obvious, but they're still just as real as someone who destroys. If you're lazy in your work, a coworker has to pick up the slack for you, or if you say, well, you know, I clock off when I get home after work and your spouse has to clean up after you all the time. Someone else has to pay the price for that. I once lived next door to a neighbour.

Lovely person, but really neglected their house to the point that it had to get knocked down because it became a building hazard. And it was just overgrown. It was dilapidated. Now I got along with them fine, but the problem was they had a rat infestation, and I had to keep sending rat traps around my house, and I couldn't stop the rats coming over because they neglected their home. Now they weren't trying to do me wrong, but their own neglect of their house had consequences for others.

Slackness, whoever is slack in his work is a brother to him who destroys. Proverbs strongly warns against laziness in our work. I know it's hard to hear, and none of us wants to think of ourselves as lazy. But a lack of energy isn't the only work killer. Sometimes it's lots of energy pointed in the wrong direction that kills good work.

So we've looked at the Proverbs wisdom about laziness, a lack of energy, a lack of drive, and getting into it. Now we're gonna look at some of the Proverbs warnings about lots of drive pointed in the wrong direction. So we see in Proverbs 12:11, it says, whoever works his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows, that Hebrew word is an energetic word. It can be translated as chases, pursues, hunts, worthless pursuits, lacks sense. See, here the problem isn't laziness.

Longman III, that scholar, he points out that the problem is misdirected energy. And that Hebrew phrase worthless pursuits, it refers to reckless, vain, empty, worthless things. Lots of other translators translate it as chasing fantasies. You see, foolish person is not lazy in this proverb. They're actually breaking a sweat, but they're hustling after the wrong things.

They're misdirecting their energy. When I was at uni, I used to work for this promotion agency, and at one... It was just like a... It was actually a very boring job. But, anyway, our boss invited us to come to this exclusive business opportunity dinner one week, and my friend and I were going to go, but we're discussing it.

I was like, I don't really wanna go. I feel like it's gonna be something like Amway. Now I don't know if you've heard of Amway, but I've got friends and stuff that had been involved and were burnt by it. Maybe you've had a good experience. That's fine if you have.

But Amway to me is kind of like a pyramid scheme over those. Say they're not a pyramid scheme. They sell products for people's homes, like cleaning products and whatnot, probably do a bunch of other things. But the way you make money is not by selling the products, it's by recruiting other people underneath you, this big pyramid, and then they would say, don't say that, but anyway, this big pyramid, and that's how you make money apparently. So anyway, so I don't wanna go to this.

I've heard of this kind of thing before. I've heard it doesn't go very well. Anyway, we went there, and the lady got up, and she said, thank you for coming today. Want to tell you about an exciting business opportunity called Amway. And so we're there for the next hour looking through the slideshow and she's telling us about how we can get really rich.

There's this young lady in Sydney that recruited all these people, and she's doing so well while she was doing uni at the same time. And I was like, oh, it's like, I don't want to be here. And then at the end of the presentation, they sat us down with one of the key Amway people and like, so what do you think? And do you want to sign up? And trying to overcome all of our objections.

I was like, oh, I just want to get out of here, but we're kind of polite and not trying to be mean and whatnot. And maybe it's like how people feel like when we're trying to evangelise them sometimes. I don't know. They're trying to evangelise me into Amway. But you see, the thing is, I'd heard from different people that have been involved in it in the past that it's actually too good to be true.

They'd spent years, and they got nothing out of it in the end. And it's just a... It's an illustration that misdirected energy can also be foolish according to Proverbs. Generally, if something's too good to be true, if it's a get rich quick scheme and it says to you two years of hard work and you'll have the rest of your life set, generally speaking, it's going to be folly. It's not going to work out.

Now, obviously, there's always exceptions to the rule. Proverbs is not about the exceptions. It's about the way things generally work. And so it's warning us against chasing fantasies, following worthless pursuits. So it's not just laziness that it's warning us about.

It's warning us about chasing after fantasies. Another more subtle way we can be ineffective at work is by doing our work in the wrong order. So in chapter 24 of Proverbs, it says, prepare your work outside, get everything ready for yourself in the field, and after that, build your house. I think the NIV is a little bit more clear here. It says, put your outdoor work in order and get your fields ready.

After that, build your house. So what it's saying is this in the ancient agrarian society of Israel where they would... They'd work the land, produce food and income. It's saying rather than building a decent house to live in first, you actually want to make sure you've got food on the table. Work your field, prepare it, make sure that it's going to be a fruitful, you know, if the Lord brings rain and so on, it's going to be fruitful before you go and build a nice home for yourself.

And the point is we can be ineffective at work by doing our work in the wrong order. Both of those things are good things to do. They're not worthless pursuits, but there is a wise order to work. Productivity experts, so called, teach us the same thing today. It's not enough to just be working hard if you want to be a skilful worker.

It's not about being faster than everyone else. You need to be wise about what you work on. You need to do things in the right order. One expert called Peter Drucker once said, there is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all. So we need to take time sometimes in our work to figure whether it's work at home or whatever it might be, what is the key lever that needs to be pulled that will give us the most leverage in this project?

What is the most important goal that will help us go towards the big goal? What is the project that will give me the biggest return? Or what is the thing that if I complete that, it'll make all my other work so much easier? These are the kind of questions a wise person asks. Now if you want to dive a bit more deeper into these work practices, I recommend a book to you called Redeeming Your Time by Jordan Raynor.

He's a Christian guy. He's a serial entrepreneur. He started a bunch of successful companies, and I myself have benefited a lot from this book. Now Christian guy tries to bring some biblical principles into it, but I'd say a lot of it's what we call general revelation. So special revelation is Scripture.

It's got divine authority. We must listen and obey Scripture. General revelation is what we get just from observing the world, how things work. You don't have to stake your life on it like Scripture, and it's something we have to weigh up, but it's a lot of general revelation that I found really helpful in the book. So for me, as someone who wasn't naturally gifted at these sorts of things, I found the book really helpful.

So I commend that to you. So we've been talking about how to work well and not so well. Proverbs commends hard work and condemns laziness. Proverbs warns against chasing after fantasies and calls us to be wise about ordering and prioritising the right things in our work. Now the last thing Proverbs clearly emphasises in good work is honesty.

Honesty. Remember, there's no such thing as a wise, wicked person in Proverbs. There's no such thing as some cunning businessman who's a bit dishonest, but they're really smart and they're really wise because they made a lot of money out of that. Now Proverbs would say, if you have the world due to the fear of the Lord, you know, He's going to bring everything into judgement. Even if you make it for a little while in this life, that is folly when you get to the judgement seat of God.

Wisdom is not just a generic skill in the book of Proverbs. It has a moral quality to it. And Proverbs emphasises when it comes to business dealings, and work, it emphasises honesty. It's got a number of proverbs on this, but I'll just read one. Proverbs 11:1.

A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight. So back in that time, the merchants sometimes rigged their scales so that when they said, I need two kilos of silver for this thing, it would actually weigh as 1.8 when they put it on there and they had to put another 200 grams on, you know, so they'd make more money out of it. And God is saying in this proverb, it's an abomination to Him to trick people like that, to deceive people like that. And so the wisdom of Proverbs is telling us that you may be tempted at times to cut a corner, to market something what not exactly the way it actually is, to lie or deceive in your work practices to get ahead. It may even be normal in your industry, but God is saying to you, that's not wise.

That's foolish. It's abominable to Him. Walk with honesty and integrity in your work and in your business practices. So you might be thinking, okay, lots of information about how to work well according to Proverbs, but Ben, you still haven't dealt with my problem. I don't like work.

I don't want to work. I know I should, but I find it difficult. I procrastinate. I try to sit down and study, and then I click on a YouTube link, I go down this YouTube wormhole or whatever it might be. So what do I do?

Well, let's explore that a bit next in the next section. The core problem behind all bad work. The core problem. See, the core problem isn't simply a lack of education about good work practices. I guarantee if you're a parent of teenagers and you're struggling to get them to do their chores and you say to them today, hey, Proverbs says don't be lazy, I can guarantee you that's not going to change them.

That's not going to transform them because the problem is deeper than just an information problem, and it's the same for all of us. There's a slogan in all of us. If you look carefully at the proverbs on work, you'll see that the core problem has to do with desire. Desire. So Proverbs 21 says, the desire of the sluggard kills him for his hands refuse to labour.

So he desires something, but it seems to be contradictory to work. Verse 26, all day long he craves and craves. It's desire out of control. But the righteous gives and does not hold back. See, we all desire something.

The Bible might say we all worship and love something, but the sluggard loves the wrong thing. They desire the wrong thing. They crave and crave and try to get more out of just a little bit more sleep, a little bit more slumber, a little bit more folding their hands to rest, just another episode, just another bite, whatever it might be. But the problem with doing that is you'll never be ultimately satisfied going down that track because your desires are infinite. Your desires were made to be satisfied by an infinite God, not by finite good gifts that He gives us.

The sluggard's desires are running rampant for everything else, never satisfied, constantly demanding more, whereas our desires can only be fulfilled by an infinite God. So that lack of desire for work, it's boring, or the over desire for everything else, it's what the Bible calls an idolatry problem. It's a love problem. It's a desire problem. If you hate work, it's not because there's something wrong with work.

God designed you to work. Work is good. It's because you have an idolatry problem. Now let me point a finger at myself for a moment. When I finished school, I had a gap year.

I went to full time work. I worked for this call centre that was in IT, so we gave IT help to customers. And when I first got there, was bushy tailed and bright eyed and excited to work, and I wanna do my best for my manager and whatnot. But I noticed when I got there, a bunch of my workmates, they were taking sickies all the time. It was IT industry, so they were into their video games, and they were just openly saying to me, oh, I took a sickie yesterday and played this video game.

I was like, oh, well, what video game? And they got me onto this video game and whatnot. And so I started playing that, and lo and behold, slowly over time, I started to become a bit more like them. I took a couple of sickies just to play this video game. I actually had an addiction to this video game, what I would call an idolatry problem, because there were some nights where I should have gone to bed at 10PM, but I'd stay up to twelve, one, two, 3AM playing this game, getting back up at five or 6AM to go to work, and I'd be absolutely wrecked at work.

And I'd be saying to myself, oh, I won't do that again. And I'd be playing it again that night because I just it was an idolatry problem. I was drawn to playing this game. I found it so interesting. I was always thinking about it.

I wanted to play it. And as I finished that job next year, went to uni. In my first semester of uni, I didn't get great marks. I was still playing the game. And then I remember one night after a Sunday service that the Lord really convicted me that I had an idol.

The Lord really convicted me that I liked this. I loved this more than Him. I was driven by this more than Him. He convicted me, cut me to the heart, and I just repented. I deleted the game, and I never played it again.

And the Lord started to transform my work practices. After that semester, I started getting better grades. And I remember being in the study lab at university, and I studied at QUT Gardens Point. There's beautiful botanical gardens there. And when I found myself sitting there going to study and I just wanted to play a video game or I wanted to escape or procrastinate or do something else, I felt restless.

I would just walk out, go to the botanical gardens and just pray, talk to the Lord, tell Him how I'm feeling, ask Him to fill my cup. And I tell you, like, every time I did that, I felt settled. I was able to go back and just do my work and actually enjoy my work, enjoy the flow and the productivity and the focus that I gained from that. The Lord really helped me a lot to become better at work and study. The core problem behind all bad work is ultimately idolatry.

We need God to reveal His superior beauty to us that we're driven in life by our desire for Him. Our unrelenting desires were made for the infinite God. Every other good thing just cannot satisfy them. Now some of you might be feeling pretty good in this service because you're like, well, I don't struggle with laziness. I'm a hard...

I'm one of the hardest workers I know. I'm Dutch. Right? Our Dutchies, we've got a reputation for really hard work. We love you guys.

Maybe you take pride in being the hardest worker you know, but don't let yourself off the hook too quickly. You might be working for good reasons. You might have your desires ordered right, and you love God, and you're working hard for His glory. But also, for some of us, the reason we work so hard is not because we love God, it's because we're also driven by idolatry. Some of us work so hard, and you see it a lot these days in our culture with the hustle and the drive and the overwork.

It's driven by status, driven by self love. I'm the idol, and I wanna make a name for myself. Or it's driven by the love of money, just chasing and chasing after money, which Proverbs condemns, and we'll see that when we talk about money later on in the series. Or it's something else. Maybe you get a high from productivity.

It's where you find your identity. It's your career, your work, your vocation. But when you retire and it gets taken away from you, what identity do you have left if that's where you're building your identity. You see, all of us, whether we struggle with laziness or overwork, we're all without Christ, we're idolaters. We love the wrong things.

We desire the wrong things. But how do you change your desires? I can't change my taste buds and stop liking coffee after the service. I just like coffee. Right?

This is why transformation is a work from above. It's a divine work that only God can do. So let's look at that next under our third heading, the perfectly worked work. Now if we're talking about wisdom, we have to talk about Jesus because He was wisdom incarnate. 1 Corinthians 1:24 calls Jesus the wisdom of God.

And what did the wisdom of God do during His lifetime? Well, there are a couple of decades at least where He did normal everyday work. Mark's Gospel calls Jesus in the original Greek a tekton. That word just means builder, could mean that He was a carpenter or a stoneworker. There's a bit of debate around it.

Talk to me after the service if you wanna nerd out on that a bit. But if Jesus is wisdom as the Bible says, then He would have lived according to the wisdom of Proverbs. He would have worked hard, breaking a sweat, being diligent in His work. You see, Jesus never cheated. He lived a genuinely human life.

He never used His divine power to serve Himself. Jesus submitted Himself to everyday work. He's walked in our shoes. He's dignified the work that we do. But the gospels focus mostly on Jesus's three year ministry, that work that He did.

And in those three years, this unknown tradie from Nazareth accomplished more than any of us. Jesus clearly knows how to work effectively. But what drove Jesus? Unlike the sluggard, He didn't lack desire for work, and He didn't over desire everything else and neglect the work He was meant to be doing, and He didn't do it to make a name for Himself, working really hard because it's about self advancement. No.

His desires were rightly ordered. He desired one thing above all else. One thing drove Him. It was what sustained Him. It was the thing that sustained Him through the hardship of ministry.

In John 4:34, Jesus said, My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work. And in John 8:29, Jesus said, I always do the things that are pleasing to Him. You see what was driving Jesus? It was His love for His Father. It was the fear of the Lord.

Remember the Spirit of the fear of the Lord rested on Him according to Isaiah 11. All those nights camping out without His own bed to rest His head, traveling throughout Israel, preaching to the crowds, healing and doing miracles, constantly giving Himself away for the good of others. Even when He tried to get away, sometimes He couldn't get a break because the crowds would follow Him. Jesus worked really hard. Why?

Because He loves His Father. He was driven by His desire to do His Father's will. And it was this desire that kept His face turned toward Jerusalem. Even though He knew that He would be tormented and crucified in that city, He did not turn away. And the night before He died in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus wrestled with the very human desire to avoid pain.

He asked the Father if there is any other way, but when it was clear that there wasn't, Jesus' love for the Father and His love for you and for me won out over His love for self preservation. The man who worked tirelessly for the sake of others for years did His greatest work passively by allowing crooks and villains to take Him, falsely accuse Him, torture Him, and ultimately crucify Him. It wasn't until Jesus was at His last breath at the cross that He said in John 19:30, It is finished. This passive work was His greatest work of all. In His life, in His active work, He covers over all of our idolatrous activity and inactivity by doing what we should have done, working with all diligence rather than lapsing into laziness, working actively for God and not for His own self advancement.

And in His death, Jesus destroys sin's grip over our hearts and desires by taking the curse of sin on Himself. That's why He died, to set us free from this curse that messes with our desires, to set us free and heal our desires so that we can actually work for God's glory and not our own. Whether that's preaching the gospel or changing nappies or sweeping the floors or writing code for a program. Now we can do it all increasingly in the right heart by the power of the Holy Spirit. This is the perfectly worked work of Christ, done in the perfectly right heart from the perfect desire for the Father.

And what do we need to do to receive it? What do we... What work do we perform? Well, the crowds asked Jesus this during His ministry in John chapter 6. They said to Him, what must we do to be doing the works of God?

And Jesus answered them, this is the work of God that you believe in Him whom He has sent. Every other religion says climb the ladder, run the treadmill, be better, reach enlightenment. In other words, work for God's blessing. Jesus says, I've done the work. It is finished.

Receive it as a gift. Trust in Me. Believe in Me. I am God's gift and blessing to you. Have you received Jesus' free gift yet?

The only thing stopping you is you. Anyone can come. The most depraved criminal the most polished influencer cannot outsin God's grace in Christ. Jesus can forgive you, and Jesus can change you. He is God's gift to the world, reordering our desires.

And you see, when Jesus captures your heart, your desires get reordered. Work moves from being an idol or a bore or a necessary evil to a joy. It becomes a way that we can worship the God that we love. Jesus uses life work to serve us. So how else can we respond to work in ways that reflect His wisdom with all the diligence and skill we can muster and to work for the gospel, labouring to share with others the invaluable work that Christ has done.

Jesus Himself is the ultimate wisdom for work. Well, we're going to respond to God's word by participating in the Lord's Supper today. At the Lord's Supper, we enjoy and reflect on what Christ did at the cross, His perfectly worked work. Jesus Himself had this supper the night before His crucifixion, and He used this meal to explain His death. You see, the cup represents the blood that Jesus shed to purify us from our sins, and the bread represents Jesus' body, which was broken to make us whole.

This meal puts on display the price Jesus paid to endure the punishment for our idolatry, for our overwork and our underwork and all the other ways that we sin against God and others. He paid the price that sin can be defeated, so that we can be forgiven, and our hearts can belong more and more to God. And this meal that we have together as a church points forward to a meal we'll have with Jesus one day when He returns and as God's redeemed people, we will one day eat with Him in the new creation at the supper of the lamb. Victory has been won. You see, after His death, Jesus rose again in newness of life.

He is the beginning of the new creation. So as the head of a new humanity that gathers today, we gather today with a seat at the Lord's table. At this table, we, with the hand and mouth of faith, through the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit, truly receive Christ who gave Himself on earth in the sacrifice of the cross. This supper also speaks to us of the fellowship we have with one another around the table as we give visible expression to that body of which He is the head and we are the members. And Paul, the apostle Paul gives us a warning about the body when he talks about the Lord's Supper in 1 Corinthians 11.

He says in verse 29, for anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgement on himself. Now this has a twofold meaning. We must be able to discern Christ's body in the sense that this is a sacred meal. It puts on display something which symbolises our Saviour's body, which hung up on the cross for our sins. So it's a sacred thing we're participating in.

But we must also discern the fact that our brothers and sisters in Christ here are the spiritual body of Christ. The next chapter Paul talks about how we are the body and Jesus is the head. So we must be able to discern reminds us that we are united together by faith and the Spirit. We belong to one another, and we want to live in peace with one another. So Paul's warning about discerning the body applies vertically.

It's a sacred meal, represents what Jesus did for us, and horizontally. We are the body of Christ gathered on earth, and we shouldn't participate in a meal that proclaims Christ's forgiveness if we hold unforgiveness towards one another, towards another member of His body. We shouldn't participate in a meal that declares Christ's love for us if we do not want to love and serve one another. The Heidelberg Catechism, a historic Q and A summary of our faith, says in question 81, who would have come to the table of the Lord? And its answer is, those who are displeased with themselves for their sins, yet trust that these sins have forgiven them, and that their remaining infirmity is covered by the passion and death of Christ, who also desire more and more to strengthen their faith and to mend their life.

But the unrepentant and hypocrites eat and drink judgement to themselves. The Lord's Supper is not for the perfect person. It's for the person that is displeased with their sins, but trusts in Jesus to cover their sins. It's not for the perfect believer, but it's for the believer that's generally trying to seek God and love others rather than who is concealing everything and just participating and not actually obeying God and wanting to do His will. Now if you don't desire to grow in your faith more and you don't trust in Jesus yet, we're glad that you're here.

But if that isn't you yet, then let me just encourage you to sit quietly and ponder what we've spoken about today. There's no shame in doing that if you're not sure about Jesus yet. Actually, it's safer to do so. But if you do trust in Jesus and you wanna participate, then I can invite the elders to come up, because the elders are going to head down and they're going to hand out to you the bread and the juice or the port, whatever one you choose, And they're gonna offer you the elements from which you can take from them. And just hold on to them as you receive them because they'll come back up and they'll lead us so that we can eat together and then drink together.

So first, they'll hand out the bread, and then I'll come up and I'll lead us so we can eat the bread together. And then after that, they'll hand out the juice, and we'll drink that together. It says in Mark 14:22, and as they were eating, Jesus, He took bread, and after blessing it, broke it and gave it to them and said, take. This is My body. The bread which we break is the sharing of the body of Christ.

Take it, eat and believe that the body of our Lord Jesus Christ was given for a complete forgiveness of all our sins. Let's eat. In Mark 14:23-25, it says, and Jesus took a cup, and when He had given thanks, He gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And He said to them, this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly, I say to you, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.

The cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks is the sharing of the blood of Christ. Take it, drink from it all of you, and believe that the precious blood of our Lord Jesus Christ was poured out for a complete forgiveness of all our sins. Let's drink and give thanks. Let's pray together. Jesus, we thank You for this meal as a church family.

We thank You for what You did, giving up Your own body to the cross, shedding Your own precious blood to cover over all of our guilty stains. We thank You for this complete forgiveness. We honour Your sacrifice by receiving it. We do not set ourselves up as a higher judge than You, God, judging ourselves more harshly than You do. We thank You that Jesus has paid for all of our sin.

So help us to rest in the gospel, to rest in the righteousness of Christ, and help us Lord to be fruitful in the gospel. Thank You that You've set us free. You've dealt with all of our ultimate problems. You've given us spiritual riches in Christ. You've given us an identity as sons and daughters, and so now we can work in the world not for our identity, but for Your glory.

And so we pray that You'd make us wise and diligent and skilful workers doing Your kingdom work and doing the other work that You've given to us as we worship You in this world. We bless You and we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.