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Labor DayGenesis 21Title Slide2Do you ever feel overworked, over-regulated, under leisured, under-benefited?3Take heart. This notice was found in the ruins of a London office building. It was dated 1852.1. This firm has reduced the hours of work, and the clerical staff will now only have to be present between the hours of 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. weekdays.2. Clothing must be of a sober nature. The clerical staff will not disport themselves in raiment of bright colors, nor will they wear hose unless in good repair.3. Overshoes and topcoats may not be worn in the office, but neck scarves and headwear may be worn in inclement weather.4. A stove is provided for the benefit of the clerical staff. Coal and wood must be kept in the locker. It is recommended that each member of the clerical staff bring four pounds of coal each day during the cold weather.5. No member of the clerical staff may leave the room without permission from the supervisor.6. No talking is allowed during business hours.7. The craving for tobacco, wine, or spirits is a human weakness, and as such is forbidden to all members of the clerical staff.8. Now that the hours of business have been drastically reduced, the partaking of food is allowed between 11:30 and noon, but work will not on any account cease.9. Members of the clerical staff will provide their own pens. A new sharpener is available on application to the supervisor.10. The supervisor will nominate a senior clerk to be responsible for the cleanliness of the main office and the private office. All boys and juniors will report to him 40 minutes before prayers and will remain after closing hours for similar work. Brushes, brooms, scrubber, and soap are provided by the owners.11. The owners recognize the generosity of the new labor laws, but will expect a great rise in output of work to compensate for these near Utopian conditions.4Are you familiar with the song, “Everybody’s Working for the Weekend?” Even if you’ve never heard the song, you may well have had the feeling. Maybe you can relate to the following sayings. “The best thing about work is going home.” “I only work to make money so I can enjoy myself on my days off.” “I deserve a break today, so I’m calling in sick.”It seems as though people believe work is a nuisance we have to live with or even a punishment for something we did. Would many people say that they enjoy their work? That they look forward to accomplishing their work? That their work is a joy to them?The Scriptural idea of work suggests that it is not a punishment, but something that should give us joy. Let us look at what we find in this morning’s text:5Genesis 2:4-76A little boy came to his mother and said, “Mother, is it true that we are made from the dust and that after we die we go back to the dust?” “Yes,” she replied. “Well,” he said, “I looked under my bed this morning, and there’s someone under there. I just can’t tell if he’s coming or going!” 7Last week we saw that everything God created - he merely spoke and it appeared. BUT when God created man He climbed down into the mud and got His hands dirty. And He breathed into a piece of muddy clay and it became a living, breathing creation… MADE IN THE IMAGE OF GOD, IN HIS LIKENESS. Not only did He design the highest mountains and the richest hues but He crafted mankind –as His masterpiece.Nothing else in all of creation required this kind of attention. Nothing else in all of creation called for that degree of involvement by God. 8Why did God do this? Why would He do something so involved, when all He had to do was speak and the man would be formed? He’d already done that with all the rest of creation. But, only with man did God get down on his hands and knees to bring life. So why would He do it that way?9Because we are created in His image and He values us! We are like nothing else that He’s created. And our value goes beyond what we can do, or what we can contribute. We are valuable because He made us in His image.10Genesis 2:8-9, 1511God creates a man out of the dust of the ground and then God plants a garden in paradise and puts the man in the garden to do what?? To relax?? To swing in a hammock and sip iced tea all day?? To take a leisurely stroll and smell the flowers and pick the blackberries?? No. Verse 15 tells us that God puts the man in the garden “to tend it and watch over it.”? Right off the bat, God puts the man to work. What’s that all about?Since there was a human to work the ground, then God planted the special garden He called, “Eden.” The word EDEN means “pleasure.” Eden was literally a garden of pleasure.God then put Adam in the Garden of Eden to live and to care for it, to work the ground and provide for it. It was a gift and a responsibility, but it was not a punishment.12We live in a society that has mixed views on work. On the one hand, we have a nation of workaholics. People working 60, 70, 80 hours a week out of a driving compulsion to “get ahead.” People who get in to work early, stay late, and bring their work home with them. 13One father kept bringing his work home with him and his 1st grade son asked him why. Daddy explained that he couldn’t finish it all during the day. The boy thought for a moment and asked, “Then why don’t they just put you in a slower group?”14The Lost Dr. Seuss Poem15On the other hand, we have a nation that worships pleasure and entertainment, and for a lot of people the joy, the meaning, the blessings, the sense of fulfilment that ensues from work, is missing. Instead, work is viewed as something to be endured, not enjoyed. We work to live. We live to work.?We work our jobs only to get a paycheck. We live from the time we punch out till the time we punch back in again. Work is only an evil necessity that allows us to do the things we really want to do.16From the time we are kids we are taught, “Get your chores done first and then you can play.”? This is why so many of us spend time at our jobs working for the 5:00 hour, working for the weekend, working for vacation, working for retirement.? We’ve been told for so long that real living isn’t work but is instead what comes after our work is done and what we can do with the money we earned from our work. You may have heard the saying, "I owe, I owe, it’s off to work I go.“ For so many, that is the best reason to muster for going to work. They find little joy or satisfaction. 17Work itself is inherently good. God didn’t mind “getting His hands dirty.” In creating the universe. Genesis 2:2 says, “By the seventh day?God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.”18Just as He works, so He has created us to work. John 5:17, “But Jesus replied, ‘My Father is always working, and so am I,’” As we use the abilities He has given us, we can be a coworker with Him to carry out His work.19For example, God can use the nurse to meet the health needs of patients, the grocer to distribute food to customers, the researcher to provide accurate information, the lawyer to promote justice for clients, the career homemaker to nurture growing children. God values these kinds of jobs because they help to carry out His purposes in the world. It takes all kinds of skills, and all kinds of people to do what God wants done in the world. What we do for work and how we do it should bring glory to God. He should be pleased with it—and with us as we do it.20The gift of work comes under the category of being created in the Image of God. Since God can only do what is good, and we are created in his image, (Genesis 1:27), then work must be good. One of the most important ways we are meant to reflect God’s image is in the way we work.??21Colossians 3:23-2422When I was a boy, I felt it was both a duty and a privilege to help my widowed mother make ends meet by finding employment in vacation time, on Saturdays and other times when I did not have to be in school. For quite a while I worked for a Scottish shoemaker, or "cobbler," as he preferred to be called, an Orkney man, named Dan Mackay. He was a forthright Christian and his little shop was a real testimony for Christ in the neighborhood. The walls were literally covered with Bible texts and pictures, generally taken from old-fashioned Scripture Sheet Almanacs, so that look where one would, he found the Word of God staring him in the face. There were John 3:16 and John 5:24, Romans 10:9, and many more.On the little counter in front of the bench on which the owner of the shop sat, was a Bible, generally open, and a pile of gospel tracts. No package went out of that shop without a printed message wrapped inside. And whenever opportunity offered, the customers were spoken to kindly and tactfully about the importance of being born again and the blessedness of knowing that the soul is saved through faith in Christ. Many came back to ask for more literature or to inquire more particularly as to how they might find peace with God, with the blessed results that men and women were saved, frequently right in the shoe shop.It was my chief responsibility to pound leather for shoe soles. A piece of cowhide would be cut to suite, then soaked in water. I had a flat piece of iron over my knees and, with a flat-headed hammer, I pounded these soles until they were hard and dry. It seemed an endless operation to me, and I wearied of it many times.What made my task worse was the fact that, a block away, there was another shop that I passed going and coming to or from my home, and in it sat a jolly, godless cobbler who gathered the boys of the neighborhood about him and regaled them with lewd tales that made him dreaded by respectable parents as a menace to the community. Yet, somehow, he seemed to thrive and that perhaps to a greater extent than my employer, Mackay. As I looked in his window, I often noticed that he never pounded the soles at all, but took them from the water, nailed them on, damp as they were, and with the water splashing from them as he drove each nail in.One day I ventured inside, something I had been warned never to do. Timidly, I said, "I notice you put the soles on while still wet. Are they just as good as if they were pounded?" He gave me a wicked leer as he answered, "They come back all the quicker this way, my boy!""Feeling I had learned something, I related the instance to my boss and suggested that I was perhaps wasting time in drying out the leather so carefully. Mr. Mackay stopped his work and opened his Bible to the passage that reads, "Whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of god.""Harry," he said, "I do not cobble shoes just for the four bits and six bits (50c or 75c) that I get from my customers. I am doing this for the glory of God. I expect to see every shoe I have ever repaired in a big pile at the judgment seat of Christ, and I do not want the Lord to say to me in that day, 'Dan, this was a poor job. You did not do your best here.' I want Him to be able to say, 'Well done, good and faithful servant.'"Then he went on to explain that just as some men are called to preach, so he was called to fix shoes, and that only as he did this well would his testimony count for God. It was a lesson I have never been able to forget. Often when I have been tempted to carelessness, and to slipshod effort, I have thought of dear, devoted Dan Mackay, and it has stirred me up to seek to do all as for Him who died to redeem me.23An often overlooked way that we serve God is in our everyday tasks. Martin Luther understood this when he wrote, “The maid who sweeps her kitchen is doing the will of God just as much as the monk who prays—not because she may sing a Christian hymn as she sweeps but because God loves clean floors. The Christian shoemaker does his Christian duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship.”24Ephesians 2:1025Another lesson we can learn about work and gardening from Adam is this: God sharecrops with us.Sharecropping is where a farmer works a field he doesn’t own. The land owner supplies the land... and sometimes even the seed, fertilizer, and possibly even the machines. When the crops come in, that sharecropper then compensates the owner of that field by sharing a percentage of the crop with the landowner. Thus the term “Share cropping”.God owned the Garden of Eden. He even planted that garden for Adam. And then “the LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.”?Genesis 2:15 God shared this Garden with Adam. He supplied the seeds to be planted. But ultimately God expected Adam to do the work and take care of that Garden. In the same way – God has given you and I a garden of “good things” to do. He’s sharing that with us. But He expects us to invest our resources in that garden (time/talent/treasure)26Why does God work?27Romans 1:2028God shows us who he is through his creation. We are finite, physical creatures and the only way we can even begin to comprehend God is through the work of his hands. God reveals himself through his work.29The second reason God works is it brings Him satisfaction. In the Genesis account of creation, God makes the heavens and the earth in six days. When all was said and done God stepped back and commented on it all.Genesis 1:3130God created us in his image, to work, where we can express ourselves, find satisfaction, impact the world around us, and bring glory to Him. We can get back to this original intent only when we begin to take God to work with us. If you can take God to work you’ll be able to say, “Thank God it’s Monday!”31An old gospel song says it this way: We’ll work ’til Jesus comes, We’ll work ’til Jesus comesWe’ll work ’til Jesus comes, Then we’ll be gathered home.32References ................
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