Awhile back I read an article entitled “Are We Obsessed with Work?” The author, Thomas Cooper, begins by quoting from another article, describing a typical workday: “On average, we are interrupted 73 times a day, suffer one hour of negative stress, take one hour of work home, converse with our spouse four minutes, exercise less than three minutes, play with children for two minutes and consider goals for one minute.” This is simply a description of the way many Americans are living today. But there’s a point. Cooper continues: “The more subtle part of the message is this: Because work is the most time-consuming and important part of our life, then everything else has to be judged by how it helps us or relates to our work. The implication is that we should be analyzing our everyday behaviors with questions like these: Is this helpful to my/our productivity? Is this something that will enhance my/our prestige? Are we wasting opportunity time with this person? Is she a contact that will be useful? Is he someone we should avoid because of office politics? What is clear from the article is that the workplace often distracts us from asking deeper moral or ethical questions. It would seem that we rarely spend time in contemplation, reflection or meditation. The article implies that the only time we ask searching questions of ourselves is when our work quality or production suffers” (Thomas Cooper, in The Marketplace, January February 2001, p. 24). The implication is that work is the most important thing we do, and everything else in our lives should be measured in relation to our work. Work is primary. It’s the center around which everything else revolves.
The author of Psalm 127 has a very different view. He doesn’t despise work. He doesn’t say, as some religious teachers have said, that work is a problem, something that keeps us from fellowship with God. He doesn’t say, as some teachers in the church at Thessalonica were saying, that since the Lord is returning soon we should abstain from work and simply wait for Him to come back. Paul condemned that teaching by saying: “In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we command you, brothers, to keep away from every brother who is idle and does not live according to the teaching you received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example. We were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat anyone’s food without paying for it. On the contrary, we worked night and day, laboring and toiling so that we would not be a burden to any of you. We did this, not because we do not have the right to such help, but in order to make ourselves a model for you to follow. For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: ‘If a man will not work, he shall not eat’” (2 Thessalonians 3:6-10).
The author of Psalm 127 doesn’t devalue work. He assumes that work is a part of human life, part of what we were created for. Adam was given a job to do in the garden, before the Fall. God calls us to work, but the psalmist understands that what we receive from our work is a gift from Him. We work, and God graciously provides for our needs. We pray “give us this day our daily bread,” and then we go to work. But our needs are not met because we’ve earned our way in the world. In having our needs met, we’re not getting what we’re entitled to. Our needs are met because our Heavenly Father graciously provides for us.
What the psalmist condemns is work that’s done apart from God, in alienation from Him. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said this: “If I were called upon to identify the principal trait of the entire 20th century, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than this statement: Men have forgotten God” (Dr. James Dobson’s Bulletin, June 1997). People in the modern world have forgotten God, and in most of our assumptions about work, God is not part of the picture. In the modern world, our lives at work and our lives in church are two entirely different things. People have forgotten God, and they go about their work in alienation from Him.
The first thing to notice in this psalm, in verse 1, is that work done in a proud spirit of self-sufficiency is vain: “Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain.” He’s not saying that the work won’t be successful. The builders may succeed in constructing a very nice house, and the watchmen may successfully guard the city. Proud, self-sufficient workers may succeed in making a lot of money. But they will do so because God is merciful, not because they’ve found a way of making it without Him. We easily forget how little we can accomplish on our own. When things are going well, it’s tempting to take credit ourselves. It’s tempting to think that everything is going well because we have done things right. And then it’s tempting to look down on others who aren’t doing so well. “Why don’t they show some initiative and get their act together?”
Nebuchadnezzar was the emperor of Babylon, a powerful empire, but the book of Daniel describes how God humbled him: “he was walking on the balcony of the royal palace in Babylon and boasted, ‘Look at this, Babylon the great! And I built it all by myself, a royal palace adequate to display my honor and glory!’ The words were no sooner out of his mouth than a voice out of heaven spoke, ‘This is the verdict on you, King Nebuchadnezzar: Your kingdom is taken from you. You will be driven out of human company and live with the wild animals. You will eat grass like an ox. The sentence is for seven seasons, enough time to learn that the High God rules human kingdoms and puts whomever he wishes in charge” (Daniel 4:29-32, The Message). He was the most powerful man in the world, but in an instant God removed him from power and caused him to live like a wild animal for seven years. Then, when he humbled himself and acknowledged God’s sovereignty, he was restored. All that we have–our abilities, the opportunities that have come our way, a stable society in which it’s possible to do well, good health that enables us to go to work each day–all these things come to us as gifts of God’s grace. When we become proud and self-sufficient, we’re taking credit for things God has done, things that are beyond our power and which He can take away if He chooses.
Proud self-sufficiency is foolish. But it’s also vain and empty. The book of Ecclesiastes is about the vanity of life apart from God. Eugene Peterson has a helpful introduction to this book in The Message: “Everything we try is so promising at first! But nothing ever seems to amount to very much. We intensify our efforts–but the harder we work at it, the less we get out of it. Some people give up early and settle for a humdrum life. Others never seem to learn, and so they flail away through a lifetime, becoming less and less human by the year, until by the time they die there is hardly enough humanity left to compose a corpse.” Here’s how the book of Ecclesiastes begins: “Smoke, nothing but smoke!.... There’s nothing to anything–it’s all smoke. What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone? One generation goes its way, the next one arrives, but nothing changes–it’s business as usual for old planet earth. The sun comes up and the sun goes down, then does it again, and again–the same old round.... Everything’s boring, utterly boring–no one can find any meaning in it. Boring to the eye, boring to the ear. What was will be again, what happened will happen again. There’s nothing new on this earth. Year after year it’s the same old thing” (1:2-5, 8-9, The Message). Life apart from God is meaningless; and proud, self-sufficient work, work that seeks to exclude God, is equally meaningless.
The next thing to notice, in verse two, is that work done with an anxious, fretful spirit is also in vain. “In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat–for he grants sleep to those he loves.” This is similar to what Jesus is saying in Matthew 6:33: “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” The point is not that we should spend all our time having devotions instead of working, and just trust God to provide for our needs. The point is that our first priority, the thing that everything else is measured by, is our relationship to God. Our work is not ultimate. Providing for our needs is not the first thing. We work because God calls us to. We offer our work up to Him as an act of worship, and we trust Him to provide for our needs. But we don’t need to work in a spirit of anxious frenzy, constantly wondering how we can manage to produce more and make more money The psalmist is not criticizing work, but work that has become toilsome. The word he uses for work here often has negative connotations and points to “the drudgery of toil rather than the nobility of labor.... the root amal relates to the dark side of labor, the grievous and unfulfilling aspect of work.” (Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, vol. 2, p. 675). He’s referring to work that has begun to consume our lives, that has crowded God out and become an idol. We may even hate it, but it’s still an idol, because it occupies a place in our priorities that belongs to God alone.
God has placed a boundary on work by commanding us to set aside one day each week. By stopping our work in obedience to God, even when we have to leave things undone, we’re recognizing that God is our highest priority. There’s a tendency for our work to snowball and end up consuming our lives, but the Sabbath brings us to a stop and reminds us that we’ve gotten off track. God gives sleep and rest to those He loves. We can afford to set aside our work, not because everything is done, but because God our Father has promised to care for us. One way to prevent our work from becoming toilsome is to stop and lay our work aside at regular intervals, acknowledging God’s sovereignty in our lives.
When I was still a music major at Messiah College, I heard about another classical guitarist who was trying to make a living playing the guitar. He was practicing 8-12 hours each day and was barely keeping up. He couldn’t afford to stop for meals, so his wife would bring him sandwiches to eat while he was practicing. I don’t know how long he kept up that pace, but something was wrong in his approach. Maybe he really didn’t have the gifts to make a living with the guitar and God was calling him to do something else. I know that Andres Segovia, possibly the greatest classical guitarist of all time, only practiced 5 hours a day and was very critical of virtuosos who became enslaved to the instrument. John Williams, one of the greatest guitarists alive today, once told a reporter that he practices 0-4 hours a day. So maybe this man was pursuing the wrong calling, trying to do something God hadn’t equipped him to do. Or maybe he was so caught up in the frenzy of trying to get everything done that he’d completely lost perspective and couldn’t stop to reevaluate what he was doing. That’s why God has given us the Sabbath. It places a boundary on work and gives us time to realign our priorities.
“It’s useless to rise early and go to bed late, and work your worried fingers to the bone. Don’t you know he enjoys giving rest to those he loves?” (The Message). If we’re working with an anxious, frenzied spirit, if our work has become toilsome, we’ve lost sight of God our Father and have begun to think that it all depends on us. We’re trusting in our own ability to provide for ourselves. “Relentless, compulsive work habits... which our society rewards and admires are seen by the psalmist as a sign of weak faith and assertive pride, as if God could not be trusted to accomplish his will, as if we could rearrange the universe by our own effort” (Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience, p. 106).
The third thing to notice, in verses 3-5, is that the best things in our lives come to us as gifts from God’s hand, not because we’ve earned them: “Sons are a heritage from the Lord, children a reward from him.” Here’s what one commentator says: “our psalm, pushing the point still further, reflects the irony that one of the most important blessings of human house-building takes place in bed. It is in the bed, after all, in the context of rest and sleep, that children are conceived. Thus, God’s great gift, the gift of children, appears to have more to do with human rest than with human toil” (Patrick Henry Reardon, Christ in the Psalms, p. 254).
I remember, when I was growing up, hearing the words “God helps those who help themselves.” The assumption was that there is a direct correspondence between our diligent labor and the amount of help we receive from God. People who work long hours can expect to receive a greater blessing than those who work less. God rewards our labor; He blesses those who take initiative and work hard to help themselves. It’s not that this is completely false–certainly diligence is a good thing and is presented in Scripture, especially in Proverbs, in a positive way–but it overlooks the fact that God doesn’t deal with His people like an employer. There’s not a direct correspondence between the amount of work we do and the amount of blessing we receive from God. We don’t earn our way with God. He deals with us according to grace.
When we contract with someone for a job, we are selling our labor in exchange for money. But God doesn’t deal with us in terms of buying and selling. Jacques Ellul, the French sociologist, contrasts God’s way with that of the world: “Grace is God’s action, freely willed and given without cost. Indeed the major characteristic of God’s world is the fact that in it everything is given freely. Grace is grace precisely because it is not bought. ‘Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price’ (Is 55:1). We are looking at God’s extraordinary generosity which means, on the one hand, that we would never be able to pay an adequate price, whatever we brought, to buy God’s pardon; and, on the other hand, that God does not obey the world’s law but another law, the law of giving. God’s one way of acting is giving. Only once did God submit to the law of selling. He allowed his Son to be sold. He agreed to pay the price of our redemption.... But when God thus binds himself to the law of selling and agrees to pay the price, he freely gives his Son in order to give liberty; we are brought right back to giving. God’s only way of acting is giving.... In this new world we are entering, nothing is for sale; everything is given away. The mark of the world of money (where all is bought, where selling with all its consequences is the normal way to act) is the exact opposite of the mark of God’s world where everything is free, where giving is the normal way to act” (Money and Power, pp. 87-88).
In one of His parables, Jesus told about a man who hired workers for his vineyard. He went out first thing in the morning and made an agreement with a group of workers. He returned later in the morning and saw some others standing there, so he said to them, “You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.” He did this two more times, and then, near the end of the day, he found some others standing around with no work, so he sent them into his vineyard also. “When the day’s work was over, the owner of the vineyard instructed his foreman, ‘Call the workers in and pay them their wages. Start with the last hired and go on to the first.’ Those hired at five o’clock came up and were each given a dollar. When those who were hired first saw that, they assumed they would get far more. But they got the same, each of them one dollar. Taking the dollar, they groused angrily to the manager, ‘These last workers put in only one easy hour, and you just made them equal to us, who slaved all day under a scorching sun.’ He replied to the one speaking for the rest, ‘Friend, I haven’t been unfair. We agreed on the wage of a dollar, didn’t we? So take it and go. I decided to give to the one who came last the same as you. Can’t I do what I want with my own money? Are you going to get stingy because I am generous?’ Here it is again, the Great Reversal: many of the first ending up last, and the last first” (Matthew 20:8-16, The Message). God deals with us according to grace. He’s not paying us a wage. There’s not a direct correspondence between the amount of work we do and what we receive from Him. Children are an illustration of that. The best things God brings into our lives come as a gift, not as something we’ve earned.
So what is the point of all this? The point is that God, not our work, belongs at the center of our lives. We’re on pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem, but along the way there are many things that try to get us off track. Pilgrim’s Progress is a wonderful allegory of the Christian life; Christian, the main character, runs into one problem after another, all of them intended to knock him off course. Psalm 122 told us the point of the pilgrimage. The purpose of the pilgrimage is worship. These pilgrims are going to Jerusalem because God’s house is there. It’s the same with our pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem. We are headed there to worship. Worship is central to our lives in Jesus Christ, both now and in eternity. But the danger is that in tending to all the details of life in this world, God gets crowded out. Little by little, we find that work, not God, has become the central thing in our lives. So Psalm 127 is there to jar us back to reality, to help us put things back in perspective. God, not our work, belongs at the center. And when God is at the center, work becomes part of our worship.
How do we keep God at the center, when our society is so bent on turning work into an idol? Here are a few suggestions before I close. 1) Recognize that the Sabbath is one of God’s gifts to us. In our contemporary society, the whole idea of a Sabbath is usually presented in negative terms. It’s seen as something that keeps us from doing what we want to do. But God’s intention is to provide us with a break from the constant, numbing cycle of endless work. It reminds us, week after week, that work is not our ultimate priority. As we lay aside all the things we’ve left undone and spend time in worship, we’re tangibly placing God at the center.
2) Be intentional in pausing throughout the day to turn your heart to the Lord. We get into such a frenzy sometimes that it’s difficult to take our minds off work for even a few moments. But since work is part of our worship, it’s important that we pause, and offer our work to God. It might help to have a few phrases memorized for this purpose, so you don’t have to think of something new each time. When you’re really preoccupied with work, it’s difficult enough just to stop and pray. If you also have to think of something new to say in your prayer, the difficulty may be too great. Use a phrase from the Psalms, like “O God, come to my assistance, O Lord, make haste to help me.” Or here’s one from the Gospels: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” Or make up some short prayers of your own: “Lord, I offer this work to you as an act of worship. May you receive all the glory and honor.” The important thing is to pause and turn your heart to the Lord, recognizing that all you are doing finds its ultimate purpose and meaning in Him.
3) Remind yourself often that a day is coming when you’ll no longer be able to work. Martyn Lloyd-Jones was one of the greatest preachers of the twentieth century. He was pastor of Westminster Chapel, in London, for 30 years, and he preached many times each week in various parts of Great Britain. But near the end of his life he was no longer able to preach, and he said this: “‘Our greatest danger is to live upon our activity. The ultimate test of a preacher is what he feels like when he cannot preach.’ Our relationship with God is to be the supreme cause of joy” (Iain Murray, David Martyn Lloyd-Jones: Volume Two, p. 738). This is true, not only for preachers, but for all of us. “Our greatest danger is to live upon our activity.” Shortly before his death, he said to Iain Murray, the author of his biography, “People say to me it must be very trying for you not to be able to preach–No! Not at all! I was not living upon preaching” (p. 739). A day is coming when we’ll no longer be able to work. We’d do well to begin preparing ourselves now.
4) Make this psalm a regular part of your prayer life. It will help jar you back to reality and remind you of God’s priorities. Also make regular use of the Lord’s prayer: “Give us this day our daily bread.” Not help us earn our daily bread, but give us our daily bread. God calls us to work, but all we have comes to us as His gracious gift. As we go about our work in this world that has forgotten God, we need to remind ourselves often that “Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain. In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat–for he grants sleep to those he loves.”
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