Enjoying the Process (Pt 1)

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

Well take your copy of God’s Word this morning in turn 2 Ecclesiastes chapter 2. There is something very different about this paragraph. In fact, there’s a word used in this paragraph that has not yet been used in the book of Ecclesiastes. It’s a It’s a word. Just one little word is going to kind of buoy us back to the surface and let us get our heads out of the water for at least long enough to kind of fill our lungs with air before we go back under. But this is the kind of passage, in fact just this one little word inside this paragraph is going to get us out from the, I guess, fairly depressing, discouraging, life is hard and then you die. Vanity of vanity, all is vanity, striving after wind. This is a passage, an array of light breaks in. This is a paragraph I’ve been looking forward to since we started Stink. When did we start Ecclesiastes? I don’t even have any idea.

idea. It’s the word shimcha. That’s the word shimcha. And you really got to get the gutter all in there because it’s a hate is the letter there.

Shimcha. It is the word in verse 26, joy. Shimcha. Joy to the one who pleases him God has given joy. This is the first real hint in in the whole book of any kind of meaningful gladness, happiness, joy. You know by this point we might have started to wonder if there really was any good ever going to be any kind of good news at all in this book. I mean based on everything that the preacher has said so far in the previous sections, I mean we pretty much have nothing but dismality, discouragement, depression, you know, we kind of week after week have been feeling this heavy weighty burden of life on our shoulders pushing us down, you know, it’s kind of like the concrete weights chained to our ankles sucking us down underneath the water. And here for the first time we have the prospect of joy, God-given joy. It is no coincidence that there is something else different about this paragraph as well. Not only do we have the word shimcha, joy, we see in verse 24 the idea of finding enjoyment. Verse 25 who can

have enjoyment connected with the shim-ha, even though it’s a different word, but they’re similar in idea. There’s something else different about this paragraph, and it’s no coincidence.

I think that this is the first paragraph that really starts to include somebody else in the story, and that’s God. Strangely absent in the book of Ecclesiastes so far has been God. Have you realized that? The only other time God was mentioned was back in chapter 1 verse 13, and I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. The only other time God has been mentioned explicitly is describing, yeah, he’s the one who has made life so miserable. He’s the one who’s made it so tough and given us this work, this unhappy business to be a part of, and it is no surprise or no coincidence to find that when the subject gets back to God and seeing life from the outlook or the perspective of submission to God that there can be joy. In everything else that he has pursued so far, he has found at best a temporary kind of joy, at best temporary relative kind of joy and wisdom he said yeah wisdom is better

than folly but I mean then you die anyway he’s worked he sought pleasure I mean we went through that whole list that chronicle of different ways he sought to find pleasure and ultimately his conclusion on everything else in life was not joy but vanity have now have a lean vanity of vanities all his It’s empty, it’s meaningless, joyless, and here we get to the possibility of joy. And I tell you what, this is a paragraph that we’ve got to get in the sense of we have got to make this a paragraph of priority in our own lives. This is one that we have got to get if we’re going to get the message of the book of Ecclesiastes.

This is a message that we’ve got to get from the preacher here, not me the preacher, Solomon the preacher, this is a message we need to understand and master, especially if we long to have any kind of meaningful joy onto the Son. He will repeat this idea in a number of other paragraphs that follow, but this is definitely the first time. It’s one of the few explicit notes of positivity in the book. And when we find these, these These are like gems, these are like the needle in the haystack kind of passages, because the majority of it is about how it’s tough, it’s hard, miserable. But there are these few gems in here that again get us back up in our heads above the water for at least a little bit and give us some positive things to learn.

It’s one of the things I’m trying to learn and apply in my own life. I think I probably have the dismality part down. I think I got that. I think I understand how to do that, how to live that part, and how to see life from that perspective. It’s this kind of paragraph here where I am wanting to grow in. Hopefully you will want to grow in it as well. The not so secret truth about enjoying life. It’s not a secret, because he’s telling us right here, it’s not so secret issue on how to enjoy life. Look at the paragraph with me. Chapter 2 verse 24. There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil.

This also I saw is from the hand of God for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment. For to the one who pleases him, God has given wisdom and knowledge and Shem-ha. Joy. God given joy, but to the sinner he has given the business of gathering and collecting only to give to the one who pleases God. This also is vanity and a striving after wind. I’m not going to finish this paragraph this morning I have purposefully decided not to try to get the whole way through this paragraph and then we’ll finish it up next Sunday morning before we head into our small groups to give you at least a week or a little bit more than a week to to dwell and think about some of these things. So pretty much I figure out we’ll get through my first point of three in the passage. Here it is point number one the superlative prospect of joy in toil. The superlative prospect of joy in toil.

And I get that from the beginning part of verse 24. There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This is Solomon, Martha Stewart the preacher telling us the good things. This is a good thing. That’s one of her mottos, if you ever watch her. It’s a good thing. Here Solomon is telling us, in fact, more than that, more than just a good thing, this is in fact the best thing. There is nothing better. Now of course this is not necessarily a completely unqualified statement. statement. I don’t think that he’s intending to tell us here that there is nothing better than getting enjoyment in your toil, like not even being in heaven with God is better. That’s not his point. His point is that under the Sun, I mean that’s where he has been, that’s where we live, is right now under the Sun.

He’s not giving us any look to heaven and saying that it’s actually better to find enjoyment in your work right now, then it will be to enjoy eternity in heaven seeing God face-to-face. He’s not making that as the statement, but He is under the sun saying there is nothing better. That makes it a superlative. A comparative is you’ve got good and better, but the superlative is the best. If there is nothing better then that means there can’t be something else best or that there isn’t another category higher than what he’s about ready to describe guys this is it are you grasping that right here Solomon is going to tell us how to get life he’s good he’s explained to us the not necessarily the meaning of life but how to have meaning in life or where meaning in life comes from, where satisfaction in your heart comes from, where joy comes from. Nothing better under the Sun than what he’s about ready to describe. It’s superlative. This is the highest it’s going to get for us.

This is the best. Nothing better. There is nothing better for a person and I want to just point out how general that is before we get into some specifics here.

For a person. This is now a general axiomatic kind of principle. That is it’s universal. It applies to everybody regardless of their position, regardless of their class in society. He’s not saying there’s nothing better for a king than to what he’ll describe. And this is beyond just his own experience as king. This is beyond just what he sees coming for the successor that he would have who follows him in his position as king. This is not just for nobility. It’s not just for the land owners or the rich people. This is not just on the other hand for the poor people or those who don’t have a lot. This is not for men only who have jobs and not for women who either have a job or who are working at home. This is for a person. It’s not just for old people, this is for young people. This is, again, cross gender, cross chronology, cross geography, cross ages. And here it is for a person. That is, in being so general, something that’s important for us to recognize because that means that applies to us. It applies not just to Solomon who was the king, it

applies to us. It applies to you as a junior high girl. It applies to you as a high school guy. Hopefully high school guys and junior high girls don’t have anything more in common necessarily than me just including you in the same sentence. Nevertheless, whether you are old and you have raised your kids and they’re gone or you are still hoping to get married and have kids. Whether you work outside of the house or you work inside of the house, this is where joy is found.

Enjoyment comes and he’s going to tell us about it. There is nothing better for a person, that’s any person, than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. There you go, that’s the secret. Well, the not so secret. Nothing better than contentment and joy where you’re at. Nothing better than the simple things like eating and drinking. I don’t know about you, but eating and drinking is one of the most basic, you know, mundane, everyday kind of things that you can do. Eating and drinking is just a picture of what happens on an everyday kind of level? Eating and drinking and then work. Things you do every day. There is nothing better than that you find enjoyment in the things you do every day. The simple things. I mean eating and drinking and working that’s pretty simple. That’s not really very complex. But for the rest of our time, I’d really like to just focus on the fine enjoyment in his toil clause in that phrase. Because as I was meditating, marinating, whatever you want

to call it on this passage throughout the week, a number of things came to mind, probably even more so about what Solomon doesn’t say than what he does say. It’s striking to me that here he’s talking about enjoyment and joy as a gift of God from the hand of God all the things that he doesn’t include in how to have meaning in life. All things he doesn’t say that we would look to you as answers for how to have that kind of joy. So I got a number of these things that stood out to me so these are kind of sub points underneath the superlative prospect of joy and toil. First, the joy or the enjoyment comes in toil, right?

Some of it comes from eating and drinking and I don’t think that he’s trying to encourage us there at that point that we should eat a Daniel’s broiler for every meal. You know like that it’s actually the food itself it’s the process of eating and drinking right? It’s not what you’re eating and drinking it’s that you are getting to eat and drink. And then specifically the toil. In other words joy comes in the process of life or in the processes of of life. Hence why the title for the message is, Enjoy the Process, or Enjoying the Process.

Joy comes in toil in the normal day-to-day things we do, not in stepping out of those normal processes of life. To eat and drink and work, as I said, are the basic things of life, these are the simple things. I mean this is a piece and contentment with what you have and what you’re doing and it is so interesting to me that in the remainder of the book every time I think he talks about joy or enjoyment he includes it or connects it with work, with toil, with labor, not with vacation, Not with taking a break. Not with getting out of work. Whether that be by vacation or a break or the weekend. I mean, out of all the people who had experienced pleasure, who had access to not working, and making other people do the work for him, I mean, that would have been Solomon.

As we saw already at the beginning of Chapter 2, I mean, here was a guy who didn’t really have to do anything. And still enjoy all of the pleasures and all of the luxuries, right? I mean, the fun things, the pleasurable things. Starting here at the end of chapter 2 and through the rest of the book, he never says that it is in the luxuries of life that we have joy. He never says that it’s in the vacation seasons of life that we have joy. He never says it’s in the retirement stage of life that we have joy. He says, joy and enjoyment comes in toil, in the middle of our work, the additions to life, the little things we try to make our lives more comfortable with, the luxuries that all of us have, Solomon the preacher never says joy is found in those things, he says joy is found in toil.

I’ll talk more about that as we go along. Not only then do we see that joy comes in toil, second, based on this paragraph, joy does not seem to depend on what kind of toil it is. He makes no qualifications here about what kind of work you do as being the source of joy. There’s no description of here’s the kind of job that you do where you can have enjoyment and all these other kinds, you can’t have enjoyment in. No qualifications, no restrictions whatsoever.

Instead, a person is to see the good. Is that how the NAS translates? How does the NAS translate that last part of verse 24? You have find enjoyment in his toil, the NAS has what? Tell himself that his labor is good. I’m having a little conversation with myself. The verb there is see. See the good of his labor. Probably is a better translation. Find enjoyment is okay because find has the idea of looking I suppose. But really to see the good of his work. To find the pleasure in his work. So that’s the nothing better than that. Telling yourself that your work is good, I mean that could give you the idea that you know you take a test and you get it back and you got enough on it but you just tell yourself hey it was good anyway.

I mean that’s not the idea.

It’s beyond just kind of trying to mentally trick yourself that you know everything is okay when it’s really not. It’s to look for the good, see what is positive, what are the blessings of your work, of your toil, of your labor, whatever your toil or labor may be. Wow that’s amazing to me because I’ve had some jobs that didn’t really enjoy a whole lot. In fact, I’ve had a lot of jobs that I pretty much hated, despised, disdained, looked down upon, held contempt for. And yes, Alma says that there is nothing better than looking for the good than finding enjoyment in whatever you’re doing, whatever your work is. Is it possible, for example to find joy to see the good in scraping gum off of a gym floor for around three hours. The answer is yes. As I collected as I was scraping gum on my hands and knees yesterday afternoon at the gym gym that seems to have become the traditional thing for me to participate in when I come to the gym gym is to get a little scraper and scrape gum you know spray some little cleaning solution on it and let it sit there and do its work and then pick at

it. All across the gym floor I think it was around three hours that I went around and did that yesterday and this is a lot of what I collected. Is it possible? I thought you guys would appreciate that, that’s what I was saying. There’s some good things in there beyond just gum. I mean if you guys want to look at that more later you’re more than welcome to come up but how appropriate is I thought even to just have it in here. A little smiley face garbage can. So we’ll kind of let the happy face look at us as we go on with our message this morning. Is it possible to find joy shoveling gravel from one pile to another one, Mr. Palmer?

I used to actually use that as an example when people asked me how my day was going or various things like that. I used to say things like, well yeah, it’s better than shoveling gravel from one pile to another all day long. Well, Mr. Palmer actually had the opportunity. How many tons of gravel was it? About ten tons. Okay, so 10 tons of gravel that you had to hand shovel, right, out of your truck into a pile, I assume. So that you could get your truck in a position where you could move it into the shop so that you could fix the engine, right? Is that accurate? Yeah. So approximately how long did that take? The shoveling gravel element there.

Three to four hours. Three to four hours. Is it possible to find joy in that kind of labor and toil? And you know what the answer is? Yes. Well, that might be part of it. You know, I kind of came up with a list of the kind of jobs that people might have during Solomon’s time who lived in Israel, And the kind of things they might have to do in some of those jobs, you know, probably the people who would have read this kind of passage first, you know, to kind of wrap our minds to kind of, you know, put on our togas and wrap our, you know, gird up our loins and go back three or four thousand years and see what kind of work they could have done to see, you know, if Solomon says there’s nothing better than to find enjoyment in eating and drinking and finding enjoyment seeing the good in your labor, what kind of people do you think he was expecting this truth to apply to? Well, how about shepherds? Again, I just came up with a list and some more thoughts on these as we go on. How about shepherds?

I mean I’m wondering how much joy there actually was in and of itself in being a shepherd. I mean you are with stinky animals, always responsible, always responsible. I mean being a shepherd is a 24 hour job. You are always responsible to be looking for their next meal. You are always responsible to be finding the next water spot, to be a shepherd at times of the season at least, at times during the year, could actually require being away from your home for maybe months in a row. Away from your, you know, nice things, away from your wife’s home cooked meals, out literally in the wilderness, because that’s where grass grows, is out in the wilderness. And so, you know, if you didn’t have a lot of your own land, you would have to, you know, drive your cattle or drive your sheep to other places to, again, find that grass or find that water.

Being out in the cold, being out during the night. I mean, always needing to be on guard, watching for wolves or predators or robbers. I mean think about that level of responsibility. Think about that kind of consuming job. You know we act like we have tough jobs because you know we you know take it home with us. Well a shepherd was really taking it home with him and even at nighttime had responsibility. I mean maybe there were shifts if he had enough you know sheep let’s say maybe he had a partner or a hireling who could help him out but still I don’t necessarily know that being a shepherd would provide in and of itself a lot of joy because then you kill what you have just been sacrificing your life for then you kill it you know or maybe if it’s sheep you shear it you know and keep going for a while but then it dies I mean it’s not like you’re having good conversation out there in the middle of the waters with the sheep you know good fellowship taking place how about being a farmer I mean or running a vineyard

that’s another kind of job that a person might have yeah that’s real good play in the dirt I just consider the lack of conveniences that farmers vineyard keepers would have had two, three thousand years ago compared to all of the you know big cool farm tractors you know we have today in the combines and all those different you know tools like an engine. It’s not all things an engine accomplishes that they wouldn’t have had two, three thousand years ago You know, you take your rocks and out to the field, you know, strap it on some plow, you know, and as you’re plowing through the field, yeah, that sounds like a good way.

I signed up for that job. You know, and you run into a rock cave. And then, you know, you can’t be in control of the weather. The frost comes, destroys the crop, you gotta do it all over again. I mean, not like you got lights out on the front of your tractor. I mean, that’s getting up at the break of dawn and working as much as possible until the sun goes down. And of course, then when you come home, you’re not tired at that point. After having worked all day as long as the sun is out.

trying to again protect your fields from the various animals or predators that could destroy it. Let me think about the face that being a farmer requires. I’m going to take this really little thing and I’m going to bury it underneath the ground and then I’ll wait. Okay, put some water on it, take the weeds away from it and then expected to grow and that’s going to provide my family’s income for you know the few months over the winter when crops can’t grow or can’t grow as well or you grow different crops I mean I don’t know that being a farmer is that great of a job how about construction workers I mean again if we’re trying to think about jobs people might have had during the time of Solomon I mean we read all those different building projects that Solomon had taking place. I would anticipate that Solomon was probably an exacting, probably a relatively critical kind of boss. I mean this was a guy with some pretty high expectations and when it takes you 13 years to build your house, you know, it probably was not taking 13 years because Solomon was working on it

in his spare time. I mean he undoubtedly had you know hundreds if not thousands of people working on it like all day long. He’s wrong, that’s ugly, that’s not square, do it again.

I mean you can just imagine that kind of thing taking place. I don’t know that being a construction worker in Solomon’s day would have been that great of a job. It’s not the job in and of itself. Kind of going back even before that you know I’m thinking about because if this is a universal truth, if this is a principle that applies to everybody at any time, then it also applies before Solomon. I think about the Israelites who are in Egypt, and after Smart Alach Moses goes in and says, let my people go, Pharaoh says, you guys must be so bored, now you can collect your own straw from which to make the bricks. And we’re not going to decrease the daily amount of bricks that you need to make. So whereas before we were providing you the straw and apparently the amount of bricks that they needed to make was still pretty high at that point. I mean barrel was not probably just giving them three hours of work a day. Now they got to go get their own straw and come back. I wonder how much enjoyment you think you could

find in going out to find straw coming back and making bricks all day every day. I mean, especially during that season of life, how much do you think the guy was home? How much do you think the guy was at home spending time with his family when he now had to go get the straw and make the bricks? Is it possible for that guy and for that family to find enjoyment in their work? I think that it is. Back in Solomon’s time, we could talk about the palace servants, you know, those who were cooking and cleaning, we talked about, you know, in previous messages, you know, that it could have fed a thousand people the kind of daily food preparation.

I mean, that’s annoying, right? You know, wake up and do the same thing again and again. The meaningless repetition of, you know, we ate just three hours ago and now I got to go through the whole process again and then I got to wash the dishes and then three hours from now we’re going to do it again being a paliservant how about if you were in the army that’s another occupation that people at that point could have had you know not only an occupation where you on a daily basis or under threat of losing your life that’s part of what it is to be in the army, but I mean we’re talking that the Israeli army oftentimes would have been away from home for months if not years at a time. That’s the case even today for people who are in the military. You know they’re going on three months tours or six months or a couple different years, a couple numerous years on top of each other away from their family. That’s predominantly men. Probably the biggest job that most of the women had was housewives. Well let’s think about that.

Let’s think about the lack of convenience that is 3,000 years ago that every housewife has today like I don’t know running water. Instead of you putting the bucket on your head, bucket head kid. Instead of putting the bucket on your head or on your shoulders and going down to the well and drawing the water and carrying it all the way back to your house every time you needed some, you turn on a faucet and you actually have the choice whether you want it to be hot or cold. You don’t got to, you know, pour it into a different bucket and then light a fire and then put that bucket of water on the fire so that that can get hot so you can do whatever you need to do.

I mean you go to a faucet and turn it on or off as you want, as much as you want, pretty much any time you want. I mean, let alone the electrical stuff like light. I mean, they had candles, yes, but torches. But we have this crazy, fandangled, magical light coming out of the ceiling.

Washing things, cleaning things. I mean, preparing every meal from scratch. not going down to the store and picking up something that then you add your own meat to. For a lot of people today, that’s the top of what cooking from scratch means. You open up the separate bag of pasta and the separate bag of seasoning and you add your own meat and that’s called cooking from scratch. You know hamburger helper stroganoff or whatever you’re eating. About if you made your own pasta and had to grow your own spices and then kill and prepare your own meat and do that every meal, every meal, not meat, day after day. Is it possible for those people to find enjoyment?

I think so. How about the lack of medicine? How about the lack of communication from your husband? And by that I don’t mean when he got home. I meant all the time he wasn’t home. I have talked with my wife about this so I think it’s okay for me to say it even I know she’s not here. Because I think we’re on the same page with this. I think that she would actually say it louder than I would. Do you realize, ladies, that part of the idea of you working at home, like part of what makes that significant, is that the guy doesn’t. Now think about that. If we make such a big emphasis about the woman being a worker at home, that means that she’s not a worker outside the home, yes.

That means who is a worker outside the home? How much do you think the guy was home when he was in the Army? How much do you think the guy was home when he was out gathering the straw and then making the bricks to still fulfill the responsibility of the day of the requirement? I mean, the guy was not home because he was working where he was supposed to be working. Is there still possibility to have joy? And the answer is yes. It does not matter what kind of job you have, what kind of coil you do. There are no qualifications. Solomon gives us no qualifications, whether you’re a husband or a wife, young person or person, whether you have a great job that you love in and of itself, or whether you have a worker bee job that is as boring as snot.

It does not matter. There is nothing better than to find enjoyment where you are at and what you are doing. Can I add that most of those families were probably living in one room houses. So I think my phrase for that would be no escape. I mean, there’s no escaping from one another.

I mean, you’re always on call at that point, whether you’re a parent or you’re a sibling. I mean, there’s no place when the guy comes home from gathering his straw and making his bricks and he’s tired and he knows that tomorrow, he’s gonna actually have to walk further away to find the straw because he used the straw that was closer. He’s gotta walk further away to get the same amount of straw and still come back and then make the bricks and be home and he’s gotta be home, honey, probably be home a little bit later tonight. And he gets home and his kids wanna see him and his wife wants to talk to him And you know, there’s no place for him to go and his lazy boy.

You know, watch the TV. No escape, always right there with each other. Hearing everything that would be going on in the middle of the night. Everybody’s snoring, everybody’s talking in their sleep. Everybody’s rustling around in whatever they were sleeping on. Don’t forget that these guys had family responsibilities, just like we do. The command in Deuteronomy chapter 6. I mean, we’ll turn there. Or I’ll turn there. Deuteronomy chapter 6. Hero Israel, verse 4. The Lord our God. The Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. And you shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up.

Just because they had a lot of work to do in preparing the meals, or cleaning the house, or gathering the straw, or building the palace, didn’t change their family responsibilities, and the fathers in particular responsibility to shepherd his household as much as he could when he could be there.

and was not out doing his other job. They had family responsibilities. Don’t forget that they had ministry or temple obligations as well. Some of them are rather inconvenient. I mean they had to make sacrifices, parentheses literally, in order to serve God in the midst of the work that they were doing. I tell you there’s no way that it was convenience for the mama to get her kids cleaned up and fed and then off to the temple for worship. Nothing convenient about that at all. Didn’t change the responsibility to do it. By the way can I add that they worked six days a week, not seven, or not five, like we most of us. In fact that was the pattern they had received from the very beginning that it was at that point working Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then they got one day off, not a weekend. And what were they expected to do on that one day?

Oh, sleep in, because man, that straw was getting really heavy this week. It was to be a day set aside for the Lord to worship Him. All of that, uh, one more thing, by the way the men had to attend three conferences a year, that’s my own word, they had to travel to Jerusalem three times a year for certain feasts to celebrate. Further away you live from Jerusalem the longer you’d be away from home, the longer you would not be talking with your wife. You know we got these cell phone buhahs. We are pretty much in constant communication with one another or at least have access to constant communication with one another. How did those women get by without hearing from their husband for a few days or a few weeks at a time? How did they get by? Well, I tell you what, their joy was not in hearing from their husband because that is, I mean, when my wife hears from me as much joy as I’d like to think that that brings her. The meaning here, the enjoyment in toil is not from having things exactly like we wish they could be.

It’s finding enjoyment in what we’re doing when we’re doing it. The people Solomon is thinking about here for a person, the people who would have read this for the last 3,000 years are people who know what it’s like to work and be tired and have lots of responsibilities. Maybe we would say they had the advantage that their life was more simple. I guess maybe we would say that, but they would probably think we were idiots for saying that. If they could see all of the conveniences that we have, I mean, there is no way that they would say, yeah, you guys have it all for that. They understood, these original readers would have understood.

They knew what it was like to have responsibilities and disappointments and struggles. It doesn’t change that we can, the prospect is available of finding joy in the toil. Whatever that toil is, he does not tell us that it’s one kind and not another. Here’s a third thing that I thought of. Joy does not seem to depend on whether your work is successful or finished. There is nothing in the passage about finding enjoyment when your project is completed. There is nothing about the joy or the enjoyment that you can find when your project is successful. It is not at this point about the grave. At this point, not about entirely your desk being all clean.

I mean, I like my desk being cleaned off. I like my stuff being organized. That is, I don’t have to wait for joy until I get to that point where everything is in its file in the right spot. I mean, I’m getting lots of opportunity to work on that in my house. Because our house is not done yet. I tell you what, I’m gonna have three, four, five pretty miserable years if joy doesn’t come until that’s done. I tell you what, in my job as a pastor, you know when my job is done? Either when I die, or the Lord comes back, or you are complete in Christ. Every one of you. Then my job is done. I gotta tell you what, if I’m gonna wait until every one of you are complete in Christ before I can have any joy, I’m not going to have any joy, not because you all are that significant of punks, just because none of us are going to be complete in Christ until we get to heaven.

So that job is never ending. There is always more to do. There is always more to do in my own life, trying to be like Christ alone in the sheep’s lives. He makes no mention that you find enjoyment when your toil is done, or you find enjoyment when your toil is successful. In fact, out of all of his projects that he completed, his conclusion after finishing those projects was vanity, emptiness, meaninglessness, palace, temple, huge pools of water and you know irrigating however much square acres of Israel. The project being done was not what was satisfying to him. He’s saying the joy can be found in the toil. Fourth, it doesn’t seem to depend on the paycheck for your work, on how much money you get from your work.

Solomon, there’s no one of us who are going to have an income like Solomon. The argument from the greater to the lesser then is if the greater income couldn’t find satisfaction in the paycheck, then why would you think that you’re going to find it in just the next step up from where you are? You know if I could just if I could just get that raise then I think I could have some joy in this job. If I could just have the kind of money that that person makes in their job then I could probably I think then you know I’d be able to find some enjoyment in it. Money itself is meaningless, vanity, empty. It’s not in the paycheck. Fifth, joy doesn’t seem to depend on recognition for your work, on other people bowing down to your great performance, pumping up your self-esteem. Oh, such a great job. You’re so amazing. I feel like you.

Again, who could have had greater recognition for their massive projects than solid? It is not finding enjoyment when people say you’ve done a good job. In fact, you kind you kind of get the idea that it’s in spite of whether anybody recognizes what you do or not. Whether you get a thank you or not. Whether somebody values your contribution or not. It is enjoyment in the work, in the labor, in the toil. I mean we do, I’m almost done. We do an awful lot of complaining and rationalizing about our lack of joy because we’re too busy or we’re not getting to do what we want or what we think we would rather be doing. And you know what, most of the time that comes because we act like our toil shouldn’t be toil. We could just figure out a way to keep the work from seeming like work. This just is. There’s a reason they call it work and not a game.

Or playtime. Or recess. I mean, work is the idea. I mean, they called the thing that because, I mean, you work. You toil. You labor. We believe we could really enjoy our toil if it just wasn’t as much work and that that misses the point. It is not that we find enjoyment by getting out of toil, it’s that we find enjoyment, we find the good in our toil. Because you know what? You are going to toil every day of your life in one way or another for the rest of your life and then you will die. God has given this business of working and toiling to all of us and I tell you what? It’s worse. Thanks to our old father Adam who sinned, God decided to curse the ground so that our work would be frustrated. We work every day except for hopefully a day that we’re setting aside each week to the Lord and that work is cursed. Not only do you have to work, your work is cursed. God made it that way.

God made it that way. And just because we’re not digging down in the ground, you know, like God cursed the ground and said he’d have to work it by the toil, by his toil and sweat of his brow, just because we’re sitting at a desk typing on a computer doesn’t mean God doesn’t have the ability to make that blue screen of death just like the toil and the sweat of trying to get something to come up out of the ground. God is probably not mystified at our lack of agricultural work and wondering how to curse our work and make it frustrating. It is not about finding different work. It is not about getting out of work. It is not about finding work that is easier. It is about working and finding enjoyment in whatever that is. Amal is the Hebrew word for toil, finding enjoyment in his toil. You know what’s interesting about this word Amal?

In other places it’s translated trouble. When it’s used of describing a person, it can be translated either as laborer or sufferer, meaning that at least with the use of this word, the nuance is there’s a connection between work and trouble, between labor and difficulty, between toiling and discouragement. In the middle of our toil, we can find joy. I think we are so depressed and discouraged and burned out because we’re looking for joy in the wrong place. We’re looking for it in the next. We’re looking for it in the next race, in the next vacation, in the next time we get out of work, in the next job that we’ll have that is a little bit more advanced than we have.

We just have a little bit more money in the bank. Or perhaps this may be your satisfied with you, John, if I just could have gotten a little bit more done today. I just could have paid, you know, all of the bills instead of, you know, the ones that I was able to get paid. If I just could spend a little bit more time at home, if my husband could just spend a little bit more time at home, just waiting for something to happen or change, then you know what? It may not happen or change. And if you’re waiting on that thing to happen or change in order to have your joy, your joy is elusive, and it is for you like striving after the wound.

You’re not going to get it. Stop living in hope of a better lot in life and find enjoyment in your lot in life now. Stop looking for the good in what someone else is doing and what you wish your life could be like and find enjoyment in what you are doing. Joy in work, in your toil, in your labor does not come from having the right job, the right employer, making a lot of money, having an exact schedule that you want or from taking lots of vacation, etc. Joy comes from the hand of God and we receive it moment by moment as we submit to him in whatever he has us doing. We’ll see that next week. This also I saw is from the hand of God.

For apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment or joy. Apart from him you can’t. That means with him you can have it in whatever. If other how much we need to probably repent of enjoyment of our lack of joy or joylessness Because it’s not just that you have put trials into our life and have for a season of time caused us to have heavy hearts or grieve over something it’s So much for our joylessness is because we have put ourself in your position and we’re just mad and frustrated that we don’t get what we want. That kind of joylessness is wrong. It comes from a wrong perspective, it comes from a wrong hope, a wrong trust, and a failure to submit to you who are the Solomon. Thank you for Solomon, from his wisdom.

Continue by your spirits to convict where necessary and teach us and draw us to look to you and to see the good from your hand every day.