(Note: In a first-person sermon, I speak as if I am the character whose story I am telling. In this sermon, I spoke as if I was King David himself.)

            Good morning to all of you! I’m so glad to be here with you today. I was flattered to hear that you are studying the story of my life in the Bible. I praise God for all that he has taught people through my life – both my good times and my bad – and if he teaches you something as well, I will praise him all the more!
            I was thrilled when I heard that I would get to come here today and talk to you about one of the most significant stories from my life – the story of God and the Philistine. Ah-- you thought I was going to say David and Goliath, didn’t you? I know that’s what people call it these days, but I’ve never really liked that title. It makes it sound like this story is all about me, but I don’t want anyone to get that impression. This story is about God and his honor and how great moments can come when we care more about God’s honor than anything else.
            I also don’t quite understand why people have made this out to be the ultimate underdog story. The whole reason I marched out there was because I never thought of myself as an underdog! I had God on my side, and I knew this puny little giant was no match for him. But I suppose that everyone else who was there that day did see me as an underdog, so I suppose that description kind of fits.
            I get kind of nostalgic whenever I get to tell the story, and I suppose there are a couple of reasons for that. First, this was the moment that God used to put me on the public stage among my people. Even after Samuel the prophet had told me that I would be the next king of Israel, I couldn’t help but think, “How could that possibly happen? I’m a nobody – the youngest son in my family!” Well, this battle became the springboard that launched me into the public eye.
            Second, this story is one of the highlights of the good old days for me. Before long, you’re going to read about some moments in my life that I would rather forget. Later on, I would commit some sins that would stay with me for the rest of my life. My actions would hurt so many people; my own family would come almost to the point of ruin.
            But this story was one of the shining moments, and it wasn’t because I was so brave or so courageous. It was just because at that time, I cared more about God’s honor than anything else. I hope you’ll remember that lesson from my story today:
 
The most significant moments of your life will come when you care more about God’s honor than anything else.
 
            When you forget about that, you’re asking for trouble. But when you live to honor God rather than just make yourself happy or to build up your own reputation, then you will always be in the right place.
 
            Well, let me get to the story. The Philistines lived to our West, between the land of my people and the Mediterranean Sea. We had been enemies for hundreds of years, and one day, they marched their army into the Valley of Elah, which was a very strategic place to control because one of the main roads went through that Valley for people who were traveling east and west.
            King Saul marched our army down there to meet them, and my three oldest brothers joined the ranks. You might remember that I had already served King Saul with my music, and I had been appointed as one of his armor bearers. But at that point, I was still so young and small that when real battle looked likely, I was left behind. So I was back with my father’s sheep and I was also acting as a messenger between my dad and my brothers.
            One day, my father asked me to take some food to my brothers at the battlefield and to bring back word of how they were doing. So the next day, I got up earlier than before to make the trip, and that turned out to be a fateful decision.
            The trip from my home in Bethlehem to the Valley of Elah was around 13 miles. I had gotten to know the path pretty well, and I even knew some shortcuts that allowed me to save some time on my walk. Before I even arrived in the valley, I could hear the commotion of our army mustering in their ranks and shouting our war cry. I ran down the rest of the path and got to our camp first, where I left all of the food with the man who was in charge of the supplies, then I ran out to the front lines where our army had positioned themselves.
 
Seeing and Hearing Goliath
            When I got to the ranks, the air itself was thick with tension and suspense. The two armies were positioned across from each other on opposite hillsides with the Valley in between, and down in the middle of the Valley was one solitary man – a giant of a man, over 9 feet tall. His body was covered in bronze armor from head to toe. All that armor must’ve easily weighed over 100 pounds, but he paced back and forth in that Valley as if he was wearing nothing at all!
            But it wasn’t the sight of him that astonished me the most – it was the words that came out of his mouth. This man looked up the hillside at us and bellowed, “Why have you come out to draw up for battle? Am I not a Philistine, and are you not servants of Saul? Choose a man for yourselves, and let him come down to me. If he is able to fight with me and kill me, then we will be your servants. But if I prevail against him and kill him, then you shall be our servants and serve us. I defy the ranks of Israel this day. Give me a man, that we may fight together (vv. 8-10).”
            I could hardly believe the arrogance of this man! What you must understand is that at that time, we all thought of battles as not just contests between armies but also as showdowns between the gods – their god versus our God, and the armies were just the method of confrontation.
            This Philistine’s boasts made it clear that he had no fear of our God whatsoever – our God, who had humbled the Egyptians and drowned their army in the sea; who had stopped up the Jordan River and made the walls of Jericho come tumbling down!
            I couldn’t believe this man could think so much of himself and so little of our God. I halfway expected our boys to fight each other just to see who could take the first crack at this man, but to my surprise, our soldiers were moving backward, not forward. No one wanted to give even the impression that they were volunteering to fight this man.
            Then I thought, “Perhaps they’re just clearing the way for King Saul to come out.” Yes, surely that had to be it. Surely our king would go out before us and fight our battles! But Saul was nowhere to be seen.
            What was wrong with my people? Did they care so little about the honor of God that no one would even try to defend it? Did no one believe that God could once again do a mighty deed?
 
Conversing with the Soldiers and Eliab
            Instead of the sound of a sword being drawn from its sheath, I heard the sound of talking among our ranks. One soldier was saying to another, “Have you seen this man who has come up? Surely he has come up to defy Israel. And the king will enrich the man who kills him with great riches and will give him his daughter and make his father’s house free in Israel (v. 25).”
            When our soldiers had retreated, they had come back far enough that I was now standing among them. I wanted to make sure I had heard these words correctly, so I asked, “What shall be done for the man who kills this Philistine and takes away the reproach from Israel? For who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God (v. 26)?”
            When I spoke those words, all the soldiers around me turned and stared at me with disbelief. One soldier came pushing and shoving his way through all the others, and when he got to me I discovered that I was staring right into the face of my oldest brother, Eliab!
            I was happy to see him, but it became clear right away that he wasn’t very happy to see me. His face was red with anger, and he said to me, “Why have you come down? And with whom have you left those few sheep in the wilderness? I know your presumption and the evil of your heart, for you have come down to see the battle (v. 28).”
            Friends, let me tell you – that’s when I began to realize that when you, in your own heart, put a concern for God’s honor above everything else, some people just won’t understand the way you act. They’ll misinterpret your motives; they’ll think you’re trying to act “holier than thou” or that you believe you’re better than them. Until someone has come to put God’s honor ahead of their own, it’s hard for them to understand why you do the things you do. Don’t let that stop you! Remember – the most significant moments of your life will come when you care more about God’s honor than anything else.
 
Conversing with Saul
            Well, as my older brother was doing what jealous older brothers sometimes do, some of the other soldiers had sent word to King Saul about the confidence that I had expressed through my words. The king sent for me, and I was taken to him. I’m sure he was rather surprised to see my face, but I said to him, “Let no man’s heart fail because of him. Your servant will go and fight with this Philistine.”
            If I’m not mistaken, Saul was trying to suppress a laugh when he replied, “You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him, for you are but a youth, and he has been a man of war from his youth.”
            But I had more experience with battle than he realized! “Your servant used to keep sheep for his father,” I said. “And when there came a lion, or a bear, and took a lamb from the flock, I went after him and struck him and delivered it out of his mouth. And if he arose against me, I caught him by his beard and struck him and killed him. Your servant has struck down both lions and bears, and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them, for he has defied the armies of the living God. The Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine.”
            I hope you can understand from my words why I felt so confident. It’s not that I was just naturally more brave or courageous than anyone else. I just had complete confidence that God would help me take down this arrogant Philistine. When my people had first marched into the land of Israel, God had promised that he would drive out the Philistines before us if we would simply trust in that promise and take action to do it. And besides, the Lord had also proclaimed through Samuel the prophet that I would be the next king of Israel. I can’t tell you why he chose me, but he did, and as I stood there among the army that day, I just chose to believe that if God made a promise, then the matter was settled. I knew I could live and act as if his promise had already come true.
            Saul could see that I was raring to fight, so he gave me permission to go. He offered to let me wear his own armor, and he even had me try it on, but you have to remember – King Saul was the tallest man in all of Israel. With his armor on, I looked like a boy trying to walk around in his dad’s shoes! I was going to trip all over myself if I tried to fight with that stuff on, so I declined as politely as I could, and I decided just to go out with the tools that had always allowed me to defend my sheep before – my staff and my sling.
 
The Battle
            Now you have to understand – my sling truly was a deadly weapon in the right hands. It was an overhead style sling, and I could sling a stone out of it at about 150 mph! That didn’t impress this Philistine however, because when he saw me walking out there to challenge him, he just about fell over laughing!
            “Am I a dog,” he said, “that you come to me with sticks?” Then he said something about his great and mighty gods, and I thought, “Just you wait, buddy! Your statues of stone couldn’t hurt me unless you threw them at me!” Then he said, “Come to me, and I will give your flesh to the birds of the air and to the beasts of the field.”
            I had had enough of him insulting my God, so I said, “You come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head. And I will give the dead bodies of the host of the Philistines this day to the birds of the air and to the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the Lord saves not with sword and spear. For the battle is the Lord’s, and he will give you into our hand.”
            I wanted to make sure that everyone knew what this encounter was really all about. It wasn’t about me or anyone else who was on the field that day. This was about upholding the honor of God and giving him a chance to put his power on display.
            I apparently got under the giant’s skin with my words, because that was all he wanted to hear from me! He started to walk toward me, and I was more than happy to oblige, so I ran toward him and got a stone loaded into my sling. I twirled it over my head and aimed it right at that big, ugly head of his, and the Lord made it fly true. The stone struck him in the forehead with such force that it sank in and lodged there.
            I don’t know if the Philistine really was this arrogant or what, but he acted like he never even saw my sling. He just kept coming at me, so when the stone struck him, his momentum caused him to fall forward onto his face. He almost crushed his own armor bearer, and when that guy saw what happened, he took off running for the hills.
            I marched right up and true to my word, I took the Philistines own sword and cut off his head. Now please don’t think of me as some brute or butcher. You might think differently about it today, but that was standard warfare back then.
            With that, the battle was on! The Philistines turned tail and started running back home, and our army chased them all the way there before they came back to collect the spoils of victory.
            As I looked out over the ranks of my people celebrating, I prayed to God that they would remember that God could be trusted and that His honor is worth defending. We are His people—and you, today, are His people—so the way we act reflects directly on Him. When we act in confidence that His promises are true and His commands are right, we bring great honor to Him.
 
The Lessons
            As I thought back on that day over the years, it dawned on me that in just that one event, the Lord highlighted some of the most significant lessons that he kept trying to teach my people over and over again. I wonder if you noticed any of them.
            The first was this – do not see merely as man sees. Don’t live your life based on nothing more than what you can see! King Saul and the rest of the people – all they could see was Goliath’s stature. They couldn’t see that the real battle that day was not physical but spiritual. God’s honor was being called into question, and what were they going to do about it? If they would’ve acted for the sake of his great name, he would come through for them!
            Second, do not trust in the strength of man to save you. So many times, my people got into trouble and danger because of their own sins. But rather than just confess those sins and return to the Lord, we thought, “If we just make an alliance with the Egyptians or the Syrians, then we will be okay!” We thought we could make all of our problems go away through our own strength or our own wisdom, when all we ever needed was to stop running away from God and just obey him once again.
            Third, the God of Israel is the living God; all other so-called gods are lifeless and powerless. Time and time again, we gave our worship and affection, our money and our resources to these things that could not help us at all. They held out nothing but a false hope, when all the while our God – the living God – promised to give us all we would ever need if we would just obey him.
            Fourth, God delights to work through unexpected channels. How often has God chosen the most unlikely person to accomplish something great for him! If you think there’s something about you that would prevent God from using you, think again! You might be the most likely person for him to use, so just prize his honor above anything else and get ready to see the great ways that he can use you.
            Fifth, the people of God represent God. The most shameful thing about that day was not the Philistine’s insults but the cowardice of my people. Their actions betrayed a very small view of God. Never forget that your actions reflect on the God you claim to love. Everything you do reflects on him either for the better or for the worse.
            Sixth and lastly, God acts on behalf of his people for the sake of his great name. God didn’t give me victory that day just so we could control a strategic valley, even though that did happen. He didn’t give me victory just to catapult me to fame, although that happened, too. He won the victory that day so that all the earth would know that there is a God in Israel. Everything he does for us he does ultimately to put his glory on display. God highly values the honor of his name, and so we should, too, more than anything else in life.
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            Perhaps you remember this common meal-time prayer from your childhood: “God is great, God is good, thank you Lord for this food.” A very simple prayer, but with very profound truth. In fact, you may not have realized it, but a number of the psalms in the Bible follow that same pattern of emphasizing God’s greatness and His goodness. These two truths aren’t just arbitrarily thrown together; they balance each other out and give us a well-rounded picture of just who God is. Each of these concepts serves to heighten the other and keep them in their proper context.

            Psalm 113 is a psalm that follows this pattern. Psalm 113 draws both of these ideas together and reminds us that while God dwells in majestic splendor above the heights of heaven, He is still concerned with the plight of man and involves Himself in our lives. For this reason, God is richly deserving of our praise!

I. Praise God for His greatness  vv. 1–4

            A. An invitation to praise

            The psalmist begins with a call to worship or praise [READ v. 1–3]. And by the time the psalmist is done with v. 3 we’re thinking, “Okay, we get the point. We’re supposed to praise the Lord.” The repetition here, of course, is for the rhetorical effect of emphasis—we are supposed to react to this call, and in a very specific way. The psalmist is calling us to praise. But what does it mean to praise?

            You’ve probably heard of a person called an appraiser. I think virtually every county has an appraiser, and a lot of cities do, too. The appraiser’s job is to declare how much your property is worth so the government can collect personal property taxes. He “ap-PRAISES” your property; he states how much is it worth. So when we praise God, we are declaring how valuable he is to us.

            Now you may have noticed in these verses that several times the psalmist mentions praising God’s name. This may strike you as a little strange because we don’t think of names the way Old Testament Jews did. We use names mainly just to tell people apart, but Jews had a different concept of what a name meant. To them, a person’s name represented their character, their personality. It stood for who the person was. That’s why we see some Old Testament characters having their names changed after significant events that shaped their lives. For example, Abraham’s names originally was Abram, but after God gave the promise that He would have many children, God changed his name to Abraham, which means “father of a multitude.” This name was better suited to what Abram would become.

            So we see that what the psalmist is pointing to here is God’s essence, His character. He is calling us to praise God for the things that make Him God.

            B. The reason for praise—God’s greatness

            But a big question remains unanswered in the psalm thus far: “Why is God worthy of such praise?” The psalmist is going to give us two answers, the first of which we find in v. 4. The first reason for praise is God’s greatness [READ v. 4] A common religious idea in Old Testament times was that deities were localized. In other words, each nation had its own god and his power was confined to that nation. The psalmist of course flatly rejects any such notion about Yahweh, the God of Israel, because He is high above all nations. His power is not limited in any way and He shares His throne with no one, especially not some carved image of stone like these other nations worshiped. God is to be praised from every nation of the Earth because He is truly the God of every nation of the Earth, whether men bow the knee to Him or not.

            But not only is He above the nations, but in fact the world and the universe itself cannot contain His glory. Solomon touched on this idea in 1 Kings 8 during his prayer of dedication for the temple. He said in 1 Kings 8:27, “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this house which I have built?”

            Herein lies the first reason for the psalmist’s call to praise, because God is so great. Mankind is dwarfed by the majesty and power of God, and such a being who cannot even be contained by the universe should strike fear into our hearts and wonder into our souls.

II. Praise God for His goodness  vv. 5–9

            A. God stoops Himself down

            But there is another reason why we should praise God, and it is an important balance to the first. We should praise God not only for His greatness, but also for His goodness, which is His care and concern for mankind, and this is the key point of the psalm. The psalmist dwells on this for five verses. Not only is God great, but He is also good, and this is important because if God were only great, He would be no better than all of the other so-called “gods” out there.

            Many other religions believe in a “god” who is great, but no other religion has a god who is good. Islam certainly preaches about a god who is great and mighty and powerful, but he is not good—certainly not in the way that the Bible describes goodness. In Islam, the will of Allah reigns supreme, and there are no restrictions on it. He doesn’t have to be fair to you—he can literally choose to do whatever he wants. You could serve him faithfully your whole life, and he could still condemn you Hell simply because he chooses to do it. That’s why martyrdom is so attractive to those who are engaged in terrorism—they feel like that sacrifice gives them a guarantee of going to Paradise.

            The psalmist mentions God’s greatness again in verse 5 to set up a contrast with v. 6 [READ vv. 5–6]. Though God cannot even be contained by the universe, the psalmist here says that God stoops down to see what is taking place. God is concerned about what is going on and from other passages we know that He is working out a plan for His glory.

            Now this is not a normal thing for rulers to do. Think about all the dictators you know from history; how many of them have been concerned about the day to day affairs of their people? Even leaders in a system of government like ours. You may find them at a hospital when the cameras are rolling, but when the TV lights go off, where are they? There are some exceptions, but most rulers lose touch with and lose concern for the individuals they rule.

            Not God though! He is concerned with people and what goes on in their lives. You know I started out this sermon talking about the prayers of little children. Do you know that we can learn this lesson from their prayers as well? Sometimes adults don’t pray about certain things because we feel like they are trivial matters to burden God with. But when a child prays, what do they pray for? Their dog who is sick, the doll that they lost. Kids pray for every little thing you can imagine because they believe that God cares, and you know what? He does! God is great, but He stoops down to see our lives because He cares.

            B. God raises the lowly up

            But not only does He care, He gets actively involved. In vv. 7–9, we see that He raises the lowly up. God doesn’t just care about the rich and powerful, He cares about the lowest members of society. [READ 7–9] In ancient Israel, the two groups that the psalmist mentions, the poor and barren women, were looked down upon. They were stigmatized by society simply because of their condition, and the status of the poor that the psalmist mentions here was one of destitution. He makes reference here to the ash heap, which was essentially the town dump. Every good sized town would have a landfill outside the walls of the city where they would burn their trash and their human waste. People who had nowhere else to turn would live at these landfills, begging for the scraps of food that people brought out and huddling into the ash at night to stay warm. You can imagine that these people were not highly esteemed.

            But look at God’s actions! God, who is so great, looks down from above the heavens, sees people in absolute destitution, and is moved with compassion to raise them to a position of prominence. He sees the barren woman in her grief and is moved to grant her children. Now these examples should be taken as proverbial. In other words, they express a general truth of life. God doesn’t take every poor person out of their poverty, and He doesn’t give children to every barren woman. He has his own plans which ultimate are good and perfect, even though we don’t understand them. But this is God’s character—to be moved with compassion by the needs of people. And we clearly see from this the goodness of God.

            God’s goodness stands with His greatness to make Him the God that He is. These two aspects of God’s nature are not contradictory, they are complimentary. If God were only great, He would not be concerned about mankind, but if He were only good, He would not have the power to act on His concerns. These truths should draw out a complimentary response from us. His greatness makes Him worthy of our worship and adoration, while His goodness makes Him worthy of our love and devotion. We can see clearly now why the psalmist calls for such a response of praise, and our hearts can respond appropriately.

            Tomorrow, as you know, is Labor Day, the day when we celebrate the contributions of workers to our country. I think I can safely say that the vast majority of people have kind of a love/hate relationship with their job. Some people have managed to get into a career that they absolutely love, but for most people, their job is just a way to pay the bills. This is really kind of sad when you think about it, because as adults, where do we spend a large portion of our waking hours? At work! This means that many, many people spend the bulk of their lives doing something that for them is little more than a necessary evil.

            I hope I didn’t just describe you, but if I did, I think I have some good news for you. It may surprise you to learn that the book of Ecclesiastes actually has some encouraging news about our work and labor. Now you might naturally think, “I don’t even want to hear what Ecclesiastes has to say about my job! That’s the really pessimistic book! Whatever it has to say will probably make me feel worse than before!”

            Well, let’s give this book the benefit of the doubt, because I think you might be pleasantly surprised to hear what Ecclesiastes has to say about the subject of work. As we look at this theme today, I think we will see that Ecclesiastes teaches us this:

Our work in this world is supposed to enhance our lives, not hinder them.

I. Excessive devotion to work or profit is a futile thing (2:18–23; 5:10–17)

            Ecclesiastes first of all gives us a helpful corrective to the obsession with work that may plague our lives. Solomon points out two observations that lead him to this conclusion.

            A. Whatever you earn, you can’t take it with you! (2:18–23)

            In light of our mortality, excessive work trying to earn a profit is futile because we have to give it all up when we die, and everything that we earned might be frittered away by someone else. [READ 2:18–23]

            Solomon was greatly troubled here by the thought of leaving everything that he had worked so hard for to someone who hadn’t worked for it at all. There was no telling what the next man would do with all of his stuff, but like it or not, Solomon had to give it up. Solomon understood that timeless principle that money that is easy to come by is easily frittered away.

            I remember when I got my first summer job in high school how I felt like I was living the high life. It was a pretty cushy job and at the time, I had no major expenses in my life. I was still living at home and basically had no bills, so my paycheck was easy come, easy go. I threw away money on a leather jacket and movies—all kinds of teenage stuff.

            And the worst part of it all is that sometimes I feel like I still haven’t learned my lesson. To this day when I receive an unexpected gift of money, its still much harder to put that money to good use than it is to put my paycheck to good use.

            Money that is easy to come by is easily frittered away. This observation is important for us think about. If we are hoping to leave our kids a large inheritance, we may not necessarily be doing them a favor. Now in 7:11 Solomon says that if we pass along wisdom with an inheritance, that can be a good thing, but an inheritance alone may not be a good gift.

Second observation about excessive devotion to work or profit…

            B. Profits will not bring the satisfaction that they promise (5:10–17)

            If we wear ourselves out at work trying to accumulate wealth and possessions, we’re going to be disappointed when we get them, because we’ll discover that they don’t bring the satisfaction that they promise [READ 5:10–11] I’m sure we’ve all heard the stories of lottery winners who suddenly discover that their family is a lot bigger than it was before! Let’s keep reading [READ 5:12–17]

            Notice how Solomon highlights the emotional grief that we experience when we hoard our profits and the fruit of our labor—our sleep is disturbed; our daily routine symbolized by eating in v. 17 becomes shot through with grief and sickness and anger. That excessive devotion to working and profiting and holding onto what we earn brings all kinds of grief with it.

So rather than devote ourselves excessively to work and building up a profit, we need to learn that…

II. Work should be done in the right way for the right reasons (4:4–8; 10:10; 11:6)

Solomon makes three observations along these lines…

            A. We should not work in order to “one-up” our neighbor (4:4)

            If our primary goal in our work is to “keep up with the Joneses” or if we are working out of a spirit of jealousy, we’ve got the wrong motive. [READ 4:4] Notice how Solomon is really condemning envy and not hard work per se. Business has a natural element of competition to it—businesses are always competing with one another with their goods and services, and that can be okay if a person conducts his work with godly attitudes and motivations. But if we are motivated in our work by jealousy of someone else, work practically ceases to be work and becomes some kind of vendetta. So jealousy or envy is not a proper motivation for work.

            B. We should work diligently, but not at the expense of rest (4:5–6)

            Ecclesiastes presents us with a wonderfully balanced view of labor and rest [READ 4:5–6] Notice the two extremes that we have here: first we have the fool who folds his hands. The picture is of someone reclining with their hands across their chest. Solomon says all kinds of negative things about the sluggard or the lazy man in the book of Proverbs. The other extreme is the man who goes after labor with both hands, and what Solomon commends is a balance—one hand full of rest, with the idea being of course that the other hand is at work.

            This is such an important lesson for us to take to heart, because I fear it is so easy for us to buy into the idea that time spent resting is simply wasted time. And sometimes in church we sanctify that idea because we say, “Well the Bible says to redeem the time for the days are evil, so there’s no time to just sit around.” Friends, what did God do on the seventh day of creation? He rested! We don’t really think He needed to rest, do we? No—He was setting an example for us!

            So we should understand that rest is not a bad thing. It is a hard thing to get, however, because there’s always something else that we could be doing. And you know what—that will always be the case! So perhaps what we need to do is make time to rest, and not feel guilty about it, but understand that its okay.

            C. We should work smarter, not harder (10:10)

            [READ 10:10] If we don’t employ wisdom in our work, we will only make things harder on ourselves. Imagine if no one had ever invented the wheelbarrow. I don’t know who invented the wheelbarrow, but imagine if that person had said, “I can’t waste my time with all of this silly daydreaming about a basket with a wheel—there are rocks to be moved! What I really need to do is just put in a few more hours moving the rocks—that’s the answer!”

            Now that sounds pretty silly, but its no sillier than what we often do! Its so easy to think that answer to every problem at work is a few more hours. How many times have you thought, “If I only had a few more hours?” Well usually at the end of those hours, we’re still thinking the same thing!

            I think the application to rest comes into play here once again, because when our bodies and our minds are properly rested we can use them to the best of their ability. We can think more clearly about our work when we’re rested, and that will allow us a better opportunity to see how wisdom can help us improve our work.

I think one way that we can apply wisdom to our work is by taking to heart our third lesson…

III. Finding the good that our work accomplishes is a gift from God (2:24; 5:18–20)

            A. We should look for the good that our work produces (2:24)

            Now I have said “look for the good” for a reason, because it is so easy to start feeling like your work is pointless and meaningless. If we embrace that attitude, then work will be drudgery for the rest of our lives, but if we can focus on the good that our work produces, we can find satisfaction in it.

            [READ 2:24] Notice that the verse says we are to “find enjoyment” in our toil. Now this doesn’t mean that we have to deceive ourselves or anything like that. A slightly more literal translation from Hebrew here would read “cause your soul to see good in your labor.” Solomon is talking about a choice—the attitude that we choose to have about our work. If we choose to think that our job is just pointless drudgery, that’s exactly what it will feel like. But if we choose to see the good that our work accomplishes, we can find satisfaction.

            But how do we choose to see the good, especially when work often has so many hassles and frustrations? I think the answer is to focus on the way in which your job allows you to serve other people. I briefly worked at a bank at one point during seminary. That really wasn’t a bad job—I had a good work environment and a very good boss, but nevertheless, that was not what I wanted to do with my life at that time. I didn’t wake up every day with a burning passion to be a bank teller, and there were days when it was very easy for me to have a bad attitude as I went off to work. But I started to become convicted about my attitude, and I decided that God had me there for a reason, so I decided to focus on the good that our bank accomplished. I started to focus on the small businesses that relied on our loans to get by, and the homeowner’s who had taken out a mortgage with us so they could buy a home. I started to focus on the financial planning that we offered to help people take control of their spending, and I started to see that our bank really did accomplish good in this community. We were providing a service that allowed our community to improve, and when I thought about my work like that, I was able to find satisfaction in it.

            So what about you? How does your work allow you to serve people and improve their lives? That’s what you need to focus on, because serving people is always a satisfying thing, and you can serve people in any profession (provided of course that profession is within God’s moral standards).

            B. We should enjoy the profit that comes from our work (5:18–20)

            We saw earlier that Solomon instructs not to devote ourselves excessively to the profit that we can make in our work, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not supposed to get any enjoyment from our profit at all! [READ 5:18–20] Notice the benefit that we get from enjoying our profits in v. 20 [READ v. 20]. Enjoying our profits takes some of the sting out of life.

            I think we all know that it can be very, very easy to become overwhelmed with all of the problems that we encounter in this world. If we focus on our own problems and the problems in our government and the problems in our world long enough, it is easy to be overcome with despair. But what Solomon is telling us is that the profits we receive are a gift from God that he allows us to enjoy to lift up our spirits as we deal with life in a fallen world. What a beautiful perspective on the fruits of our labor! I think this tells us that we don’t need to feel guilty if God allows us to be successful in business; we don’t need to feel guilty about enjoying some of the fruits of our labor.

            Now this is to be balanced of course by Solomon’s warning about devoting ourselves excessively to money and profits. And you know, as we look through Scripture, the Bible doesn’t give us a clear-cut guideline about how much is too much. The New Testament treats us like people who are supposed to be mature in Christ, and mature people are supposed to be able to achieve a balance in the various areas of their lives. So as we seek to mature in Christ, that’s a question we should wrestle with—“How am I handling the profits of my labor? Am I being too selfish with them? Am I enjoying them appropriately?” We may not always have an easy answer, but we need to wrestle with the question.

            I hope we have seen today the appropriate way to deal with work and labor, something that consumes a large portion of our lives. Friends, I hope we have seen that God does not consider your job to be an unimportant thing. It is not a waste of your time, it is not less important than a “spiritual” job like being a pastor, it is not even a necessary evil—it is a gift from God to you to give you an outlet for serving other people, to provide for your family, to be generous to others, and to get some enjoyment out of what your labor produces. I hope that you will buy into this perspective, because I believe it will make your days at work much more pleasant, and it will allow you to find satisfaction in what you’re doing. So, enjoy your day off tomorrow, and I hope you can return to work on Tuesday with a new appreciation for the gift of labor.