Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Your Work Matters to God, Part 13 of 45
TEXT: "So the Lord God said to the serpent, 'Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers: he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.'
To the woman he said, 'I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.'
To Adam he said, 'Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, "you must not eat of it," cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return' " (Genesis 3:14-19).
IDEA: God's curse was not that people had to work, but their work was made more difficult.
PURPOSE: to help people understand what the nature of the curse was.
We have made the point that all legitimate work is inherently good.
- What do we mean by "inherently good"?
- What do we mean by "legitimate"?
I. One objection that people might have is that God has cursed work. Doesn't Genesis 3:17-19 say that all work is a result of God's curse?
How would you respond to that assertion?
God gave Adam and Eve work to do BEFORE the Fall (Genesis 1:28, 2:15). So work was part of God's creation mandate, and he called it "good."
What did the curse involve? See Genesis 2:14-19 above.
God cursed the serpent and he cursed the ground, but he did not curse the man and woman.
The curse made work more difficult, but it did not make it evil.
Ecclesiastes 5:12, 19, 3:12-13 all say that work is a gift from God. So the work itself is a benefit, but the curse makes the work more difficult to do.
II. Christians are glorious but we are flawed.
We are made in God's image, but we are also suffering from a curvature of the soul.
The best revelation of God is in a great city. We see people at their creative best. But in the city we also see people at their worst.
