How to Get the Victory Over Hard Work

Rethinking the Hardness in Hard Work Requires Rediscovering Faith’s Romance with the Invisible

“I [Paul] planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase [fruit].”

1 Corinthians 3:6

“The horse may be prepared for battle but the victory is the Lord’s.”

Proverbs 21: 31

” …receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.”

James 1:21

“Faith is the source of good works. The greater the power we employ, the greater disaster we suffer, unless we act humbly and in the fear of God.”

Martin Luther.[i]

When it came time to me to go to high school, my parents sent me to a Christian boarding school. Part of the deal was each student had to work. Everyone had a job. My job was to keep the music building clean and maintain order.  Looking back at those days in the music building, there were just too many temptations. Boys and girls needed to practice their instruments in the little sound proof rooms and this lead to small twists. One day, the principal called me in and said I could go work on the farm or leave school. I went to the farm and it was good for me. I liked it. It felt like real work – “man’s work”. I still got into trouble, but the farm boss, Floyd Shear, liked me and stood up for me and kept me out of reach of the principal. In time I was offered the top job – milking the cows. Every other morning, I woke up at 12:30 AM and milked one hundred Holstein cows finishing around 6:30 AM.

Floyd Shear was a tried and true dairyman. He knew every cow by name and where she came from. On his wall, he had hundreds of pictures of prize bulls and their semen right there in tubes submerged in a dry ice refrigerator. One day, he invited me to witness an artificial insemination.  First he took me into his office and showed me the picture of the father bull, next he extracted the correct vile containing the semen from the dry ice refrigerator. Next he opened a box and pulled out a long plastic sleeve to cover his hand and arm and raising the temperature of the precious bull juice, he went to work on the cow and using the full length of his arm, inseminated her.  It was all very amazing for a 16 year old, a sort of sex education show and tell long before society and schools came around to such things. For a while, we were not sure whether the semen had took. But Shear had a keen eye, and one day he came through the milking parlor with a slight grin and nodding his head he said, “We’re good to go”. He knew because there were changes in the cow’s face and mood.

The question I want to address in this lesson is whether our work, the work in life’s journey we undertake for whatever cause and purpose, is or is not implanted with a hidden spiritual seed called faith and hope in God.  As intangible and spiritual as this question may appear, in the paragraphs that follow I argue that the presence or absence of this spiritual, but very real element in the heart and mind, has profound tangible, ethical, moral and practical consequences, and these consequences in many cases are discernable not only by the wise and experienced, but vividly apparent to all.

Doing our work with faith and hope in God means we are doing it in a way that from beginning to end, ultimately trusts its potency and fruitfulness to an invisible power of blessing and purpose lodged in God. When it comes to the success of our work, instead of putting our confidence in all that we can see, touch and feel, we place our hope and confidence in something unseen. We work by faith and prayer. In the following, I attempt to spin this little work thesis into six contrasts, asking the simple question, “Is a work implanted (literally impregnated) with faith and hope in God, i.e. impregnated with dependence, not human strength and ability to fulfill its purpose and bear fruit, but on the invisible God’s hidden blessing and grace ( for it is hidden grace that gives life) or is this magic spiritual seed absent?

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In anticipation to a late fall 2019 teaching invitation along the Thai Burma border I commenced to think more carefully about justice. This posting is a window into my preparations. But there is also another motivation behind this piece. Upon returning to the USA from Asia this summer (2019) I observed that many Protestant churches have come to identify with ‘Progressive Justice’ and incorporated it into their mission statement. I am not confident however that the churches who have embraced this banner have fully grasped the distinctive meaning of justice as it is given to the church in the Judeo-Christian tradition. ‘Justice’ as it is understood in the modern world and justice in the sacred tradition at one level share similar meanings but at another level their understandings diverge.  This divergence is significant. If the church’s understanding and mission are to escape being absorbed into the world’s in late Modernity, it is imperative that it clarify the distinctive strands of meaning it brings to the table regarding justice. Properly understood the church’s relation to its world in time and place is always dialectical rather than unitary.

The Biblical word justice emerged into the lexicon of words and meanings out of Israel’s formative experience of deliverance from Egyptian slavery (Psalms 103:6-7). Unlike Greek thought that gave birth to abstract ideas Hebrew thought expressed and interpreted signature events.  Liberating events preceded meaning, acts and words were joined. Formative acts in the history of Israel generated meanings and ethics. In the Bible, the formative history that sourced the meaning embedded in justice was Israel’s bondage to the Pharaoh followed by their liberation. In Egypt the Hebrews belonged to the pharaoh and existed to do his bidding. To live was to serve him. In short, they were under him, not merely as a political authority and governor, but as a god. Pharaoh overreached, or to state the matter precisely, he trespassed his rightful stature and dignity. Looking back at the situation from this side of the Exodus and the one God as Lord revolution he went beyond his civil political office and assumed god-like power over them. The totality of their existence was under his will, body and soul. This divine identity of Pharaoh was normative until it wasn’t. By this cryptic phrase, I am arguing that there was no basis to critique Pharaoh’s claim to possess absolute power over his Hebrew slaves until Yahweh showed up. Only after the revelation of God as the invisible one God as Lord over all, were human and political claims to divinity exposed for what they were. Pharaoh trespassed a boundary.

Pharaoh’s trespass was vividly demonstrated by his refusal to allow his slaves the freedom to worship. Israel had requested a mere weekend in the desert to worship their God. Pharaoh’s refusal was no doubt externally motivated by economics, a factor present in the Torah record of the story. But it was deeper than economics.  Almost certainly Pharaoh feared that a revival of their religion via a “camp meeting in the desert”, something Moses and Aaron set about to effect, would clarify to the peoples that they belonged to One’ higher and greater than Pharaoh. Even if Pharaoh considered this belonging to Yahweh imaginary rather than real, the danger to his spiritual hold over them remained the same.

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