Working Wisely (Proverbs 6:6-11)

#2 in Proverbs: Walking in Wisdom || April 14, 2024 || Glynwood Baptist Church, Prattville, AL || James Jackson, Pastor

Working Wisely

(Proverbs 6:6-11; 24:30-34; Colossians 3:22-24)

Good morning! Please open your Bibles to Proverbs 6.

A couple of weeks Heather Raider posted something on her facebook. She listed 10 jobs that she said she had had over her lifetime, but said one of them was not true. So I decided to do the same thing. I listed eleven jobs—ten of which I have actually had, and I gave you guys a couple of days to try to guess which one was a fake.

It was a lot of fun. Most people guessed that I had never been a night watchman in a nursing home. But that was false. Tom Moore messaged me and said “after last week when you told us you didn’t know what a mitre box was, I’m pretty sure you’ve never made custom picture frames. But that was also false.

No, it was Rachel Fisher that first guessed I had never been a donut maker. And that was true. I actually got let go after training at Dunkin Donuts. Apparently I wasn’t “Dunkin material.” Whatever that means.

But I’m pretty sure that from the time I was sixteen years old and on, I’ve never not had a job. At one time in seminary, trish and I had five jobs between us.

I’m thankful that my mom and dad instilled a work ethic in me. They took me to Red Lobster for my sixteenth birthday, and at the end of the meal my dad said, Well son, you’re 16 now, so you need a job. And when the dining room manager came by to ask if we needed anything else, I asked for an application.

We are in the second week of our study of Proverbs. I mentioned last week that Proverbs isn’t arranged topically, where you have all the verses about friendship in one chapter, and all the verses about money in one chapter. No, its arranged more like what you would expect if a Hallmark store blew up.

What I did do this week, and what I will try to do in the coming weeks, is put as many verses about the week’s topic as would fit on the back of your listening guide. So that may help get your started as you build your own Proverbs topical index during this study.

We are going to start this morning looking at Proverbs 6, beginning in verse 6. If you are physically able, please stand to honor the reading of God’s Word:

⁶ Go to the ant, O sluggard;
    consider her ways, and be wise.
⁷ Without having any chief,
    officer, or ruler,
⁸ she prepares her bread in summer
    and gathers her food in harvest.
⁹ How long will you lie there, O sluggard?
    When will you arise from your sleep?
¹⁰ A little sleep, a little slumber,
    a little folding of the hands to rest,
¹¹ and poverty will come upon you like a robber,
    and want like an armed man.

And now, while I have you on your feet, I’d like you to turn over to Proverbs 24 as well. Look at verses 30-34:

³⁰ I passed by the field of a sluggard,
    by the vineyard of a man lacking sense,
³¹ and behold, it was all overgrown with thorns;
    the ground was covered with nettles,
    and its stone wall was broken down.
³² Then I saw and considered it;
    I looked and received instruction.
³³ A little sleep, a little slumber,
    a little folding of the hands to rest,
³⁴ and poverty will come upon you like a robber,
    and want like an armed man.

This is God’s Word, and we are thankful for it. Let’s pray.

Slugs and Ants

Before we start, we should probably get some definitions out of the way. What exactly is a sluggard? We don’t use that word very much today. In his commentary on Proverbs, Ray Ortlund describes a sluggard this way. He said, “Think of the way syrup oozes slowly out of a bottle when it’s cold. That’s the sluggard—sluggish and slow and hesitant when he should be decisive, active, and forthright.[1] Part of the dictionary definition of the sluggard is habitually lazy or inactive, sleepy or slow moving, has the ability to work but refuses to do so.

Modern day synonyms listed on thesaurus.com include bum, clock watcher, couch potato, deadbeat, good-for-nothing, goof off, idler, laggard, layabout, lazybones, lint-picker, loafer, lollygagger, lotus eater, lounger, moocher, shirker, slacker, sloth

(Those last four sound like a law firm!)

Proverbs uses the term fourteen times, and it is never good. Here’s just a few of them from the back of your listening guide:

• Proverbs 10:26 As vinegar to the teeth and smoke to the eyes, so is a sluggard to those who send him. (He’s just annoying!
• Proverbs 19:24 The sluggard buries his hand in the dish; he will not even bring it back to his mouth! (That’s taking laziness to a new lever)
• Proverbs 20:4 A sluggard does not plow in season; so at harvest time he looks but finds nothing (He’s dumb enough to be surprised when there’s no harvest.
• Proverbs 21:25 The sluggard’s craving will be the death of him, because his hands refuse to work (It’s not that he is disabled or can’t find a job, it’s that he refuses to work)
• The sluggard says, “There’s a lion outside, I shall be killed in the streets” (Prov. 22:13).
• Proverbs 26:13-16: As a door turns on its hinges, so a sluggard turns on his bed. The sluggard buries his hand in the dish; he is too lazy to bring it back to his mouth.

So Proverbs paints a portrait of a man (or a woman) who won’t start things, won’t finish things, won’t try hard things, won’t take care of basic things, is a nuisance to others, and will find himself perpetually in trouble.

Some of these are intended to be humorous images. But being lazy in your work isn’t always funny. It can be deadly. Proverbs 18:9 says “One who is slack in his work is brother to him who destroys.” Brother to him who destroys? That’s kind of harsh. So I slept in for a few minutes and was late to work. It happens. So I got distracted by some cat videos on YouTube for a few hours on Monday afternoon. No harm no foul, right? But there is harm, and there is foul.

• In February, a door panel blew off a Boeing Alaska Airlines jet in midflight.
• In March, a wheel fell off a Boeing United Airlines flight.

By the grace of God, no one was killed in either incident. But both of them came down to someone who failed to tighten a bolt properly. One who is slack in his work is brother to him who destroys.

So what is a sluggard supposed to do? Well, Proverbs isn’t a book that tells you what’s wring without giving you advice for how to make it right. And the first things Proverbs says to the sluggard is: “Go to the ant.” The ant? Yes. Get out your magnifying glass, get down on your knees, and watch the ant. Why the ant?

Proverbs is suggesting there are things a human being can learn from going to ant school.

1. Notice that the ant is internally motivated. Verse 7 says the ant doesn’t have any chief, officer, or ruler. There’s no boss ant cracking the whip. She has self-initiative. She’s a self-starter.

This week in Man Church, Rick Burgess was talking about work, and he said the worst employees are those who won’t do what you tell them to do, and won’t do anything until you tell them to. Those employees need to go back to ant school!

2. Second, the ant works a lot harder. Verse 8 says she prepares her bread in summer. It’s hot in the summer! You know who works hardest in the summer? Ants! Just watch an ant at a Fourth of July picnic! She’ll carry off the Cheetos one crumb at a time, and then come back for the Oreos. I don’t know if ants sweat, but if they do sweat, they don’t care.

3. Third, she’s a lot smarter. There’s a reason she prepares her bread in summer. It’s because she needs to gather her food in the harvest. The Israelites were an agrarian society. They knew that the fall harvest was the busiest time of the year. So if you were going to have energy for the work, you need to have already baked your bread. So the ant prepares her bread in the summer, and she harvests her food in the fall. She is future focused.

I need to stop and explain something else, too. Notice that in verse 7, Solomon talks about the ant like a woman—“she” prepares her bread in summer. “She” gathers her food in harvest. There’s a reason for this. In Hebrew, the noun “ant” is feminine (I guess otherwise it would be an uncle).

But Ortlund in his commentary suggests that this may be about more than Hebrew grammar. It’s a wake up call for men. Guys, we tend to be passive. We often allow women to do the bulk of the work while we just show up. Or maybe we work hard at our job, but we are passive in your home or in the church. Solomon says the antidote to that is to go to the ant. Look at the initiative she takes. Look at her work ethic—how even in the hottest part of the day she isn’t taking a break. Look at the way she thinks ahead.

Ortlund wrote this challenge to men in the church:

A church filled with men energized, men working, men engaged, men with intensity, men of conviction and action—that is exactly what the world needs to see in us today. But to display Christ that strongly, we need to humble ourselves and admit our need and accept God’s simple remedy. It is so humbling that we, whom God created to rule over creation, need to learn from an ant.[2]

Work and Life

So while we are on the subject of creation, let’s talk about what God intended from the very beginning about what we call work-life balance today. Work life balance is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the discipline of not allowing work to become so much of a priority that you don’t live your life, and not allowing your hobbies and interests and pursuits and family time be such a priority that you don’t work. From the very beginning, God intended those to be balanced.

A lot of people think that humans didn’t have to work until sin came into the world. They remember from Genesis 1 that God placed Adam and Eve in this beautiful garden where all their needs were met, but they forget that Genesis 1: 15 says that “God placed the man in the garden of Eden to work it and watch over it.

Now, when sin came into the world, God did curse the ground. He told the Adam:

¹⁷ And to Adam he said,

“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
    and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
    ‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
    in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
¹⁸ thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
    and you shall eat the plants of the field.
¹⁹ By the sweat of your face
    you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
    for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
    and to dust you shall return.”

So work came before the fall. Toil and meaningless came after the fall. The result of sin is that we don’t always see the results of our hard work.

In his classic memoir of the Holocaust, Night, Elie Wiesel talked about one of the cruelest punishments of the Nazis. They would force a man to spend all day digging a hole. Then, at the end of the day, they would tell him he had to fill up the hole before the sun went down, or else they would get shot. Wiesel said that would happen day after day until the prisoner was completely broken because of how meaningless the work was.

God always intended for us to have meaning to our work. Sin messed that up.

The second principle about work life balance that we get from creation is that we work from our rest, we don’t rest from our work.

Many people have the “working for the weekend” mindset. That the weekend is the reward for the work week. But again, this wasn’t the pattern in creation:

(there was evening and there was morning.

Church and Family (2 Thess 3:10, 1 Tim 5:8)

• Provide for your family
• Don’t work don’t eat applies to the church

Work as if your boss is Jesus

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[1] Ortlund, Ray. Proverbs: Widsom that Works Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Publishers, 2012, p. 100.

[2] Ibid., p. 101