"Why do you tell your child a thing twenty times?” asked some one of a mother. “Because,” said she, “I find nineteen times is not enough.” Now, when a soul is to be ploughed, it may so happen that hundreds of furrows will not do it. What then? Why, plough all day till the work is done. Whether you are ministers, missionaries, teachers, or private soul-winners, never grow weary, for your work is noble, and the reward of it is infinite. The grace of God is seen in our being permitted to engage in such holy service; it is greatly magnified in sustaining us in it, and it will be pre-eminently conspicuous in enabling us to hold out till we can say, “I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.” ~Charles Haddon Spurgeon
As any good "teaching reading through science teacher" would do, I started to wonder what the rest of the sermon was like. It's a sweet sermon on the work of plowing. The hard work of plowing, but the assurance that we must only plow through the hours the Christ has appointed. We must work, but we must only do the work appointed, no more. There is toil in our work outside of Eden. The work we put in is never going to equal what we get out in this fallen world. But work we must. In the same sermon Spurgeon said,
Brother worker, are you getting a little weary? Never mind, rouse yourself, and plough on for the love of Jesus, and dying men. Our day of work has in it only the appointed hours, and while they last let us fulfil our task. Ploughing is hard work; but as there will be no harvest without it, let us just put forth all our strength, and never flag till we have performed our Lord's will, and by his Holy Spirit wrought conviction in men's souls. Some soils are very stiff, and cling together, and the labour is heart-breaking; others are like the unreclaimed waste, full of roots and tangled bramble; they need a steam-plough, and we must pray the Lord to make us such, for we cannot leave them untilled, and therefore we must put forth more strength that the labour may be done.
I love Paul David Trip's book Broken Down House. It a book the compares life in a fallen world to life in house that is being renovated. (It's a really good book. You should go read it.) It seems like a good book to read now that I might (hopefully) soon be living in a house that needs a little work. The second chapter is called "Know Where You Are." He talks about how we tend to forget that we live in a fallen world. We expect things to work, and things don't work right in a fallen world. We get surprised when things don't work, or when work is toilsome with very little fruit, but really we should be more surprised when they do work. When God, in his grace, allows a little glimpse of Eden where everything just worked right. Where work and toil were not synonymous. He says,
"I think many of us live in a permanent state of location amnesia. We have forgotten where we live. Lose sight of the fact that this is a broken-down house where nothing works quite right, and it set you up for all kinds of trouble."
I realized this morning when I heard myself yelling, "Why can't anything ever work the first time here," at a locked computer lab door, that I had forgotten where I lived. I expected my work to not be frustrated. I expected systems to be just. I expected one of the three copiers in the building to be fully functioning. I expected the problems of poverty and urban crime to be solvable. I expected thirteen year old girls to miraculously stop wanting to punch each other. Those things are part of life in a fallen world. But my work will not always be frustrated.
O that day when freed from sinning,-Come thou fount of every blessing.
I shall see Thy lovely face;
Clothèd then in blood washed linen
How I’ll sing Thy sovereign grace;
Come, my Lord, no longer tarry,
Take my ransomed soul away;
Send thine angels now to carry
Me to realms of endless day.
by Robert Robinson
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