Proverbs 12:24
There could be many things said about the
protestant work ethic, both positive and negative. The value of hard work
helped our nation grow. For some it became a quest to earn God’s favor, an
impossible task for the best of us. But for many it became the way to give our
families a better life than we had ourselves.
Unfortunately, for many people today, hard
work is just too much to ask. They want a handout. And even those in power miss
the lesson of our proverb. Work is a good thing.
We need to learn to stick with something
even when it gets very difficult. We need to be willing and able to do the
hardest of tasks if we really want to get ahead. The phrase ‘diligent hands’
was used to describe the tool used to remove the grain from the plant husk. It
took a lot of work to break apart the newly harvested grain. You had to beat
the grain stalks to remove the bundles of grain. Then these bundles of grain
had to be worked again, breaking the hard shells that surrounded the kernel that
gets eaten.
This harvesting process was done in steps
and stages over several days. And you couldn’t stop until the full process was
completed or all your efforts would be wasted.
So the lesson we can take from this proverb
is that we must stick with the task until it is completed. That is why it leads
to being in charge. When we learn that effort is a good thing, then when tough
times come we have the ability to see the process through until completion.
But for those who haven’t learned this
lesson, a very different end awaits them. Laziness puts a person’s future in
someone else’s hands. We put in endless hours only to have the value of our
work kept by someone else. They make the profit and we take home only enough to
live. We might not call it forced labor, but it is pretty close to it.
Slaves generally don’t like what they are
doing. They make the best of a very bad situation. They do it for their
families. They do it to survive. They don’t get the benefits of their hard
labor. They put in the effort and another person gets the fruit.
Are you diligent or lazy?