All right, we are continuing this week in our study of the Ten Commandments, and we are to the fourth commandment. And the fourth commandment is a real transitional point in the Ten Commandments. The first three have no other gods before me. Do not make any idols of anything in heavens above or the earth beneath, and do not take the Lord's name in vain. Those are very God-word commandments. Right? You could think of Deuteronomy 6. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, all your mind. Those are God-word commandments. The final six commandments, starting with honor your father and mother, do not kill, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not lie, or bear false witness against your neighbor, and do not covet. Those are very neighbor-word. Neighborly commandments, that's better term. Right? Those are love your neighbor as yourself commandments. The fourth commandment is a transition, it is both God-word and neighbor-word. Six days show you work into all your layers, actually two commandments. Two commandments in one, I'm not one of those eleven commandment liberals. There's ten commandments, but the fourth commandment has two parts to it. Right? Work for six days. On six days show you do your work, all your labor. And on the seventh day you shall rest. So we're going to look at it over two weeks. This week we're going to look at what it means to work, next week we'll look at what it means to rest. And what I want us to see this week is we look at this transitional commandment, there's several things I want us to see. First of all, that all the commandments go back to creation and to how we are created, what does that mean? That means when you break one of the commandments you are unraveling the fabric of your own existence. These are not just arbitrary rules that God just came up with. He wasn't sitting together with the son of the Holy Spirit going, how can I make it really hard to get into heaven? Let's give them ten tough things to do, let's make an optical course that they will never pass. That's not what the commandments are, he's already redeemed this. The commandments are for those who have already been redeemed, telling you this is how to live, this is how I created you to function. And we're creating this image and we're going to look at what all that means. And then from how we're going to see how informed next week we'll see how our love for the Lord informs how we love each other. I'm really excited about sharing all this with you. And what I want you to see most of all this week is that we are created in the image of God who delights in his works. We are created in the image of God who delights in his works. And we find our dignity as humans in our industry, in our works and the works of our hands. You're created to do that. Before we get into that list stand as we read this great text, starting first of all with Deuteronomy, chapter five, and then skipping backwards for context to general genesis, chapter two. First Deuteronomy, chapter five, from the 10 Commandments, observe the Sabbath day to keep it holy as the Lord's regard commanded you. Six days shall you labor and do all your work. But the seventh is the Sabbath through the Lord's regard on it, you shall not do any work. You or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock or this is your owner who's within your gates, still can't say that word. Sojourner, who is within your gates, that your male servant or female servant may rest as well as you. Now for context, let's go back to Genesis chapter two. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work and he had done and he rested on the seventh day from all his work and he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it God rested from all his work and he had done in creation. These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens with no bush in the field of jet in the land and no small plants in the field had yet sprung up for the Lord had not caused terrain on the land. And there was no man to work the ground and a mist was going up from the land and watering the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed the man from the dust, from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living creature. And the Lord God planted a garden and eaten in the east and there he put the man whom he had formed and out of the ground. God made the spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food and the tree of life was in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The river flowed out of Eden to water and there it divided and became four rivers and the name of the first is the pition and the one that flowed around the whole of the land is have a law where there is gold and the gold of that land is good. Delium and Onyx stone are there the name of the second river is gone and it is the one that flowed around the whole land of kush and the name of the third river is the Tigris which flows east of Assyria and the fourth river is the Euphrates. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. As far the reading of God's word all men are like grass and all of our glories like the flowers of the field, the grass withers and the flowers fall but not God's word. God's word stands forever. You may be seated. We are created in the image of a God who gets glory from his works and we find dignity as we find our work. The first thing I wanted to see here is God made us in this image. Now if I wanted to select all the relevant texts for this sermon I would have had to go all the way back to the very first Genesis 1, 1 and reach to the end of Genesis 2 and that's a little long and the word God will stand forever but I made a promise not to make you stand forever. So I didn't want to read the whole thing but if you won't mind let me go back to it a little bit. God creates the entire world and all of it and he delights in it. Then he says that he gathered together father-son and Holy Spirit they talked to themselves with each other and they said let us create man in our image. Now before we go any further we need to ask the question why. Why did he want to create man in his image? Angels aren't created in his image. They are all kind of amazing beautiful creatures throughout the universe known and unknown that are not created in his image. What was the purpose of creating man in his image? Well the purpose we know is so that whenever any being, whether it be animal angelic or otherwise, see humans that we give glory to God. That's what the image is there for. That's why he got put out his image on the earth. That's the purpose of images. We see this going back for centuries before there were media, before there were newspapers and other ways of informing the world about who was in charge, what would the nations do? The ancient Pharaohs would put statues of themselves everywhere to say hey he's the leader. That's the ruler. That was the same in Rome. They would put their image on money to say this is my money. Jesus is pointing out, it really calls the stirr. When he said it looks like it sees his money, that's his image. He's the one in charge. That's what images do. In Soviet Russia, when they had power, they were using power all over Eastern Europe, what did they do? They put statues of Russian soldiers everywhere. The person who taught me this was Richard Pratt, my Old Testament professor. He talked about going to preach the gospel in Czechoslovakia under communist rule. He said whenever he would drive by statues, an extremely curious man, whenever he would drive by a statue, he would point to that and go who's that? The taxi drivers would say ruchis. Why won't there be Russian soldiers in Czechoslovakia? Well, let everybody know who's in charge. That's the point of images. Now, I'm going to take a little side note here. You saw it coming. There's a lot of debate about images today. And what images need to come down and which ones don't? We just need to be honest. We all know what those images mean. And when the United States of America started putting up Confederate statues, not during the Civil War, 50, 60 years later during Jim Crow, everybody knew what it meant. So just be honest enough to not say, oh, those statues don't mean anything. Oh, they mean something. You know what they do? That's why I created this in this image. The image means something. It tells everybody who's in charge. Well, what kind of image are we created in? We're creating the image of a God who loves to work. Go back today and read Genesis 1. How delighted God was in his work. What did he do? He created the heavens and the earth and he looked at him. He said, yes, that's good. He created water. In my mind, I've just got this image. It's going to trust me. This is just a picture, okay? I know I'm not a triathiest. I know the three or one God. But in my mind, I got the Holy Spirit. And he figures out water. And he brings it to the Father and the Son. He goes, look what I made. What is it? It's water. What's it made of? It's two hydrogens of one oxygen. Well, what's it going to do? It's going to cover the earth. It's going to cover two thirds of the earth. Every being that walks on the earth is going to be made of it. 80, 90 percent of their bodies are going to be made of. It's going to allow them to move with fluidity. They're not going to be all stiff and too dense. They're going to be able to move and to exist. And it's going to feed every plant and every animal. It's one of I think the Holy Spirit did it because we're told he hovered above the water. Like he's being protective of it. Okay, this is mad. And he was proud of it. He loved it and what did he say about the water? It was good. And he created the sky and the clouds. And he said it was good. And he created the animals and the trees. And he said they're good. And he created humans in his own image. And he said they're very good. We are creating the image of a God who loves his work. He describes himself as a worker. He doesn't say God just spoke and guarded into existence. How did he put that garden there? Genesis 2, he planted a garden. He didn't just speak a human into existence. How did he get that human there? He formed us out of the ground. He's a sculptor. He's a gardener. He's a shepherd who protects his children. He's an artist of Psalm 104 describes him as the artist making this world beautiful, taking pleasure in the beauty of it. He gets glory from his work, we're told. That is the God that we are in the image of. That is the God we are like. He created us like himself. And he created the earth to be worked. That's why I chose this text. It has all these words that I can't say, like gallium, gallium. I don't know, but gallium. I don't know what the hell you pronounce it, but I know one thing. God hit it in the earth. Isn't that funny? God hit things in the earth. He wanted them to be discovered. He wanted them to be to be mined out of it and refined. He hit gold and onyx. He hit them in the earth and made them precious so that we humans would find them and mine them and cultivate these raw materials. What did he create? Man to do. Man and woman he created us to cultivate the ground to take these raw materials and produce the necessary elements of flourishing. He created us to be like him. And we need to take the time and the opportunity to enjoy, to celebrate all the ways that we have been like him through the centuries. I mean it's amazing. It is amazing. Doctors have taken mold, mold, and created antibiotics to save lives. What in the world? It's amazing. Geologists have taken rotted decay dinosaur bones and created a fuel that has run the world, that gives us lights and air conditioning praise to Jehovah. It's glorious. We have engineers who've taken, I don't even know, every time I try to decide this or describe this, my kids make fun of me. Like you don't really have any idea what's in the cell phone do you? I don't. I know there's silver and there's wires and little bitty things like sand that's been made into silicon which is somehow a processor. I know it's amazing. I know I can talk to something in my hand and it will all of a sudden call somebody. I don't understand how any of that works. But God put all that in the earth and he put it there for humans to develop and we've done it and it's glorious. It's beautiful. God is a working God who takes glory in his work and we're created in his image to get joy out of our work, to get dignity out of our work. That's one of the many many reasons. One of the last four months have been so disorienting. Many of us have been separated from our work. I mean, I went through a very dark series of months of depression because y'all weren't coming. I got no joy from the work. It's okay that that's not a sign of some kind of immorality or weakness. That's just, you're just not getting to do what you're recreated to do. It's hard. That's why retirement. It disorients a lot of people. It disrupts a lot of people. You don't get to do what we're created to do anymore. Work is part of who we are. But we don't live in the ideal world of Genesis 2. Right? It's a big part of the problem. We don't live in the ideal world of Genesis 2. We live in the corrupted fallen world of Genesis 3. What happened in Genesis 3? Adam and Eve sinned. They they sought out independence from the Lord and the two things that were cursed first. We were cursed in our relationships, our relationship between father and mother, between mom and child. That relationship was cursed and work was cursed. God looked at Adam and he said, curse it is the ground because of what you've done. This ground that was, that I created with beauty, that I created to be one long discovery of gold and onyx and those other things. Instead it's going to bring forth thorns. This leads. And your life which was supposed to have gone on forever and been one long exploration of how glorious and gracious your God is and one long joyful celebration of creation and of your creator. Instead it's going to be a titanic struggle as you seek to carve your life out of that earth. You're going to be fighting with the dust and by the way you're going to lose. You're going to return to the dust. You're taking out of it. You're going back. In all that angst we feel about work and all that struggle and worry about am I going to make it? Am I going to succeed? Am I going to provide for my family? That's it was all born there and our views of work were corrupted. Our views of work have continued to be corrupted. I was reading this week. Someone named Robert Ludlam. He's a good guy for me to read because I disagree with him about 60% of the time. She's good to read people you disagree with. He's an economist and he writes on politics and he shouldn't stay in the subject but that's gone. Everybody's welcome their opinion, America. But he wrote something fascinating. He said that what the sixties were to our views will on sex. The nineties were to our views of money. Before the sixties you never talked about sex. It was quiet, secret. If you were pregnant you kind of hid. Everybody knew how it worked. It would be foolish or naive but it was kind of something for you to discover on your own. And then through the sixties and seventies it became something that was out in the open and talked about and displayed for everyone. It changed its very nature. He said in the same way until the nineties you didn't really talk about how much money you made. It was kind of your own business. Get the quiet. He said ever since then those have been kind of a public consumption and work has no longer become something we do for its own sake. Work is not the calling money is the calling and that's really corrupted our view of work. Work has become something that not even the job itself gives us our value but the money we get paid for the job gives us our value. And that crushes us. It crushes us. And we know better, right? I can sit here and talk to you about how Joe Flacco was paid fifty million dollars to be the backup quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens. You know he wasn't worth that money. I could have been the backup quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens last year. I mean just watch Lamar Alexander's all you do. Right? He didn't make anybody's life better by being the backup quarterback. He made fifty million dollars. School teacher makes what 30,000? Every school teacher you've ever had in your entire life combined has not made fifty million dollars. Do you think they're more valuable to your life and to the life of our society than the backup quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens? Of course. Don't confuse a paycheck with value. But we do. We do. And as a result of that as a result of how sin has affected our work, we have two, we have many real corrupt views. One is that we do confuse, pay with value. The other one is we confuse our work for our identity. We over value work. This is a very, it tends to be a man soon. I don't like to talk about men and women separately, but to be men, men tend to tell you not what they do, but who they are. Right? It's not that I sell insurance. I'm a salesman. It's not that I teach geology, but I'm a professor. It's not that I practice surgery, but I'm a surgeon. It's our identity. It's how people treat us when they talk to us, when they meet us, and how we introduce ourselves. And as a result of that, when the work doesn't go well, we feel crushed. Or we have the undervaluing of work. People who want to avoid it at all costs, you see work itself as the curse. And so the constantly going to making efforts to somehow avoid it at all costs and make a living off lotteries or game shows or marriage or whatever possible way just to avoid having to work. And then losing their dignity through that. And that's neither of those is our calling. Our calling is to find work to enjoy the Lord, to enjoy how it created us. And it's possible. It's possible. I don't know where to put this point, but I'm just going to put it here. As I was thinking about this sort of an all week and praying about it, the thought that came up to me every single day was some of, if not all, but at least I can name five on top of my head, of the happiest people I've ever known in my life. We're all custodians. They were janitors. And I don't know how to identify once, you know, my mom's best friend for her entire career was a guy named Fish Day Fisher. Just always had a joke. Just always laughing. The high school kept custodian. Can't imagine a worse job than picking up at high school kids. And he just loved it. He was hilarious. Everybody in the old school knew him. You didn't want to get on his wrong side, but he was hilarious. We had a custodian, the first prize Jackson name, Ali. Ali was hired in the 40th. Continue to come into work in the 80s 90s. I was there in the 90s. Nobody knew how old Ali was. His paycheck was going to be he was essentially retired. Nobody expected him to do it. He just would not quit coming to work. He just loved it. He loved that building. He loved the people. I got a friend named Dan Fairley who was a lawyer at the biggest law firm in Mississippi. Butler Canada and Snow hated his job quit to become a janitor. In order to pay his debts he had to run a janitorial company. But every night he went and cleaned something. He just loved it. I don't know what that is, but there's something in that about just loving the work and being content with the work. Not with how people view your work, not with how you're compensated for the work, but loving the work for the works sake that I think is very godly. God didn't create the earth because it was going to pay off. He certainly didn't create us because we were going to pay off. We were going to cost him his son. But he enjoyed the work. So how do we redeem work? How do we become more like what God has created us to be? The first thing, of course, is going to be establishing who your identity is. As long as you're trying to establish either your identity or your security through work you will be unstable. You won't know who you are and you won't be secure enough to enjoy life and you won't know joy. So what do we do? We come to the one who came to earth to work, who redeemed us through sweat, who wore a crown of thorns, and who returned to the ground for us. Jesus experienced all the curse on our work for us so that he could be our identity. So that when we are introducing ourselves, we don't have to introduce ourselves as the doctor, lawyer, or Indian chief. We are in Christ. That's who I am. You only know who I am. I'm in Christ. I am Christ. My life is hidden in Christ. And as we become comfortable with his identity, we become comfortable with the God's sovereignty. That I am who I am. I am where I am. I have this job, not because it's the only thing I could find, not because it's the best I could do. I have this job because the Lord of the universe who loved me more than he loved his own son who gave his own son for me to redeem me out of my own selfishness and greed that the Lord of the universe gave this position to me. I am who he made me to be. And so I can do this work as unto the Lord. It's one of the great Protestant gifts to the world. Martin Luther was told ask what we should do if we thought the Lord was coming back tomorrow. And he said, well, if you're a shoemaker, you better go make a good shoe. And there was a famous painting of a cobbler holding up his shoe. It's under the Lord. I did this for you. I want you to be able to go to work this week with that spirit of if Jesus were to walk in the door, he could look at him and say, I was just working on this for you. This is where the Lord has me today. I was just cutting this rose bush for you. It's for you. If we receive our identity in him and accept his loving grace in our life, then that enables us to work for the work's sake that we might enjoy him in our word and that he might rejoice in his works. Please pray with me. I father in heaven, I pray that you would enable us to see our work as a gift from you. And we pray that you would receive our work as our gift to you, that you would be delighted in the work of our hands and receive glory and in those works as well. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.