“Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest,eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.”(Psalm 127:1,2)
There is an aspect of life that will always remain outside
of our control no matter how clever we are, no matter how well we plan, no
matter how much experience we have.
Circumstances have a way of making idiots out of very smart
people.
He was a smart guy working for a successful corporation.
He understood the stock market considerably better than I do. But I divested my
holdings a few weeks after the company’s stock suddenly began to slide downward
in value. I didn’t get top price (it was somewhere in the mid-thirties), but I
netted about $8,000 and was perfectly happy with that. (I should add that I
didn’t get out of the market because I was prescient or clever; I got out
because my personal circumstances required it.)
My boss stayed in. The company was solid and there was no
reason to think anything serious was amiss. Share prices fluctuate, as anyone
knows, for a variety of reasons.
Did I mention it was 2007?
Short story: the share price continued to plummet, losing
significant value daily. The ship was sinking but we just didn’t know it yet.
The parent corporation sold off our little Canadian subsidiary to an American
company and we ended up doing just fine. Meanwhile, the shares in the parent
the last time I looked were down to something like $0.87. My boss hung on until
the end because by the time he realized the parent corporation was in serious trouble
and was not going to rally, the share value was so low that any mitigation of
his losses he might have accomplished by selling would have been negligible. I
suspect he lost somewhere around $100,000, and he was not alone in that.
Circumstances are always out of our control, and the
Psalmist acknowledges it: “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to
rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.”
The takeaway from this for the Christian is that worry is
pointless and unnecessary, for a couple of good reasons.
One is that the Lord “knows what you need”. He is never surprised by circumstances. Notice the term is “need”, not “want”.
He knows what we want too, but he gives us what we need. “Give us this day
our daily bread” we are taught to pray, for good reason. Tomorrow is another
day, and we can pray for its needs tomorrow.
If I need, for instance, a pension, the Lord may choose to
provide it through perfectly normal means, like RSPs or stock awards. Or he may
not, because he knows the end from the beginning. It’s possible that I’m going
to die of a heart attack at 55 (and I’ve known healthy, athletic men who died
younger). In that case, what on earth do I need with a big pension? I have no
idea today whether I’ll need one or not, but it’s wonderful to know that the
Lord knows, and will take care of it for me. If I haven’t got one, it’s because
I don’t need it.
The flip side of that is that I can’t do anything about it
one way or another, so why waste time concerned with it: “Which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” Once we recognize our complete dependence on the Lord for everything, it frees
us up incredibly. It frees up our time. It frees up our minds. It frees up our
hearts. It gives us time and energy to serve in the confidence that someone else is
looking after all that. If we absolutely insist on worrying about something, it’s
more profitable to spend our mental energies considering whether we are doing
the best job possible with the resources the Lord has given us and
contemplating how we might use them for him more effectively.
And though we have an obligation to behave responsibly with
the money we receive from employment, if, having behaved responsibly and
wisely, through circumstances outside our control we wind up flat broke, it isn’t
really our problem, is it?
It’s a problem our master has promised to take care of.
Since we can’t know which way things are going to go, it is pointless to stress ourselves about it. Easier said than done, of course, but if we are thinking like the Lord wants us to think, there’s a tremendous amount of peace available to us that is unavailable to those with a worldview that excludes God.
Since we can’t know which way things are going to go, it is pointless to stress ourselves about it. Easier said than done, of course, but if we are thinking like the Lord wants us to think, there’s a tremendous amount of peace available to us that is unavailable to those with a worldview that excludes God.
“He gives to his beloved sleep”.
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