When you shall eat of the fruit of your hands, you will be happy and it will be well with you. (Psalm 128:2 ESV)
Work
God gives us many blessings through supernatural means… things like grace, mercy, forgiveness, adoption, justification, sanctification, and glorification. All theological words, yes… but all precious and out of our ability to acccomplish on our own.
But God also blesses us in ways that involve some contribution ourselves. God gives us work, and the results of our work are blessing.
God does not give us tasks, jobs, and work merely to keep our idle hands occupied. Rather, He blesses us with both the work itself, and the results of our labor.
Many folk today seem eager to avoid work, take shortcuts in our work, and be done with work. But work is a blessing, and a means to blessing.
The best example is Christ Himself. He had work to do on earth. If anyone deserved to not ‘work’ it was Christ. The Son of God, an amazing heavenly home, power and authority, and He had already been working throughout eternity.
But His work blessed His people. His obedience and resistance to every temptation counts as ours. His miracles helped so many. Being finite when He was infinite, suffering the physical effects of Adam’s sin in creation, accepting guilt for everything of which He was innocent, were all hard work.
But He blessed us. Doubly. He blessed us by doing them, and He blessed us with the results.
Two things, then, to be thankful for. Our God-directed work, and the happy results.