Ecclesiastes 4 - Why Doesn't it Work at Work
Tom Shrader explores Solomon's observations about work in Ecclesiastes 4, identifying three approaches: those driven by pride and envy, those who avoid work entirely, and those who maintain balance. He emphasizes that pride is the root of much workplace competition and dissatisfaction, arguing that work should glorify God rather than serve ego. Shrader concludes that while everything appears meaningless from a horizontal perspective, everything matters when viewed from God's eternal perspective.
“Solomon's not saying to us that everything is meaningless, therefore give up. His answer is not nothing's important. His answer is everything is important.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Reflections From the Top of the Heap (2007)
Recorded: May 17, 2007
Duration: 38 min
Themes: work, pride, envy, balance, purpose, meaninglessness, perspective, competition, struggling with pride, workplace competition, career dissatisfaction, work-life balance, feeling meaningless, professional, employee, business owner
Scripture: Ecclesiastes 1:2, Ecclesiastes 4:4-6, Ecclesiastes 4:7-8, Ecclesiastes 4:9-12, Isaiah 12
Theological Themes: vanity, meaninglessness, eternal perspective, god's sovereignty, under the sun, human perspective, biblical wisdom, sanctification
Full Transcript
Let me invite you to open your Bibles to the book of Ecclesiastes. We are in chapter 4. We're not technically doing an in-depth study of the book all the way through, but we've taken sections and certainly captured, I think, the spirit of what Solomon is writing.
The chapter we missed, chapter 3, begins with a really familiar passage. There's an appointed time for everything, a time for every event under heaven, and then a time to give birth, a time to die. I was Friday at the doctor's office. I was not feeling well, and I was in the restroom, and he had that passage hanging in the restroom. I thought that was kind of interesting. What came out of it, I was telling Mr. Wheeler, is I've got kidney stones in both kidneys right now, so I can't beat this thing. I'll be praying about that. We'll see what they're going to do, but we live with it at this point.
Here's the book of Ecclesiastes. Almost every week that message is the same as it was day one for us. Chapter 1, verse 2, Solomon gives you his summary. "Vanity of vanities. Vanity of vanities. All is vanity." Some of your translations will say meaningless, meaningless. This becomes really important because it's that same message every week.
The Eternal Perspective
God is saying everything is meaningless, and the qualifier is that little phrase in verse 3, "under the sun." If I look at life in just a horizontal plane from a human perspective, there's no ultimate meaning to it. There's no satisfaction in it. And so I can at that point almost go, "Well, gosh, why go through this? Nothing matters."
Interestingly enough, in my mind, there's a guy that I like to read. His name is Philip Ryken, and he wrote a commentary on the book of Ecclesiastes, and the subtitle is "Why Everything Matters." So just the opposite of that reaction. Solomon is not giving you these insights to drive you to despair, but He's giving us these insights to flip us around so we now see life not under the sun, but from God's perspective.
I was doing some reading on discipleship the other night. What's a disciple? What are you trying to teach a disciple? The guy, it was Howie Hendricks, and Howie was pretty interesting. He said, you want a disciple to model Jesus, you want a disciple to be a servant, and you want to instill in them an eternal perspective. Well, that is what Solomon is all about. If I can see things the big picture, if I can see things as God sees them.
The Theme of Vanity
Today we're going to hang out in chapter 4, and you can see on your outline the topic today is work, but look at this theme that is, again, pretty familiar. Verse 4, "this too is vanity." Verse 7, "I looked again at vanity." Verse 8, "this too is vanity." Verse 16, "this is vanity." And then as if to kind of emphasize it, underline it, He says, "striving for the wind." This in and of itself is meaningless.
He's going to talk to us about work. We're going to pull out, and you can see in the outline, how much you should give at work, what you can get from work, what you share with your work, and some individual thoughts. Now, for many of you in this room, you're past work for pay. You're not doing that anymore. This is really important for you, not to check out, but to be a resource for the young men and women who are going to talk to you and ask you life questions.
That was just reading an article the other day on the deep desire that young men and women have to be mentored. Now, I'm a little suspicious what they mean by that, because my experience for mentoring has been that means they'll meet you any time that's convenient for them, as long as you're buying. I'm not obligated to take your advice, but here's what I know. There's a whole generation that, in many cases, hasn't been parented and hasn't had the benefit of a large corporation to instill values and ethics and professionalism in them, and they're deficient, and you are the solution to that.
Learning Now to Pass On Later
Some of these things, you may go, "Well, I wish I would have heard this 30 years ago." Well, that's not an option. We don't have a time machine. Those are gone. Here's the deal. Let's make sure we hear it now, and let's internalize it, customize it, so you can pass it on.
Ecclesiastes chapter 4, verse 4, Solomon writes, "I have seen that every labor and every skill which is done is the result of rivalry between a man and his neighbor. This too is vanity. The fool folds His hand and consumes His own flesh. One handful of rest is better than two fistful of labor and striving after the wind."
The Problem of Envy in Work
Solomon makes a statement that, on a surface, taken as an absolute, is almost absurd. He said, my observation is that the reason people work is envy. Now He's not saying that's true in every case, but He's saying that's certainly true in a lot of them. He's talking about the old phrase we would use, keeping up with the Joneses, and Ryken offers this insight. The world is full of Joneses trying to keep up with other Joneses.
There's always, in sports, this idea of who's the best, and top ten this, and greatest whatever of all time, and there was one the other day on boxers, and absent from the list was a guy that just came along at the wrong time, and His name was Larry Holmes. Larry Holmes was a great fighter. The problem is, you had Ali, and Frazier, and Foreman, and Evander Holyfield, and Holmes was this guy that He was really, He used to be a sparring partner for Ali, and Holmes was a guy that always, compared to Ali, everybody came off kind of slow, and Holmes always struggled, and Holmes was from Easton, Pennsylvania, and Holmes had a saying. He said, "In Easton, the Joneses keep up with the Holmeses. I'm going to set the pace here."
The Root Issue of Pride
The idea that we're getting at here is this idea of pride. I'm going to spend maybe too much time on this, but my experience, probably personal, and observation with others, is one of the most compelling forces that leads us to sin is pride. I did not go through the parking
Lot and look at bumper stickers, so if you have this bumper sticker on your car, it's not a criticism of you, but I got behind a car Tuesday, where this guy had one of these "my kid is an honor student" bumper stickers. What is the possible point of that bumper sticker? If your kid's an honor student, he or she should be smart enough to know they are, shouldn't have to tell them. I don't even know you or your kid and I already don't like you. My favorite one of those is "my kid can beat up your honor student." But I mean, honestly, and I'm not looking to debate it, and if you disagree, that's your right to disagree, but that seems to me, and especially if that kid is one of five, what does that say to the other four kids? My kid's an average student? And, well, I'm just trying to make him proud and get his self-esteem. Well, there's a lot of ways to do it. A bumper sticker isn't going to do it.
In my own dark, cynical world, my interpretation of that is, you want me to know you got an academically smart kid, so I'll think you're a heck of a dad. You're some kind of mom. When Sarah was in, my daughter Sarah, was in first grade, she came home one day and said, "Tomorrow we're taking the Iowa basic skills test." And I said, "All right, well that's good, you know, you'll be fine." So it's in the first grade, the year's over, and about two weeks later in the mail comes this innocuous looking envelope with a return address for Iowa City or wherever it was, and it was her Iowa basic skills score. So I opened them and discovered that she was, by and large, average. So I had to sit down and I had to say to her, "Okay, number one, this comes from your mom's side of the family, and we can overcome this, we can work through this."
But I remember, and it was one of those moments that was like a great revealer, God just laid my heart open. I wanted Sarah to kind of be a combination of Mother Teresa and Margaret Thatcher and Shania Twain. And I wanted her to do extraordinary things. Now I'm going to tell you, this is the truth, now because it's true of me doesn't mean it's true of you, but I would suspect it is to some extent. I wanted her to accomplish all those things so when she was there getting the award, I would think she must have a heck of a dad. That's that pride, it's so subtle. It drives so much of what we do.
C.S. Lewis on the Vice of Pride
I want to read you, and it's a fairly long quote from Mere Christianity, so it's C.S. Lewis. And you can, by the way, go online and Google "C.S. Lewis pride," and you can navigate your way to find this. But Lewis, to me, just drills this. He's writing along, so we're about a third of the way into the book, and he said:
"Today I come to the part of Christian morals where they differ more sharply from all other morals. There's one vice of which no man in the world is free, which everyone loathes when they see it in someone else, and of which hardly any person except Christians ever imagine that they're guilty themselves. I have heard people admit that they're bad-tempered, or they can't keep their head about girls or drink, or even that they're cowards. I don't think I've ever heard anyone who is not a Christian accuse himself of this vice. At the same time, I have seldom met anyone who's not a Christian who showed the slightest mercy to it in others. There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves, and the more we have it," and this is a great sentence, "the more we have it, the more we dislike it in others. The vice I'm talking about is pride. The virtue, the opposite of it, in Christian morals, is humility."
Listen to this sentence. I would love to be able to craft one sentence like this in my lifetime. Pride leads to other vices. Now, he's talking about pride, definition, is a complete anti-God state of mind. When I come to pride, I'm saying it's my will, not Your will. So if you go back into, what is it, Isaiah 14, where Lucifer becomes the devil, he is saying to God, "I will, I will, I will."
The Test of Pride
We could stop there, but Lewis gives us a little test. If you want to find out how proud you are, the easiest way is to ask yourself, "How much do I dislike it when other people snub me or refuse to take notice of me?" When they don't seem to think you're special. We have a lady at our church who she and her husband are partners with another gentleman in a restaurant, very successful restaurant, and she has a great line. I don't know if it's hers originally, but it sure works. She said this: "It's easy to be a servant until somebody treats you like one." That's what Lewis is saying. That pride kicks in.
The point is that each person's pride is in competition with everyone else's. It's because I want to be the big noise at the party that I'm annoyed at someone else being the big noise. Here's another little insight. Pride is essentially competitive. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that we're proud of being rich or clever or good looking, but that's not true. We're proud of being richer or cleverer or better looking than others.
Christians have it right. It is pride which has been the cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began. Pride always produces enmity. And he's saying now, I start to live that out, and if that's true when Lewis is writing in Great Britain, it's true many times over in the United States today.
A Personal Story About Pride
I'm trying to think where I was, just pride, but I was telling the story. My family and I had never flown on a private jet, and we had a guy who was a pilot, and he had a jet. He had a jet, and we were going on vacation, and he said, "I'd love to fly you guys." We were just going to San Diego. He said, "I'd love to fly you guys over." And I said, "Well, that would be great. Never done it, sounds good." We got out, we were flying out of Scottsdale, and we'd pull right up and load the
plane, and by the time I'd parked the car, we're ready to go, wheels up in five minutes. We're about halfway there, and Haley said, "I feel like I'm the President of the United States. This is so special." I just started thinking, okay, I didn't do anything other than I know this guy, and that's my contribution, but I'm pretty proud.
Then we land at the place in San Diego, I think it was Jim's, and we pull in, and I'm looking at the plane, and we're unloading it, and I'm feeling pretty special, very special. Just then, this huge plane comes in next to us, and it's a guy who has his family, and this is his jet, and he's taking them on a trip around the world. I'm hearing this story, and I'm looking out, okay, and I don't—I hope this doesn't offend you—I looked at his jet and our jet, and his jet went just like this on our jet. Just like that. I could swear, I could see that wing go up, and I thought, not only did I not communicate or contribute anything, it's just another jet.
What Solomon is saying is if you're driven by that pride, and we have to be careful here, the objective is not to take away your motive, it's to redirect it. If there's pride, there's no end to this.
Pride Has No End Game
I'm watching some interviews the other day, spring training interviews, and they're at the Cubs. They're asking these guys a question that they haven't asked them in 100 years: "How are you going to do this again this year?" I think about Tom Brady. In this room, I'm guessing there aren't many people that like Tom Brady and don't like Bill Belichick. I like them both. But I mean, Brady, he's just cool. If he asked me out for coffee, I'd go. He's just cool. He's an absolute stud.
When that Super Bowl ended this year, he's standing at the 50-yard line with the Super Bowl trophy in one arm and Gisele in the other arm. Yet I know, because there were hints of it this year, that that release is not quite as quick as it was and the ball's a little slower getting there. They got Garoppolo ready behind him. It's only a matter of time before they're going to talk about Brady like he was some third-string quarterback with the Cardinals. He's arguably the greatest that's ever played the position. I don't want to stake that out, but he's in the discussion.
If you're proud that you're faster than, bigger than, better than, that's not enough motive because there's always that jet. There's always Tom Brady. The poor baseball guy's got no chance because they're competing with Babe Ruth. You got no chance in that conversation.
The Two Extremes: Driven by Pride vs. Dropping Out
What Solomon is saying is I looked around and I saw guys and gals in verse four that are driven by ego and pride. Then verse five, I saw a whole group of people who said, "Well, that's stupid," so they're going to sit back and do nothing. They're going to sit back and they're going to coast. They're not going to get in the rat race. They think they're profound, so they don't want to be a rat. They drop out.
One author writes this, speaking about verse five: "Here is a picture of complacency, unwittingly self-destruction. For this comment on him points out a deeper damage than the wasting of capital. His idleness eats away not only at what he has, but it erodes his self-control, his grasp of reality, his capacity to care, and in the end, his self-respect."
So I got this guy who's absolutely driven to be at the top and then this guy who has no initiative. Then the guy in verse six who has—and we use the word on your outline—who has a balanced perspective.
Finding Balance in Perspective
I've always pushed back from that word "balanced" because I've always felt it was kind of an excuse to not be great. I don't know that balanced people accomplish great things, but somehow, it's to take this world, this life, and put them in perspective.
For most of you, and it occurred to me yesterday, halfway through the lesson, that if you're not a sports person, I lose you a lot, and I apologize for that, and I've determined the answer to that is for you to become a sports person. I don't have any other story, but there was a guy last week, this was a big story. Gene Chizik is his name, and he was a head coach at Iowa State, which is just a crummy job, and got hired at Auburn, and it was really controversial when they hired him. I mean, it was like, "Who is this guy?" He didn't have a .500 record at Iowa State, and we're going to hire him. He wins a national title in two years, and then they run him out of Auburn.
So he's been the defensive coordinator at North Carolina. Last week, he announced he's going to step down so he can spend more time with his family. Now, I'm always—I mean, these guys always step down to spend more time with their family, and then take an ESPN job, and they're on the road all the time, but it's not Chizik. Chizik, apparently, it's the real deal, and he's talking about, "I'm driving my kids to school," and everybody's all excited about what he did. That didn't seem like it's that tough.
The Real Challenge: Keeping Your Job While Balancing Life
I don't think that's the challenge. The challenge is, how do you keep the job at North Carolina and balance life? How do you have quotas and deadlines and investors and balance this? I understand, back to verse six, I understand that one handful of rest is better than two fistfuls of labor and of striving under the sun.
I have to see things as God sees them, and ultimately, I have to be more concerned about winning at God's dream than the American dream. That's pretty hard to do, especially in light of what we talked about at the beginning. It's not much fun when you're at the Christmas party, and everybody's talking about how much they're making, what's going on, their new house, their new car, their new wife, their new this, their new that, and you're going, "Well, I'm just..." And your contribution is this: "I'm just happy." We don't value that much.
So Solomon's saying, I need to understand that it's okay if I'm not the biggest and the best. Now, let me remind you, Solomon writes this
As the guy who's the biggest and the best. He's not some loser who, at the end of the day, says, "Oh, this is all stupid because he can't win." That's what I did. Years ago, I predicted that the computer was a fad and it was going to go away. And all the data's not in, but it looks like I might be wrong on this. This was another moment where I said to myself, "Tom, you're really bad."
Here was my problem. I was intimidated by the computer. I didn't know how to run it. And so rather than learn and respond, I just explained it away. It's never going to be a factor. I remember when the guys at Coal Banker were out in the Mesa office. We had one guy in particular start with his computer stuff and he spent forever inputting data. And he's inputting data. I said, "By the time you hit print, we're going to have three deals made." But he was right. And so somehow, I got to figure out that balance.
The Problem of Consuming Without Purpose
Then, when I look at verse seven and eight, he's talking about consuming. "Then I looked again at vanity under the sun. There's a certain man without a dependent, having neither a son nor a brother." Now, in that culture, they would not pass inheritance on to the wife. So this guy may be married, but there's no son, there's no brother. What they're saying here, there's no heirs, "yet there's no end to his labor. Indeed, his eyes weren't satisfied with riches. And he never asked, and for whom am I laboring and depriving myself of pleasure? This too is vanity."
Now, that's probably a pretty rare exception in our environment, but he's saying there's nobody after me. Why are you doing this? At least most of us can still lie and say, "I'm doing this for the kids." I remember, we won't name names. He was a golfer, one of the first Nike guys. Very successful. And he negotiated this contract for like $96 million or something. And they were asking him all these questions. And his answer was, "I have to provide for my family." Well, I'm not—I guess I am in a way—I'm not judging that. But just say you want the dough. Don't dress it up for your family. This guy doesn't even have that excuse.
Let me read you the paraphrase of verse 8. "There's a solitary person, completely alone, no children, no family, yet working obsessively late into the night, compulsively greedy for more and more. Never bothering to ask, why am I working like a dog? Never having fun. Who cares? More smoke." And I wrote a note by there. It's a little bit dated. But Howard Hughes: "I'm just going to live by myself upstairs in the penthouse at the Desert Inn. Nobody's going to see me for years. I'm going to get on a plane and fly around between Mexico and here and wherever else. And I'm going to die up there for whatever reason." Solomon said, "I saw that guy."
The Collaborative Approach
And there's accumulation. Now he presents to us, beginning in verse 9, an idea of an approach that is collaborative, that it's a real team. He said this. "Two are better than one." So that's the general principle. "Because they have a good return on their labor." Generally, two are going to be more productive than I would be as an individual. It's not just work twice as hard. It's going to be beyond just twice as hard.
And there's other benefits to all of this. It says, verse 10, "If either of them falls, the one will lift up his companion. But woe to the man who falls when there's not another to lift him up." He said, somebody is going to have your back. Somebody is going to be there to help you out. What we're driving at, and Solomon's driving at, is this life. We're independent. We're designed to live in community. We need other people around us. Life is better. Life is more efficient. Life models the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and loving and sharing when I live in this. And he's almost appealing to selfishness. If you want what's best for you, you need another person.
We live at that rugged individual. The thing that I see, again, we're doing a generation thing about the next generation, is they're much more collaborative than we are, much, much, much more working together, much more team-oriented. They're taught that way, really, in school. And Solomon's saying, there is an incredible advantage to that.
"Furthermore, if two lie down together, they keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? And if one can overpower him who's alone, two can resist him. A cord of three strands is not quickly torn."
Work as Worship, Not Competition
Solomon looks at work and puts it in that and says, "Here's what I've observed, is that work, like everything else, is meaningless under the sun." It doesn't mean that I shouldn't strive, and I shouldn't work, and I shouldn't work hard. But my point in working is to glorify God, not to be the best overall, not to win the trophy.
And my experience over the last 20 years is every time you talk like this in a competitive environment, and that can be in business, sports, education, whatever it is, people are afraid that you're going to take away the edge. And Solomon's saying, there's no edge. There's no edge to be driven by pride, and ego, and selfishness, and profit. Because at the end of the day, driven totally by that, at the end of the day, you'll be miserable. Because that will never satisfy.
Everything Is Important
Let me close the same way we started. Solomon's not saying to us that everything is meaningless, therefore give up. His answer, and this is a spoiler alert, because we don't get here till the last week. But His answer is not nothing's important. His answer is everything is important.
Sandy and I were talking last night about this and something else that we are reading. And she was talking about how important it was for her to treat the checkout person at Fry's with honor and dignity. How important it was. Costco, I didn't know Costco did this. What a great company. If you pull into Costco, they'll check the pressure on your tires, and they'll fill your tires. I mean, I didn't know they did that. Last summer, I got my...
That matters how you treat them, how you treat every person in your life. And what Solomon's going to say is you're going to be judged on everything you do, not so much the action, but the motivation. That's why you don't cheat your customers. That's why you don't lie on your taxes. Close to home on that - we just finished ours. That's why you live a life of honor, because you glorify God in that.
People see something different about the way you navigate at Fry's, the pharmacies, over in the corner. And you can see from there. I had to wait the other day, so I'm watching the checkout line. And the way people come through there, they're so mean. I mean, how can you be mean checking out of Fry's? They're so mean to the people. They're so grumpy.
Everything Matters to God
And it matters. You glorify God when you represent Him with joy. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. So the message is not nothing matters. The message is everything matters.
Pick up right there next week.
Father, thank You for that amazing truth. It's obviously contrary to our nature, so help us live not naturally, but supernaturally. God, we pray that You would use our life as salt and light, as a magnet to draw people to You. Father, we pray that in Jesus' name, amen.