Your Labor Is Not in Vain

Four years. Four years of praying about it, which is not a figure of speech and is the actual length of it.

It started as a thing she noticed. Then it was a thing she could not stop noticing, and then it was a thing she prayed about, and then it was a folder, and then it was a folder with numbers in it that worked. She had a name for it. She had spoken to a woman at the bank who had been encouraging in the guarded way bank people are.

She had told four people. Three of them said do it. The fourth said do it twice.

She shelved it on a Tuesday afternoon in about ninety minutes.

There had been a conference on the Saturday and a man had said, in passing, in the middle of something else, that anybody putting their energy into building an enterprise right now had not understood what time it was. It was not the main point of his talk. She could not tell you what the main point was.

She sat with it Sunday and Monday and on Tuesday she took the folder out of the drawer, put it in the loft, and told nobody she had done it.

That was fourteen months ago. She has not opened the loft.

Sit down at the table. There is a verse at the end of the longest chapter in Scripture about the resurrection, and it is about work.

The conclusion of the resurrection chapter

Here it is, and the important thing is where it sits.

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.1 Corinthians 15:58

That is the last verse of the chapter. The whole chapter is about the resurrection. Fifty seven verses of the most sustained argument in the New Testament about the dead being raised and the body being changed and death being swallowed up.

And the conclusion Paul draws from all of it is: therefore work.

Not therefore withdraw. Not therefore stop building. Therefore be immovable and abound in work, and the reason given is that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

You are standing on the actual conclusion of that chapter rather than on a man's aside at a conference. 1 Corinthians 15:58 draws work directly out of the resurrection, and the Spirit inspired that as the therefore at the end of the argument.

The man at the conference reached the opposite conclusion from the same premise. One of those two readings is in the text.

And it is worth asking why the resurrection produces work rather than withdrawal, because the logic is not obvious until it is said. If everything ends in nothing, then effort is a way of passing the time and nothing built survives its builder. If the dead are raised, then the world has a future, and what is done in it is done into something that lasts rather than into something that dissolves. That is the argument, and it runs the opposite way to the intuition almost everybody has, and the Spirit inspired it in that order deliberately.

What ninety minutes did

Now the Tuesday, because ninety minutes against four years deserves examining rather than regretting.

An aside is powerful precisely because it is an aside. If he had preached against your folder for forty minutes you would have engaged with it, disagreed with parts, and weighed it. Instead it arrived sideways, in the middle of something else, as an assumption rather than as a claim, and assumptions do not get examined because they do not announce themselves.

That is how it got past four years of prayer in ninety minutes. Not because it was stronger. Because it did not have to fight.

You did not receive guidance that Saturday. Nothing written anywhere told anybody to stop building, and the Spirit does not undo four years of prayer with a remark somebody made on the way to a different point.

And notice what has happened since. Fourteen months, and you have not opened the loft, and you told nobody you shelved it. Things that were genuinely laid down in obedience do not usually need to be kept quiet.

Get the folder down

Here is the practical part and it is one action.

Get the folder down. Not to start anything on Thursday. To look at it.

Fourteen months is long enough that some of the numbers will need doing again and that is fine and it is not a reason not to look. What you are doing is not launching a business, it is reversing a decision that was never really made. Nothing written anywhere required you to keep it up there, and the Spirit is not the one who put it in the loft.

And tell one of the four. Probably the one who said do it twice. Say what you did on the Tuesday and why, out loud, to a person, because it has been a private thing for fourteen months and private things stay exactly the size you left them.

You are permitted to pick it back up. What is written puts labor in the Lord under a promise that it is not in vain, and the Spirit is the one who was in four years of praying about it and did not change His mind on a Saturday.

And if it turns out, after you look properly, that the thing genuinely does not work, that is a completely different outcome and it is an honest one. Numbers can be wrong. A market can move. What you cannot leave standing is a decision made by an aside, because a decision made that way is not really yours, and it will keep on operating in other places until it is named.