Sun 9:30a Class; 10:30a Worship; 11:35a Communion
Bible Bites
Enjoying What We Ought to Do
We've all heard the comment. A celebrity who has made a great deal of money doing his thing, and now old enough that interviewers are beginning to ask whether he's going to retire, will say something like this: "Well, I plan to keep working as long as I enjoy it. The day I no longer enjoy what I do is the day I'll quit."
Certainly, there is much to be said for enjoying our work. We do a better job when we're doing things we like to do. In some fields of endeavor — athletics and entertainment, for example — enjoyment so greatly affects the quality of one's work that quitting may be a practical necessity when one's "heart" has gone out of what he does. But in the more commonplace realms of human effort, our work can rarely be laid aside simply because we don't enjoy doing it anymore. For one thing, very few of us have the financial independence to take such a take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward our life's work. But more to the point, who is to say that we do what we do for no higher reason than that we enjoy doing it?
The fact is, most of the worthwhile things that need to be done in life need to be done whether we enjoy them at the time or not. To say that we won't do them at all if we can't enjoy doing them is to say that we have no higher priority in our work than to receive pleasure from it — and that is plainly not the case. There may be some peripheral activities in life for which enjoyment is the primary requirement, but the truly significant things that call for our attention deserve that we attend to them whether we feel like it or not.
Let us be reminded that there is such a thing as duty, and that duty is not always a bad idea. What we ought to do ranks much higher than what we receive pleasure from doing. Unpleasantness is not an unqualified evil, anymore than pleasantness is an unqualified good. Where would we be if Jesus had said, "Well, if I can't enjoy dying for the sins of the world, then I just won't do it at all"? It was not for any joy in death itself, but for the joy set before Him that He endured the cross, despising the shame (Hebrews 12:2). He surrendered His life because it was right to do so, and because He had no higher priority than to please the Father (John 4:34; 6:38).
Much of the time, however, there is no reason why we can't fulfill both priorities: we can enjoy doing what we ought to do! In fact, learning how to love what we have to do is one major part of becoming a mature human being. When we reach the point where our hearts and our feelings have become so attuned to what is right that they coincide with the obligations of our will, then we will have grown in wisdom concerning the genuinely good things in the world. Feelings come and feelings go, as all of us learned early on. But the true men and women are those who are able to put aside temporarily unpleasant feelings in order to do what is permanently good. Our impulses must be subordinated to our principles, and it should not make us unhappy to do so.
Our highest motivation ought to be to please God. Paul said, “Therefore we make it our aim, whether present or absent, to be well pleasing to Him" (2 Corinthians 5:9). If our character is what it ought to be, whatever pleases God will bring joy to our hearts, even if the act involves some unpleasantness on the surface. We'll be able to say, "I delight to do Your will, O my God, and Your law is within my heart" (Psalm 40:8).
— In Focus Magazine, April 2000
