Eden

It’s audio devo day!

Did you know that God never intended your work to be stressful for you? Instead, He has in mind for your daily responsibilities to be a joyful and richly satisfying experience. Jesus paid the full price to set us free from the curse of frustrating, oppressive toil! Be richly blessed as you listen here:

(Know someone else that needs to hear this today? You can either share today’s blog link with them, or look up my Feeding on Jesus podcast for sharing and subscribing. You’ll find it at these links on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and most other podcast platforms, with episodes identical to these audio devos!)

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Did you know that God never intended our work to be stressful for us? Did you know that whenever we experience our daily labors as intensely burdensome, we are living under Adam’s curse? It’s true! Let’s revisit for a moment what God said to Adam immediately following humankind’s first sin:

“But to Adam he said, ‘Because you obeyed your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, “You must not eat from it,” the ground is cursed because of you; in painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you…” (Gen. 3:17-18, NET).

We may think to ourselves, Well, guess that’s life on Planet Earth. Guess we’re destined to it being this way, since Adam and Eve doomed us all to this drudgery. They messed it all up for us permanently. Work will always be stressful.

Not true! For several thousand years, humanity did live under the curses that resulted from their disobedience. But Jesus came to fully pay the price for their sin and ours, and to redeem us from the resulting curse. Here is what Galatians teaches us about that:

“Christ took away the curse… put on us. He changed places with us and put himself under that curse. It is written in the Scriptures, ‘Anyone whose body is displayed on a tree is cursed’” (Gal. 3:13, NCV).

When Jesus hung on that tree at Calvary, He became a curse for us. In doing so, He made provision for us to live fully free of it!

So we don’t have to experience work as stressful, painful toil. We can access the provision Jesus purchased with His blood. As we talked about on the episode, “Deeply Restful Hard Work,” we can learn to operate from a place of inner rest. Instead of living with frustration, thorns, and thistles, we can carry out our daily responsibilities yoked to Jesus and finding rest for our souls. Operating this way, we will discover that Continue reading Breaking the Toil Curse