Bill Johnson - More Than a Job, How God Sees Your Work (08/19/2025)
When you work and your labor improves your city, you’re providing a service, you’re providing goods, you’re growing wheat. In this example, you are pumping gas, whatever it might be. You’re providing a service for your city. God considers that to be generosity. This doesn’t say, «Blessed will be on the head of the guy who grows wheat and gives it away.» That’s fine, but that’s not the lesson. Hello there, welcome back! Glad that you could join us. We’re going to look today at chapter 11, and there’s a portion at the end of chapter 11 that excites me, and I’ll explain it to you when we get there. But this is a chapter where we get to look once again at the role of wisdom in city life. Where I want to start is verse two. It says, «When pride comes, then comes shame,» but here’s the phrase, «with the humble is wisdom.»
It’s important that in our thinking we consider that humility and wisdom are connected because if we learn what is connected in the Kingdom, we’ll learn to value the right things. It’s not just wisdom; it’s that I value humility. It’s not just wisdom; I value understanding, I value insight, I value favor—all these other things. So, «with the humble is wisdom.» Now, let’s jump down to verse 10. It says, «When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices.» Now, think with me for a minute. All of us live in cities, and when it goes well, it’s the reason you should pray for your friends—the righteous friends you have that own a business or perhaps a medical practice, or they’re an accountant in a firm, or it doesn’t matter where their place in life is—a school teacher. We pray for them to be visibly blessed of the Lord in that place. Why? Because it says «when it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices.»
I don’t know how this works, but somehow, it’s easier to celebrate somebody else’s victory when we know that they live a righteous lifestyle. It’s harder to celebrate someone’s victory when we know they’re devious and deceptive, and they steal, and they are dishonest. It’s hard to rejoice for those people. But when we see, «Oh, that person has been so faithful for so long,» look at what has happened to their life. This says joy is brought to a whole city—when the righteous are doing well. So, it’s a really good reason to pray for the righteous to be honored, blessed, and increased.
It goes on, it says, verse 11, «By the blessing of the upright, the city is exalted.» So, not only does it have access to Kingdom joy, it is actually promoted. Think about that: when the righteous are blessed of the Lord in a community, the entire community comes into a promotion. Man, that’s amazing to me because I love to think in terms of city transformation. So how does it happen? Well, there are a lot of great things we could do—we serve, we love, we care, we feed the poor, we do all these things. Those are important. But here’s another one: You drive by a gas station owned by a brother or sister in the Lord, and you pray for them to prosper. Why? It’s the way God wants to promote your city. It’s the way He wants to release another level of joy to your entire city because the righteous are doing well. The righteous will use the favor for good purpose.
Alright, so it says, «By the blessing of the upright, a city is exalted, but it is overthrown by the mouth of the wicked.» That’s just scary to me because there are so many destructive things said by the wicked in all of our cities, day after day after day. So we’ve got to counter that with the favor and blessing of the Lord on the upright. Alright, go with me, if you will, now to the end of the chapter. This is just a personal favorite place I love to talk to our students about. It’s this set of three verses here. Go to verse 24, excuse me, it says, «There is one who scatters yet increases all the more.»
Now first of all, understand this—you’ll see it’ll become clear in a moment. This is talking about generosity, it’s talking about having a generous heart that we scatter and yet we increase. Alright, so here it is: There is one who scatters yet increases all the more, there is one who withholds more than what is right. So you can see withholding is contrasted with scattering, so the concept is generosity. There is one who withholds more than what is right, but it leads to poverty. Next verse, verse 25: «The generous soul will be made rich.» Now again, it’s the soul; it’s not talking about money. The internal world gets healthy; that’s what brings the external blessing. So the generous soul will be made rich; he who waters will himself be watered.
So what is the theme here? The theme is generosity; it’s a heart posture of generosity. Here’s what’s fascinating to me: verse 26, «The people will curse him who withholds grain, but blessing will be on the head of him who sells it.» I love this verse: «Cursed will be the one who withholds grain.» In other words, let’s say we’re in a farming community, and I raise wheat, and I harvest my wheat, but I don’t want to sell it to you. The Bible says I’m cursed for that. But then it says I’m blessed if I sell it. Now what’s the context here? The context is generosity.
Here’s what I want you to see: when you work and your labor improves your city, you’re providing a service, you’re providing goods, you’re growing wheat—in this example, you are pumping gas, whatever it might be. You’re providing a service for your city. God considers that to be generosity. This doesn’t say, «Blessed will be on the head of the guy who grows wheat and gives it away.» That’s fine, but that’s not the lesson. God is actually interested in a person producing—in this case, a crop—producing a crop and being appropriately rewarded for their labor. That is God’s design. This whole nonsense of everything coming to us from the government is actually from the pit of Hell. I’m telling you, it weakens the identity, it weakens the assignment that God’s given to us to work and to be rewarded from our labor. That’s the design of the Lord, and God actually considers the person who gives themselves to grow a crop and then sell it at a fair price. God counts that as generosity, and He says they’re going to be rewarded for it.
That’s amazing to me that God thinks of being productive in that way, in the same light as generosity. It doesn’t mean I grow a crop, I make an income, and now I don’t have to give because I’ve provided a service for the community. It’s just all a part of this nature of a generous lifestyle—that I want to do something with my life that makes my city better. So I pray that for you. I pray that this would just stand out—that each of us could delight in the beauty of earning an honest income, having it be the reward of the Lord, no shame involved in it. Delight in it because God has honored you.
Generosity chapter 12 is fascinating because it talks once again a lot about our speech. So join us for that.