Have you ever run across the “professional-student,” a college student who is too indecisive to complete a degree and has been hanging around the campus taking classes for five, six, or even ten years? He is older than everyone else but because the money never runs out he can avoid committing to a course of study. As long as Mom keeps writing tuition checks, he will stay in school–where he will never have to grow up and take on responsibilities.
But when the money does finally run out, he will wake up hungry and will have to get a job.
Hunger gives clarity.
“He that laboreth, laboreth for himself, for his mouth craveth it of him” Proverbs 16:26.
Proverbs says the worker works for himself, because he is hungry. Is it selfish to work all day in the garden, the orchard, or the fishing hole because you are starving? Of course not. Consider a more modern translation:
“A worker’s appetite motivates him because his hunger urges him on” Proverbs 16:26.
Hunger is a compass. It is one of those things in life that can provide direction. Hungry people don’t sit around “gazing at their navels.” Hungry people do not have the luxury of asking existential questions about how to spend their time or what their dreams and goals ought to be. Hungry people know exactly what they need: they need food.
“All a man’s labor is for his mouth, yet his appetite is never satisfied” Ecclesiastes 6:7.
Solomon says we spend our whole lives acquiring food that we stuff into our pie holes. And we are never full, or at least not for long! But that is a good thing. Hunger gives us direction. How do you find your life’s work? Find something people will pay you to do. If you have choices, be thankful and keep working while you seek additional wisdom and direction. But if you have an interest that society will not pay for, perhaps that interest is only a hobby.
God uses our hunger to guide us to meaningful work.
If you love singing but have a terrible voice, have fun singing and consider it a hobby. Find another way to make a living. If you love woodworking, but you keep getting fired from construction jobs, take that as a sign. Go find a job you can do successfully. God put you here to make a contribution—and if you are making a valuable contribution, someone will pay you for your work. And that’s how you know you are doing something of value to the world—the world pays you to do it. In other words, when you find the work that is right for you, that work will put food on your table.
Karl Marx says that capitalism is selfish, because employers “exploit” employees to make more money. But this is a mischaracterization: both parties are in this thing to make money. We do not act selfishly, but out of “enlightened self-interest.”*
Marx, the founder of Communism, famously lived over thirty years on the handouts of his friend Friedrich Engels.** Because Marx was not forced by hunger to secure a paying job, he was free to spend his time writing about economics–a pursuit that would not have put food on his table.
We call the world’s default economic system the free-market system. This familiar system allows people to negotiate the purchase and sale of goods and labor at whatever prices the market will bear. It’s what you and I participate in every day. People around the world have done business this way for thousands of years. It is the economic system in the Bible.
But Marx condemned this time-tested system as “capital-ism,” a word he invented that seems to imply we worship money (capital). Marx—again, a man who never knew hunger—wrote that the workers of the world should unite around a market controlled by the state, which he called “commune-ism” (sounds a bit like worship of the state?). Communism was a terrible idea, mankind’s greatest failure of the 20th century, as I have discussed elsewhere.***
The BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM estimates that over 94 million people have been killed by Communist governments, including 65M in China and 20M in the USSR. For every life taken by Nazis, Communists have taken at least five. (Yet Marx calls our system as selfish.)
Once Engels began supporting Marx and the writer no longer had to earn money from his work each day, Marx spent all his time writing about economics. What was the result of his work? Nearly 100 million deaths at the hands of Communist governments. Marx would have made a greater contribution to society if he had remained a journalist writing about lost dogs and housefires for German newspapers, and satisfying his hunger with his own labor.
“A worker’s appetite motivates him because his hunger urges him on” Proverbs 16:26.
Welcome the opportunity to rely on your own two hands. To pay your own way and be self-reliant. God uses hunger to guide people to work that is of value to society. If society is paying for your work, then you are making a valuable contribution.
AΩ
* “Enlightend Self-Interest” is a term coined by Edmund Burke, based on a concept observed in de Tocqueville’s DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA. De Tocqueville saw the way American villagers worked together to achieve common goals, and this notion of work that benefits both the community and the individual became known as “enlightened self-interest.”
** It is often said that Marx never held a job. But he had worked as a journalist in Germany, making money from his newspaper stories. Then in 1849, he moved to London where he held no jobs between 1849 and his death in 1883.
*** For more on Communism, consider: https://dadsdailydevotionals.com/2024/07/02/incentive-1-corinthians-97-10/ and https://dadsdailydevotionals.com/2024/07/11/whats-wrong-with-communism-1-corinthians-910/
Household Words: 