Part 2: All the Effort, None of the Reward
In Part 1 we looked at how a deceitful heart lies to us before we ever sit down on the nest. In Part 2 we are going to look at something just as sobering. All the work the partridge puts in on those eggs adds up to nothing. She grinds for weeks and walks away with an empty nest.
Her effort was real, but it was fruitless.
The Hardest Working Fools
We picture the dishonest person as lazy. Someone looking for shortcuts or unwilling to do the real work. That picture rarely matches reality.
The partridge grinds. She sits on those eggs for weeks. She protects them from foxes and hawks. She goes without food when she needs to. She is fully invested in a nest that was never hers.
A man who gets rich in the wrong ways works the same way. He is up at 5am scheming the next deal. He is up at midnight covering the last one. He is grinding harder than most honest people you know. He is just grinding on the wrong nest.
Proverbs 21:6 “The getting of treasures by a lying tongue is a vanity tossed to and fro of them that seek death.”
Notice Solomon says they are seeking, moving, and chasing. They are working themselves to exhaustion for something that is going to slip through their fingers.
The tragedy of the dishonest man is that he tries harder than anyone else and ends up with less than everyone else.
Effort Without Direction Is Wasted Effort
Effort by itself is not the same as fruit. You can pour years of your life into something and end up with nothing to show for it if you were pouring it into the wrong nest. God rewards direction more than He rewards intensity. A farmer who plants wheat in salt water is going to work hard and eat nothing. It does not matter how many hours he put in. The ground was never going to give him a crop.
Ecclesiastes 5:16 “And this also is a sore evil, that in all points as he came, so shall he go: and what profit hath he that hath laboured for the wind?”
Solomon calls it labouring for the wind. That is a picture of a man who is not sitting still. He is exerting himself. But he is trying to catch something that cannot be held.
That is the dishonest man’s whole life. Massive effort and nothing to hold at the end.
We do not have to be embezzlers or con men to fall into this pattern. Christians do it in quieter ways.
The Christian who never asks what he is working for is a partridge in the making. The hours are pointing the wrong way.
Colossians 3:23-24 “And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men; Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance: for ye serve the Lord Christ.”
Paul tells us to work hard as unto the Lord.
What God Actually Rewards
God weighs faithfulness more than He weighs effort.
The parable of the talents in Matthew 25 makes this clear. The master commended the servants because they were faithful with what he gave them.
Matthew 25:21 “His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”
The word he used was faithful. The servant who buried his talent had energy too. He was afraid, and he wasted that energy on the wrong plan. He did something with his life, and it was the wrong thing, and the master called him wicked and slothful and cast him out.
The partridge is doing the same thing on a different scale. She is putting in the hours and doing the work. But she picked the wrong nest, and no amount of grinding is going to change what the eggs actually are.
The question is not “how hard am I working?” That is the wrong question. The partridge is working plenty hard.
The question is “what am I working on?”
Am I building a nest that God gave me or a nest I took by wrong means? Am I pouring my hours into something that will bear fruit or something that will fly away? Am I labouring for the wind or labouring for the Lord?
The Christian who never asks these questions is going to find out at the end of his days. And by then it is too late to redirect the effort. The years are gone, and eggs are gone. All that is left is the empty nest and the memory of how hard he sat on it.
Do Not Waste the Hours
You only get so many years and so much energy. You must choose wisely.
The partridge could have laid her own eggs. She could have built her own nest. She could have done the honest work and had honest fruit at the end. Instead she found somebody else’s eggs and sat on them until they were gone.
That is what a wasted life looks like. The effort was pointed the wrong way from the start.
Pick your nest carefully.
