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If America had only industrialists and financiers, athletes and academics, it wouldn't survive a year. It depends on the millions of men and women who earn their living week by week. They build our roads and homes. They operate our factories and produce the crops that feed us. They staff the offices and churn out the paperwork that keeps the wheels of business and government turning. They clean homes, keep yards and drive buses and taxis. They are laboring people. Balladeers sing about them, poets praise them and our nation rightly honors them on Labor Day.
God ordained that we earn our living in the sweat of our face (Gen. 3:18-19). Jesus grew up in the home of a working man and was trained in his carpenter shop.
God's law orders that a man "labor, working with his hands the thing that is good" (Eph. 4:28). When he chose the men who were to serve as his apostles, he chose workingmen. Idleness and sloth are roundly condemned by God (Prov. 18:9).
There always have been those who by birth, chance or marriage could live well without labor. We who must work must not envy them, nor should they despise those who earn their living. Thomas Carlyle said, "There is a perennial nobleness and even sacredness in work...There is always hope in a man who actually and earnestly works." Booker Washington observed, "No race can prosper til it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling the field as in writing a poem."
Wise men have long recognized the value of labor. "Labor is the great producer of wealth; it move all other causes" (Daniel Webster). The benefits of labor bless employer and employee. "Labor rids us of three great evils: irksomeness, vice and poverty" (Voltaire). "The fruit derived from labor is the sweetest of all pleasures" (Vauvenargues). "Love therefore labor...it is wholesome to the body and good for the mind; it prevents the fruit of idleness" (Wm. Penn).
God never intended that a healthy man live off the labors of another. He teaches us, "If any will not work, neither let him eat" (II Thess. 3:10). This Christian work ethic, which has benefitted Western civilization and our country for generations, is undermined by those who would reward the sluggard with free bread. May God's blessing rest upon the workers of our nation and may we appreciate the contribution they make to our common good.
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