Dear Friends,
There is nothing sadder than being blessed and failing to recognize it! I have been working through Genesis and yesterday suddenly realized how much I was enjoying it! It’s is work. I do get tired. But what a blessing. Even in the Garden of Eden God blessed man with a task. Today’s devotional will explain how that is a blessing and I hope bring you joy. Have a wonderful day!

Because of Calvary,
John Janney

• Genesis 2:15 (ESV)

  15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

“It’s hard to see how the pair were supposed to ‘keep’ the garden, or how Eve was to ‘help’ Adam if there was not work to do… Toil, not work, is the punishment of our first parents…. Work is nothing less than how we make love to the world.” [Garret Keizer, The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a Sometimes Deadly Sin, (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2002), p. 285]

“…A surprisingly large number of retirees succumb to illness only a year or so after they retire.  ‘The death certificate I signed says he died from a stroke, which was medically correct,’ a doctor told me about one of his recently retired patients. ‘But I believe he really died of a broken heart. He just felt useless and didn’t want to live any longer.’” [Billy Graham, Nearing Home: Life, Faith, and Finishing Well, (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 30]