In the summer of 1995 I interned at West Hill Baptist Church in Wooster, OH. My family attended West Hill since I was five or six years old. I grew up there, played tag in the parking lot there, went to youth group there, and performed in drama events there. My youth pastor was one of two spiritual fathers who encouraged my pursuit of being a pastor and, even though he had moved on to another church by the summer of 1995, I came home from Liberty University to serve at my home church.

They gave me a variety of assignments. I taught the college age group on Sunday mornings, but that was only a small part of my responsibilities. I helped plan vacation Bible school. I went on hospital visits. I watched and wrote notes for “The Seven Laws of a Teacher” by Howard Hendricks (so the the Christian Education Director didn’t have to). I led congregational singing when the worship pastor was gone. I changed one of the lightbulbs in the sanctuary. And I had to wash the church van a couple times a month.

It was an amazing job, my first time every being paid—however much it was—to do “church” work. I didn’t mind most of the menial tasks because I believed that it all went with the “ministry.” I finished that summer more certain that I was pursuing the right thing.

One other privilege I had was to lead a short term missions trip to New York City. The youth pastor at the time had a friend who was planting a church and we arranged to go and help. I wish I could remember more of the details of that trip. I’ve had few other long weekends as miserable, difficult, taxing, fun, and memorable as that one.

I was 21 at the time and the oldest member of our six person team. The other five were all college age but a year or two younger. We had energy and naïveté on our side. What could go wrong?

Like I said, I wish I could remember more specifics. What I do remember is that we drove through the night and arrived in the Big Apple the next morning. We met up with our contact who immediately took us to a Kinko’s to make copies of flyers he wanted us to pass out. We must have been in Kinko’s for a couple hours and there was minimal communication about what was happening. We left, it was time for lunch, and we drove an hour or so to someone’s house to eat sandwiches.

Hardly anything was planned for us before we arrived. We did lots of sitting around and also lots of knocking door to door, passing out flyers for the church by asking residents if they would be willing to take a brief religious survey. We spent the better part of two days going from apartment building to building trying to get a foot in the door with these questions. We sang a song for the church service on Sunday morning, hung around with more odd characters that afternoon, and then finally headed back to Wooster.

We weren’t more than an hour outside the city on Sunday evening when the church van broke down. None of us had a cell phone; it was 1995. We called collect from a gas station pay phone and got permission to use the church credit card to spend the night in a hotel until the van could be fixed when the garage opened Monday morning. All six of us rode in the cab of the tow-truck. At the third motel we tried, they finally agreed to give us two rooms even though officially each room needed a 21 year-old representative.

During our time waiting by the side of the road we started a Top Ten list of our NYC experience. One of them was about how “Only Sean drives in NYC,” a special designation I earned by well-timed horn honks and skillful parallel parking in the van with 1/2 turn play in the steering wheel.

One of the Top Ten rules was a verse from Proverbs. I shared this proverb with the team so many times on the trip that it became our motto and donned our t-shirts when we returned. The piece of wisdom that summed up much of our trip is still one of my favorite passages in the Bible. It is a passage I understand much better twenty years later.

Where no oxen are, the crib is clean:
but much increase is by the strength of the ox.
(Proverbs 14:4, KJV)

Even the customarily fanciful Message can’t paraphrase too much confusion into the proverb.

No cattle, no crops;
a good harvest requires a strong ox for the plow.
(The Message)

As with many proverbs, the context doesn’t provide much help or even color. The verses before and after cannot be connected in any meaningful way. By itself the proverb is agricultural. If you wanted to draw the bubble-cloud “Meanwhile, back at the ranch…” in your Bible, here’s your shot. But the implications of this wisdom two-liner are almost limitless.

There are numerous proverbs about animals, some related to a farm setting, and many about the topic of work which Proverbs 14:4 appears to be about. But none of those are in the periphery. There are no cross-references to mess us up. I looked in a couple KJV copies, a NKJV, a NASB, and an ESV and they don’t have any cross-references for verse 4, and good for them. The most helpful observation we can make in terms of context is that it was written by Solomon not merely collected by him since Proverbs 10:1 begins a long section attributed to his pen.

The two halves of the verse hinge on the adversative conjunction, “but.” It’s a contrast. The contrast, though, is between two different kinds of good. It isn’t good and bad. This proverb makes a man wise in distinguishing two types of advantages, one minor and one major.

The proverb begins with a deceptively simple observation and presents the first advantage: no mess. “Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean.” A manger, or “crib” (KJV) is a feed box, a trough. Of course a junior high student in logic class might want to point out that the manger could be made messy by something other than an ox. A tornado could sweep mud into it. Or that same student might point out that a foolish farmer could keep putting food into the manger but, if he had no oxen, it would not be clean. In other words, oxen clean out the manger by eating from it.

The point of the line is not about the dirt-free surface area of the sides, it’s about the work required to feed oxen. A bachelor living by himself understands this principle. If Slick doesn’t eat, Slick doesn’t have dishes to do. It must be the wintertime or the farm is in a place where oxen didn’t have access to a field for grazing. For whatever reason, food must be provided for them. One ox might eat 20-30 pounds of hay a day, multiply those pounds by number of oxen. In order to maximize daylight for plowing, the farmer would either need to rise early to feed the oxen or feed them after a long day of work, or both. He was going to be tired.

He was also going to need to plan and plant and harvest and store corn or grain or hay for the oxen to eat so that they oxen could help till and plant and harvest other crops on the farm. The pressure of bad weather and the weight of transporting and storing and securing the food adds a lot to the feeding task. A clean manger is starting to sound good. This doesn’t take into account fencing for a pen or perhaps maintaining a barn for the hay or for the oxen, which would also need cleaning. What goes in will come out, typically in a much less pleasant form.

If you don’t oxen, then you don’t have all this hassle. You also don’t have much harvest.

The second line offers another good: “but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox.” It is the second advantage. This comment can be multiplied by a team of oxen as the first half implies.

An ox can do things that a farmer can’t, or can’t as easily. A farmer could use a hoe but he can’t pull a plow. It was work for a farmer just to guide the plow behind an ox doing all the pulling. The hard ground, the cold ground, the rocky ground, or the muddy ground would be jarring or slipping and challenging just to hang on.

But to harness the strength of the ox brings “abundant” or a “wealth” of crops leading to “much revenue” (NAS). Without the animal the harvest won’t be as abundant. There’s much less clean up and also no crop to enjoy or share or sell.

A few things about the wisdom in Proverbs 14:4:

First, messy but plenty is preferable to shiny but empty. A wise man seeks profit and he calculates that more crops, more product, is better profit than less crap, less labor. Less is not always more. There is a certain kind of person who prefers minimalism, and others may come to a situation where they want to scrap it all, get rid of everything because of the mess and the overwhelming tasks. Solomon says a mess with profit is better than the profit of no mess.

Second, the wisdom of this verse is not about how more work leads to more profit. The simpleminded man understands that. The wisdom of this verse is about how unsung investment brings more return. Neighbors don’t see the early morning and after-field work feeding. The feeding represents all the work unnoticed at the marketplace or the county fair. The inconvenient, unpleasant parts of the job, the parts poets don’t sing about, are the vital parts that lead to increase. They are minor annoyances that add up to major advantage.

Third, the wisdom of this verse is about much more than oxen. Who wrote this verse? Solomon? What was Solomon’s occupation? He was king. Where did he grow up? In the king’s palace with his dad, King David. Solomon had great understanding about a lot of things (1 Kings 4:29-33). He tried a lot of things in his search for meaning under the sun (Ecclesiastes). But I would be surprised if he ever held the handles of a plow behind an ox, or ever helped bring in the harvest from the field, or ever laid out hay in a manger, or ever mucked the stalls in a barn. He had servants to tell servants to do that kind of work.

His wisdom works on the farm because it works in the world. In fact, do you really think that it was the farmers who needed this wisdom? Were the Future Farmers of Israel debating if an ox or two might help them?

The people who need this wisdom need to learn it from those who know. The oxenagen of this illustration breathes fresh air for us city slicers who don’t want to get our hands dirty.

Conclusion

Everyone wants something. If you’re wise, you wan’t a harvest of more than not needing to do anything with a harvest. So what harvest do you want? What profit are you pursuing? It isn’t whether or not you want something, but which something do you want? Do you want the pain of discipline or the pain of regret? Do you want the ease of body with no work to do or do you want the ease of mind with a finished harvest and money in the bank? Is doing nothing the goal? Then you will have nothing. Is having something the goal? Then you can’t do nothing.

It might be a new business where you enjoy the work and serve others. It might be a new school or event that tries to expand worldview. It might be a joyous thanksgiving or holiday meal, some other happy celebration or party or gift. It might be an affection moving, mind-renewing, truth-driven worship service. It might be raising sharp arrows of children who will strike the target. It might be a short term mission trip, or wisdom itself.

If you want any of these crops to be abundant, and you should, then embrace the tiredness, the stink, the sweat, the planning, and the effort that go along with oxen. Own the ox, whatever the ox might represent. Be wise and realize that you must do much unsung work in order to reap a crop worth selling or singing about.

• Success (abundant crops) is rarely a surprise; it usually comes from sacrifice, commitment, and hard work.
• Profit routinely results more from patience, perseverance, and perspiration than position or power.

On the other hand:

• We are often short-sighted, applying effort only when the results are immediate rather than sacrificing with the long-view in mind. We desire instant gratification.
• We are also prema donnas, temperamental and demanding snappy appreciation for whatever we’ve done. We desire instant glorification.

Abundant crops grow in the fields of wise farmers. They are wise, not because they learned a trick, but because they spent time preparing and planning to keep the ox’s trough full. They are wise, not because they figured out how to avoid the messy work, but because they understand that the feeding and cleaning is part of the process that leads to plowing, and more plowing is what enables the more selling. None of it is a waste of time. They are wise because they do the things no one else wants to do in order to gain the results everyone else wants to gain.

It is a gift of God to be able to enjoy the process, to see God’s goodness even in the ox snot and know that it is good. It is especially a grace to be thankful for it rather than to complain about it to a friend or on Facebook or even mutter in the quiet of your own pity party. A great harvest requires hard and unheralded work. Don’t give up on the harvest. Give up the fantasy of thinking harvests come some other way.

Little did I know in 1995. More do I know now. I desire more of God’s wisdom and greater willingness to step through ox patties for the sake of joy piles in the future. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might. Own the ox.