Oxen, Mangers, Homes, and Churches (Proverbs 14:4)

Proverbs 14:4

Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean,
but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox.
.

While it may not be true of every person you know, many people have lives that treasure being orderly. Many people love for their houses to be clean, their schedules to be kept, and their lives to be just so. For such people, when things are thrown off track, the consequences are quite difficult to handle.

This fact can be mirrored in churches. Many churches and their members love to have things very tidy, very neat, very clean. We come to the pristine sanctuary in our Sunday best. We love bulletins without spelling errors and sermons without flawed grammar. We look for well-played music, organized orders of worship, and timely beginnings and endings to everything. We all are willing to confess ourselves as sinners saved by grace, but very few of us indeed would ever dare to upset the apple cart by actually talking to another person in the church about our own faults, sins, and struggles. We love seeing the people we know, the people who are safe; and we cringe just a little when someone walks in who is not quite up to our standards of being shipshape.

The problem is, as we keep ourselves orderly, clean, and without mess, we find that our community dwindles, becomes sick, or perhaps even falls apart. We might develop one of the best-looking church services you could find in our town, but nothing looks different. None of our own show their brokenness. None of our own confess their sin. None of our own show their weakness in humility. And we certainly do not look upon it favorably when someone who is an outsider comes to us and airs his or her own dirty laundry.

The Ox and the Manger

Send into the scenario Proverbs 14:4, “Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox.” This may be an obscure proverb to you, but it will make sense rather quickly. Imagine that you are a farmer who loves a clean barn. You like your barn to be in order, tidy, without mess. How can you keep a truly clean barn. The best way to keep your barn spic and span is to not let any animals into it. So you sell off your oxen. You certainly do not need some smelly animal coming into your barn, messing on the floor and slobbering in the watering trough.

What’s the problem with the clean barn picture? When it comes time to work the fields, the farmer has no animal to pull his plow. Though oxen are messy, oxen are also the creatures necessary for accomplishing the work of farming for the farmer of yesterday. With a working team of oxen, the farmer can accomplish leaps and bounds more than he ever could have accomplished without them.

So, the farmer has a dilemma. On the one hand, he loves a clean barn. On the other, he wants to have a productive harvest. He must count the cost. And, if he is going to be a farmer who is worth anything, he is going to have to conclude that having a successful farm requires that he let his barn get a little messy. He must have oxen, or the farming business is simply not for him.

Tools for God’s Glory or Museums for Our Glory

Now, return to our own lives. I’m not suggesting that we turn the church into a smelly barn. I’m not suggesting that our homes ought to be messy. But what I am suggesting is that the church building and our homes ought to be places that are more designed for the work of God to be accomplished than they ought to be museums of our own glory. Let’s think of how this might apply in each area.

Your Home

First, let’s think of your home. You live there. You want it to be nice and presentable. Indeed you should want these things. But if your desire to make your home beautiful keeps you from using your home as a tool for ministry or as a place for family joy, you are missing the point. Wouldn’t you rather have the harvest of well-developed relationships and friendships and a loving family than you would have a “Better Homes and Gardens” worthy picture. Sure, you can strive to have a nice home, an inviting home, but do not let that consume you.

On the other hand, if you want your home to be a place where people will come and be ministered to, you need to have a home that is clean and inviting enough that people will feel comfortable in it. If when someone comes to your door, you have to clean a path for them to reach the sofa, you need to change that practice. If you are regularly too embarrassed to allow anyone into your home, you ought to do the work to make your home a vehicle for potential ministry. Remember, everything we have is to be a tool that we use to bring honor and glory to God; so make your home such a tool.

The Church

The church building is another place where we must take stock. Just as I ended the discussion on the home I will continue with the church building. A messy, ugly, or unsafe church building will not be inviting to outsiders. Studies show that people are still drawn to clean and even beautiful church structures as places of worship. Therefore, it is foolish to have an unkempt building and grounds. How we care for the building and the grounds is an outward sign, at some level, of how much we believe that what we are doing is important, sacred, and worth our energy.

On the other hand, we must never make the cleanliness or perfection of the building be a concern that keeps us from ministry. A church building is a place of worship, but it is by no means the temple of the living God. The people are the church. The building is a facility in which the church often meets to take part in corporate worship. As such, the building is not the highest priority. Let us not protect the building so much that we refuse to use it for ministry. Like a good home, the building ought to have a clean, nice, and yet lived-in feel.

Finally, what about the church as a community. Just as we can become too protective of the building, not allowing potential dirtiness to enter it, so also can we become too closed as a community. As a church community, we must learn to be welcoming of the less fortunate, the down-trodden, the needy. We must not turn up our noses at sinners—for goodness’ sake, we are sinners—who express their need for help or grace; instead, let us become a place of healing. It has often been said that the church should be a hospital for wounded sinners and not a museum for perfect saints; such a statement is true, and we must learn to live it.