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Laziness Is Stealing Your Purpose | Fierce Pathways
You weren’t created to just exist—you were made to create, move, serve, and build something meaningful. But laziness can creep in as procrastination, fear, or just not knowing where to start. This message is about pushing past the waiting and walking boldly into the work God has given you to do. Work isn’t a curse—it’s a gift from God that existed before sin did. So what are you waiting for?
My name is Andy Schmeck, I am one of the pastors here and I'm excited to be with you this morning. We are talking about the sluggard in work. If you're not familiar with the sluggard, it's a biblical term for like a lazy person and in true pastoral fashion. I'll start with myself. Here's a few, a vignette, if you will. A few stories. Okay, when I was just before freshman year, summer before freshman year, I grew up in Central Illinois, so the crops weren't ready to be worked yet. I didn't have football camp and so I could sleep in and my mom and dad gave me one chore to do that day, and so they went to work and I woke up at one or whatever and proceeded to play NCAA football 99 until I heard that garage door open and then I rushed to the dishwasher my one task and tried to get it done before my mom came upstairs and was consequently disappointed in me. It was the last one task day of that summer Classic laziness, not caring enough, not even remembering the one thing that I was supposed to do. Fast forward a few years to seminary, and I was super anxious because I was struggling grade-wise, especially in comparison to how I did in school previously, and I was wrestling with this, like, okay, if I'm not good at this, then what does that mean for my ministry in the future? And then it just felt like I was wrestling with this, like, okay, if I'm not good at this, then what does that mean for my ministry in the future? And then it just felt like I was a big disappointment to my folks and to my spouse, and that weight was really weighing on me. It was paralyzing me and so I went on medication and once it cut you know, some of that medication just cuts the top off and I wasn't anxious anymore and consequently I had no motivation to do seminary work. I found out that it was only the fear of letting my folks down that was driving me to write that personal paper. It wasn't love of God or love of other people. I did not care about the personal assessment in my ministry future.
Speaker 1:A different kind of laziness. A different kind of laziness. A different kind of laziness. If you've met my four children, they can get into some trouble, and one of them, I don't know which, used to unscrew all the door stoppers in our house out of the baseboards and so, consequently, one day we came back and the internal garage door flung and put a hole right into the wall. And that hole stayed there until my dad dragged me to the hardware store and we got one of those backstop things and puttied it over but I don't know if it was me or the kids. Someone had stepped on the doorstop and so then the door just went right over the doorstop and put a hole right into what I had just done, and so it was about two years before that hole got patched. It is still not painted. And now on the other side of the house there's another hole from my kids running into the chair with a little car.
Speaker 1:Okay, not finishing the task is a type of laziness. Okay, not finishing the task is a type of laziness. And when I was in tech boot camp there was this programmer's motto, if you will. It is as follows quote we do things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy. Over the course of two weeks I tried to automate a file that takes 20 minutes to make once a month and, if you can do math, that net balance is out after 28 years. The idea was right, right, but it was misplaced energy. It wasn't very efficient. It was kind of a waste of time, all right.
Speaker 1:So if you're following, you might get this sense that like, oh, maybe I'm a little bit lazy or I struggle with laziness and in our like performance culture, work hard, play hard or Chicagoland, that is like embarrassing. It's embarrassing. But it's not just embarrassing. You already know that laziness has effects on our lives and in our communities that are harmful. Right, first and foremost, it just costs you more money. Right, if you don't brush your teeth, cavities and root canals are significantly more expensive than toothpaste. Right, if you don't change your oil, an engine or a new car, thousands and thousands of dollars. Right, as you get older, if you don't change your oil, an engine or a new car, thousands and thousands of dollars right, as you get older, if you don't keep your core strength and balance, falls can lead to medical bills upon medical bills or worse.
Speaker 1:It's not just the expense, though. It's also our time. Often we think back on like man. I watched four and a half hours of Netflix in a row. That probably wasn't the greatest use of my time. But just go the one extra step and think what could I have done with my time? It's the concept of opportunity cost, and I'll just make it clear here Okay, so if you're 20-something and you're like I'm going to spend my 20s doing what I want to do and then when I'm 30, I'll settle down, I'll look for a spouse or I'll start a career. But those 10 years go by and you're no longer competing against the 30-year-olds have developed themselves and you're competing against 20-year-olds who have 10 years on you 10 years of growth. And the pool of careers that are available to you or the pool of future spouses is different. When you wait let alone if you wait to 50, to try to start a career or just try to start looking for a spouse, right, opportunity costs.
Speaker 1:We all have been in group projects where you look at that kid across the way and you can tell he is not going to pull his weight. But in the group projects of life, laziness is an incredible burden, right? If you don't believe me, talk to parents of adult children who failed to launch. I'm not picking on you, young adults, if you're still at home trying to pay off bills or if you're working or something like that, but we all know the type where they spend their day shopping, or they spend their day playing video games in the basement right. Talk to those folks, talk to the spouses who are carrying the weight of their families Again, not talking about trying to figure out what equality looks like in your marriage.
Speaker 1:Rather those who say, quote I feel like I'm solo parenting in a two-parent household and it's worse than that, because laziness is a vice. It gets worse as you practice it right, it progresses, and so you will find yourself, if you continue to be lazy, unable to work hard, you won't be able to do the mental exertion like to endure the mental exertion it takes to solve the problem. You won't be able to work eight hours in a day. You got to take all those 30-minute smoke breaks or, oh my gosh, I'm so stressed let's see what's on TikTok and then, four hours later, go back to your work. You know like laziness is harmful. It's harmful All right.
Speaker 1:Even if we wanted to, though, even if we wanted to overcome laziness, it just creeps into our lives. Part of it is like just structural, like societally, we don't really give purpose to work anymore, or we do in one specific way, and we'll get to in a second. So think about if you ask kids what do you want to be when they grow up? What do they say Social media influencer, professional video game player, youtuber, you know, as Palmer Luckey said, he's the CEO of a defense company. He said you can't tell your kids to follow their dreams when their dreams suck. Now I don't mean to come down that hard on social media influences or whatnot. Right, like when I was younger you would see like, oh, I want to be an NBA player or an NFL player or my favorite, I want to be famous, I want to be famous.
Speaker 1:But we see what happens culturally when everybody grows up thinking me first, entertainment, culture first. You know, if the kids also not to blame the kids, that's on us as adults, right, like, absolutely, that's not the kid's fault that they don't know a purpose for their lives, that's us, on parents, okay. So if the kids wise enough, despite our bad parenting, and they're like you know, actually, if I wanna get paid, I got to do something that someone's willing to pay me to do they then get into a rat race, a competition that they don't really care about, and they strive, and they strive and they work, and they work to try to prove that they're enough, right, this is the one thing that our culture does say you should improve yourself and you should enjoy your life. Good luck, right. But if you think like, one of my favorite examples of this is Tom Brady.
Speaker 1:He's 28. He's already won three Super Bowls in 2005. And he's asked on 60 Minutes like hey, like, what do you think about your success? And he says like folks to paraphrase folks look into my life and think, oh, he must be satisfied. But he thinks is this all there is? There has to be something more. And the interviewer says well, what's the solution? I wish I knew. I wish I knew. He said Right, if you ask a doctor why they become doctors, the first answer almost always is like it provides financial stability, it's a really great career.
Speaker 1:Right, which, like, historically speaking, is crazy because they could say I save people's lives. And it's not bad. Right Again, it's not bad to want to provide for your family or whatnot. And it's not bad, again, it's not bad to want to provide for your family or whatnot. It's just that, if that's the only motivator, we're just feeding selfishness. We're just feeding selfishness, all right. So then, what our culture offers is two giant circles. One is that you should improve yourself, work hard. The other is that you should enjoy your life, play hard, work hard, play hard and you find the intersection of those two things and you're golden right.
Speaker 1:But we've all had experiences where we look back on enjoyed days or enjoyed weeks and we're like man I really actually hurt my future self here. Or we look back on our work careers. We look back on work days or work weeks and we're like man, I didn't enjoy any of that. And then those weeks start stacking up and the grind of the nine to five starts wearing on you and you're like man is this normal? Is this what everybody does? Or worse, we look back on weeks where we neither enjoyed nor did we do anything important. Enjoyed, nor did we do anything important. Even if you make it through your career with some substantial wealth and you're able to scrap some things together, then you look at the next generation to pass that wealth on to. You're like I'm not excited about these entitled folks. They don't work as hard as I do and they certainly don't enjoy the same things that I enjoy. So what?
Speaker 1:This morning we're going to talk about what the Bible says about laziness, about the sluggard and about work. I'm hopefully going to inspire you to do your work, to love your work and see how God redeems our work. We'll start in the beginning. Proverbs 10.4 reads lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth. Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth.
Speaker 1:Here's the dichotomy. Lazy hands are like the negative side of work and diligent hands are like the positive side of work. Lazy is literally like the term for slack. We still kind of use it that way, like oh, that kid in my group project, I'm going to have to pick up his slack, right. So the analogy is literally like a bow and arrow, where if you're stringing a bow and you pull back the arrow, if there's slack in the bow, there's not a lot of oomph to the arrow and it's not very accurate. And so diligence doesn't here just mean hard work. It also means accurate work, right, that you apply the punch to where it's supposed to go.
Speaker 1:Laziness, then, is like not just, oh, I don't care about anything. It's also like your inability to finish work. You don't square up to the problems and you make excuses for why you don't right. You don't notice obvious opportunities right, and it gets worse until you destroy yourselves and really destroy value. The worst part of it is that it's a false God. Laziness offers you oh, I just need some rest, I just need a little bit of comfort, and it provides none right. Anytime we pursue laziness, it actually leaves us with regret. Okay, so then we have a question why does the Bible even talk about diligence If work is so hard and menial tasks are so annoying, why would we talk about the goodness of work? And this goes all the way back to the beginning, where the Bible actually very different than other ancient texts about work. I'll just talk about one.
Speaker 1:In Greek mythology you have Pandora's box. If you're not familiar, zeus gives this gal named Pandora a box and in it holds all the calamities of humanity, and she you know curiosity gets the best of her. She opens it and literally all hell breaks loose in the box, not just sickness, not just pain, not just not just, you know, famine, but also work, menial tasks, because to the Greek mind, the philosopher is king and the slave is the class that does all of the menial labor. Gods would never demean themselves of doing that and that's why they tricked humanity into doing it themselves. The Bible is very different.
Speaker 1:In the beginning, god created the earth and when he formed Adam, he formed Adam out of the dust. He got his hands dirty. Right, the idea that God would make a paradise for humanity. Right. He makes a beautiful garden of Eden and in that garden he puts Adam and Eve and gives them a task, name all the animals and take care of the garden. He put work in the human flourishing. Before sin entered the world, before the destruction and corruption of all good things, there was work and it was good. It doesn't just stop there. The Spirit of God hovered over the waters in the beginning, right. God is intimately connected to watching creation flourish. In Psalm 65, god is likened to a farmer, that he digs trenches and fills the trench with water. And this means that before Karl Marx, by a few thousand years, by many, many years, god was representing the proletariat, if you will. God was doing the menial tasks. God was the one who was representing blue-coll collar work.
Speaker 1:Right that there is dignity in working with your hands, regardless of the task. That's why, martin Luther, the Protestant work ethic Reformation stuff they say you can milk cows to the glory of God. That we believe that gardening is a spiritual act because God himself is a gardener and that anytime we cultivate and create and make something beautiful and proclaim truth and fight for goodness. We are honoring God, that we can offer those menial tasks as worship to God, and he receives it, because that's who God is. Don't miss this. Work is good and so, very simply, we want you, at fierce, to do your work. We want you to do your work. But just because work can be good doesn't mean that that's going to be enough. We also want you to change your hearts.
Speaker 1:In proverbs 10, the very next verse, he who gathers crops in summer is a prudent son, but he who sleeps during harvest is a disgraceful son. You might first think accuracy, prudent son, hit harvest. Maybe that lazy son. He just slept through harvest that time, but he was ready in the middle of winter or something like that. But notice that the word disgrace. It's actually embarrassing, shameful for the son to miss harvest. Why? Because harvest, even more then than now, was your whole community's lives at risk. If you didn't bring in harvest, there's a chance that somebody doesn't eat. And so you're not only saying like, oh, I'm selfish to sleep through harvest, you're saying selfish at the expense of everybody else. I do not care. I do not care what everybody else is saying.
Speaker 1:In this way, we want you not only to do your work, but to love your work. Other people should be an inspiration for why you do anything. When you're at work, think of the end client, think of the end user, think of the guest that you're serving, think of the people that you're trying to impact when you're working. If you're doing menial tasks and chores at home, think about how it benefits your family, think about how it benefits your community. The love for other people should be inspirational.
Speaker 1:I'm going to give you a weird example. In a book called Tribe by Sebastian Younger, he's talking about how we in modern culture no longer have these tight-knit tribes, these tight-knit communities, and it costs us socially. And he likens back to the Bosnian War, where a gal who is a journalist was interviewing other soldiers and they were talking about how happy they were to serve, how they loved that they could trust their brother in this time of need and how, after the war, they actually wished they could go back because the corruption wasn't there and they knew that they were fighting their brother in this time of need, and how they, like after the war, they actually wished they could go back because the corruption wasn't there and they knew that they were fighting for a purpose. Imagine with me for a moment that if you look down your street to the left or to the right, or if you look around your cul-de-sac, if you knew that the people were working for you, if they knew that you were working for them, like if we looked around this room and we knew that you guys to the grindstone for each other. That's not all that we should be loving, though.
Speaker 1:God also gives us gifts. In the Bible, he talks about skills or talents that he gives us. Right. The things that you're naturally good at are gifts from God that you're supposed to use, and when you use them, we might call that following your calling, and so we no longer have the two circles of work hard, play hard. We have work for God. Do the things that you're good at, that he gifted you in, and play well with others, that the love of other people and what God has gifted you.
Speaker 1:We find the intersection there, and that would be our focus, and so, as you're like, this is really simple At home, you just draw the Venn diagram, start listing this stuff out and then pursue. Feel free, feel God-inspired, even to pursue the things that are in that intersection, right, like that's what God has made you to do. Johann Sebastian Bach used to put at the top he's a famous composer, right he used to put at the top of all of his music compositions soli deo gloria, for God's glory alone. And I think, like if we could just get there, it would be so freeing that, like God himself works, and that when we work we reflect his goodness, and so when we work we can work for his glory in the very everyday tasks that we do. You know, it frees you up from the competition, the rat races, it frees you up from overworking and from laziness, and that's a wonderful, wonderful thing. So work is pre-fall, it's good, so you should do it, and the best work is at the joining of working for others and working the way that God made us.
Speaker 1:But what of all the troubles, what of all the frustrations, what of all the hopelessness and the lack of rest that we have in our culture? How exhausted we are. Last proverb, proverbs 15, 19. The way of the sluggard is blocked with thorns, but the path of the upright is a highway. The way of the sluggard is blocked with thorns. That word is intentional thorns, if you didn't know, when sin came into the world, god cursed the ground, not humans cursed the ground and made thorns to grow and consequently, our work is laborsome and tiresome. It's frustrating. So here it's a short way of saying sin affects your work and the lazy is just going to get stopped up by sin. Not going to make headway, you're going to get caught in thorns. Well, what's the solution? Working hard, diligence, it says, but the path of the upright is a highway. Oh good, okay, so like I don't have to work super hard, I'll just have to be perfect before God. I don't know about you, but I've already confessed my laziness this morning, and so that's actually not good news for me, you know. Oh yeah, just be perfect, like God is perfect, and then it'll be a highway. I have good news In Galatians 3, it says that Jesus took our curse upon himself.
Speaker 1:He took our curse, the one that we deserved. We deserve the way of thorns, and he took that upon himself. Easter's coming, and I don't know if you know this, but when Jesus was accused of being king of the Jews, that was the death sentence. Jews weren't allowed to have the death penalty, so they had to go to the Romans and say, hey, this guy's saying he's king. That sounds like an offense to Caesar, you should kill him. And so they made fun of him by putting a robe the royalty right, the purple robe on him. They put the sign over his head when he was hanging on the cross. They put the sign over his head, king of the Jews. And they made a crown out of thorns and pressed that into his head. Thorns and press that into his head. He was ground up so that we might have a highway. He took the way of the thorns so that we might become like God. He became sin. Who knew no sin? That we might become the righteousness of God.
Speaker 1:And it doesn't just stop there. He's not just seeking the moral purity of our hearts. He came to redeem everything. A few months ago was Christmas and we sang joy to the world. No more let sin and sorrow grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found. He came to redeem all things.
Speaker 1:And what that means is that if you're hopeless about your work, if you have, like, worked real hard to put a team together, and then those, like two individuals, just start fighting. They're irreconcilable and they blow that thing up. You spend your life trying to build a product and get investment and capital dries up. Right at the end. You gain all of this knowledge to apply to just figure out that you're too old, that you don't have enough energy, you don't have enough strength. That God promises to redeem your work, that, if not in this life, then in the next, the perfect thing that you're trying to bring into the world, that novel that you always dreamed of, that perfect musical piece, the wonderful dream home that you want to sell or that you want to build, whatever it is, god promises to see it to completion. He gives you the desires of your heart. Amen, there's hope, because Christ took the penalty for us.
Speaker 1:But what of us who are just tired? What of us who are just weary? Matthew 11,. Come to me, this is Jesus talking. Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy burdened. I will give you rest, praise God. Then he says take my yoke on you. You know the thing that they put on oxen. And you're like wait a second. I am tired, don't want to work, I don't have any strength, I don't want to keep pressing into this, I would like some rest. And he says oh, no, no, no, no. Come work for me, For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. My yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Speaker 1:His teaching is not burdensome, because when God is your boss, you won't overwork. When God is your boss, you won't overwork. When God is your boss, you won't overwork, because you know that to please him all you have to like. He already died for you. He already died for you. What more do you have to do to please him? He just wants you to trust him. He just wants you to follow him. He just wants you to trust him. He just wants you to follow him and you won't underwork, you won't be lazy, because you'll see how much it cost Christ to get you to this point.
Speaker 1:Before all things, he had good works for you to do and he loved you enough to give his life so that you might do them, that the desires of your heart in this life or the next might come to fruition. Praise God, jesus is enough for us. It's just wonderful mixture of love and grace that transforms us from the inside out into the people that we want to be no longer lazy, no longer hardened and bitter or cynical, but loving, able to do good work. So this Sunday I want you to think what are the little things that God might be calling me to do this week that's good for me, that he put in my lives to do? Who are the people that I can do that for? What has God gifted me to do and how can I use that for his kingdom?
Speaker 1:Even this morning, as you go about your day, as we go into the gym to hang out like what has God gifted you to share with others this morning and finally cling to that hope that Christ will make good all of your work, that Christ paves a way, a highway, through the thistles, for your work to matter in this life and in the next. Do your work, love others and love God. Do your work, love others and love God and be captivated by how Christ can redeem your work. Let's pray, heavenly Father. Lord, we confess that we are often selfish. Our culture encourages it. Lord, we struggle to help our kids navigate this type of work environment.
Speaker 1:And God, with so many things going on in the world chaos and large structural changes and looming threats, lord, we pray that you would help us to have more faith today. God, that we would trust what you're doing in our lives, that you have put us here for a purpose. God, that we would love you and love others by the works of our hands. God, that we would offer our lives as living sacrifices to you. And, lord, that the hope of heaven, the redemption of our work, would be inspiring to us this morning. God, that it would cut through our selfishness, that we would look at you hanging on the cross on our behalf and be moved to love as you have loved us.
Speaker 1:Lord, we pray that you would help us to take this into the week, that you would help us to take this into our workplaces. God, that you would help us to fight selfishness in our families and in our marriage. God, that we would continue to pour ourselves out, knowing that you have us. God, that you are not burdensome to us. Lord, that you'll give us the grace that we need every day to work to do good things. And, lord, we pray with all of God's church that you would come again and make all things right. God, that we might be your people and you would be our God, and that we might experience the intimacy and the glories of the work that we always have wanted to be able to do. In Jesus' name, we pray Amen.
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