If you’ve struggled with laziness or find yourself easily ensnared by distractions when you should be working, it’s possible that you’ve tried to overcome these tendencies by making some adjustments to your daily routines and workflow. Perhaps you’ve devoured some good books on productivity and consumed some decent podcasts on making the most of your workday. It’s possible that you’ve implemented some of these strategies and found some of them useful.
It’s also possible that these attempts at restructuring your workweek have not led to enduring change. You still find that you have a proclivity toward procrastination and mindless diversions that leads to you wasting a lot of your time.
The problem is that it’s not enough to establish fresh routines, implement new disciplines, or craft novel strategies to overcome laziness. Our problem with slothfulness goes much deeper than our daily habits or lack thereof. At its root, laziness is a heart problem—a stye in our spiritual vision—that gives rise to our tendency to procrastinate in the face of challenging duties, neglect our responsibilities, and yield to mindless distractions and diversions. While it is helpful to discuss practical strategies to help us make the most of our time, we won’t achieve any kind of lasting victory over our sluggardly ways by just making a few changes in our schedule and adopting some new ideas from the latest productivity podcast.
Just Adjusting Your Workflow Won’t Solve It
There are at least two reasons why we won’t experience lasting change by merely tweaking our workflow.
First, routines and disciplines as such don’t have the power to change our hearts. If we are honest, we would have to admit that despite the myriad of productivity enhancers we’ve put in place, we still find ourselves succumbing to laziness more often than we would like to admit. Mere practical strategies can’t uproot the fundamental causes of our laziness.
Second, routines, disciplines, and strategies do not enable us to determine what we should be doing. Practical strategies and routines are at their best when they enable us to accomplish our priorities, and any daily routine we implement should be in the service of these priorities. But the routines themselves don’t provide any criteria by which I can judge if I am doing what I am supposed to be doing. These priorities must come from somewhere else. For the Christian, these priorities are determined and guided by Scripture.
We Need a Biblical Vision of God and Life
If we are going to make progress in cultivating true diligence, therefore, we need much more than a guide to organizing our desk or crafting our monthly schedules. We need a biblical vision of God and life. In the following, I will offer eight truths from Scripture that we must believe if we are going to see lasting change in our lives.
(1) God Created You for His Glory
The most foundational truth that we must grasp as we confront the sin of laziness is this: God created us to please and glorify him (1 Cor 10:31). By my very nature as a creature, I am beholden to God and his will and wishes, not my own inclinations and aspirations. A distinguishing aspect of our humanity is our capacity and calling to exercise dominion over the earth and subdue it for the benefit of other image-bearers (Gen 1:26-31). God created us for useful productivity, weaving this expectation for labor into the fabric of the week: six days (not five) to work and one day to rest (Ex 20:8-11). To shirk this calling is to rebel at a basic level against our Creator and our own design as humans.
(2) God Purchased You for His Glory
As a Christian, this obligation to God intensifies, for Christ has purchased us with his blood. “You are not your own,” Paul writes, “for you were bought with a price. So glorify God with your body” (1 Cor 6:19-20). Not only are we under obligation to fulfill God’s calling on our life as image-bearers, but we are now doubly obligated to do God’s will because he has shed the blood of his Son so that we would belong to him. Christ died for the express purpose of securing for himself a people who were “zealous for good works” (Titus 2:14). Being saved apart from our works does not relieve us from the duty that belongs to us as image-bearers. Rather, our work is now empowered by the Holy Spirit and conducted out of the joy of being right with God, not out of the fear of appeasing an angry deity. Indeed, Scripture teaches that we were saved apart from good works so that we would be rich in good works (Eph 2:8-10).
(3) You Live Under God’s Amazing Mercy
It was only after Paul spent eleven chapters providing a detailed exposition of the gospel and its entailments that he then turned to instruct the Roman congregation on the practical outworking of their faith. He begins chapter twelve, “Therefore, I urge you brethren, by the mercies of God, to present yourself as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. For this is your reasonable worship” (Rom 12:1; emphasis added). The call to be a living sacrifice is to full-time, constant, diligent, and willing obedience to God. But it is rooted in the mercy of free justification and peace with our Creator (Rom 3:21-16; 4:5; 5:1). Rather than condemning us, God has saved us and given us the righteousness of his own Son (Rom 5:12-21; 8:1). In Christ, we now live in the realm of unceasing mercy. Even when we indulge in slothfulness and fail to make the most of our time, our heavenly Father doesn’t cast us away and disown us. We still belong to God and possess all the resources we need to grow in godly diligence. This unchanging mercy, then, is not a means of excusing our laziness, but a vital motivation to overcome it. Indeed, we glorify God most when we make grateful use of the mercies he grants us.
(4) Christ has Entrusted You with a Stewardship
Christ has entrusted every Christian with a portion of his wealth so that we might multiply it for the furtherance of his kingdom (see Matt 25:14-30). This stewardship includes our financial resources, property, personal goods, relationships, jobs, ministry opportunities and responsibilities, natural and spiritual gifts, time, and physical health. Christ expects a return on his investment and warns that if we constantly neglect our stewardship, we will prove ourselves to be an unbeliever (Matt 25:26-30). Positively, those who manage their Master’s resources well can look forward to hearing, “Well done good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over little, I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master” (Matt 25:21, 23).
(5) Diligence is Praised throughout Scripture while Laziness is Despised
In light of what we’ve already noted in the last four points, it should come as no surprise that Scripture places a high premium on diligence and spares no rebuke for the one who resides in a state of perpetual laziness. The Proverbs are replete with commendations and lavish promises for the hard-working person. It is also full of reprimands and warnings for the sluggard:
A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich.
Proverbs 10:4
The hand of the diligent will rule, while the slothful will be put to forced labor.
Proverbs 12:24
The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing, while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied.
Proverbs 13:4
The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, but everyone who is hasty comes only to poverty.
Proverbs 21:5
The New Testament follows this pattern present in the Proverbs. In Jesus’ parable of the talents, the master chides the servant who hid his talent in the ground as lazy and wicked (Matt 25:26). Paul describes the Cretons with unflattering words, calling them “evil beasts, lazy gluttons” (Titus 1:12, emphasis added). Paul sharply rebukes Christians who refuse to work, bars them from eating other people’s food, and disbands them from Christian fellowship (2 Thess 3:6-12). Professing Christians who didn’t work to provide for their own families were considered worse than unbelievers (1 Tim 5:7), and recently widowed Christian women were to remarry, bear children, and maintain the home so they wouldn’t fall into the trap of idleness (1 Tim 5:11-14).
Examples from the Old and New Testaments could be multiplied. The point here is simply to underscore how Scripture consistently exhorts God’s people to a life of holistic diligence. Such diligence leads to the enrichment of our lives and souls and blesses others.
(6) The Days are Evil
In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul exhorts us to make the most of their time. Making the most of our time is linked to walking in wisdom and doing God’s will (Eph 5:15, 17). Interestingly, Paul grounds his exhortation to make the most of our time with the observation, “because the days are evil.” Why does Paul use the “days are evil” as motivation for making the most of our time? Given his previous exhortation to walk in wisdom (v. 15) and the following exhortation not to be foolish but to understand the will of the Lord (v. 17), it is likely that Paul is concerned that the pervasive, unrelenting evil of this world will encroach on the Christian’s mind and dilute their wisdom if they are not constantly giving heed to their walk with Christ. Evil permeates everything in our society, and if we are not vigilant, our hearts will become infected with the world’s outlook, and we will lose a sense of biblical realities and the urgency demanded of these realities. In other words, if we are not actively seeking to make the most of our time, the world will invade our lives with its foolish priorities and ways of thinking.
(7) People Benefit from High-Quality Work
The Proverbs place the sluggard in the same category as the vandal because both people are destructive (Prov 18:9). The damage the vandal inflicts is often easily seen: he demolishes valuable physical objects and defaces property. The sluggard’s destruction is less perceptible—at least initially. A person who aims to do the least amount of work possible and does not seek to create high-quality products and services robs his employer, his fellow employees, and the consumers who will eventually purchase those goods and services. The Proverbs tell us that the sluggard is bothersome to those who employ him: “Like vinegar to the teeth and smoke to the eyes, so is the sluggard to those who send him” (Prov 10:26). The diligent person, however, is a blessing to those who hire him and to those who stand to benefit from his work. He creates useful goods and services and hones his skill so that his usefulness grows, perhaps to the point of significant recognition (Prov 22:29). We will be motivated to shun laziness when we focus on the benefit that diligence provides others (Acts 20:35).
(8) Diligence is Far More Satisfying than Laziness
Finally, we must remind ourselves that God’s ways are always more satisfying than sin. It’s not enough to merely say “no” to laziness. We must be convinced that our souls will experience greater and better satisfaction by practicing Christ-centered diligence. The Proverbs characterize the way of wisdom as the way of pleasantness (Prov 2:10; 22:18). Laziness, on the other hand, is attended with unnecessary difficulty and pain: “The way of a sluggard is like a hedge of thorns, but the path of the upright is a level highway” (Prov 15:19). Laziness leads to unfinished assignments, unmet obligations, and unfulfilled promises, which inevitably lead to relational trouble and difficulties at home and at work. The sublime pleasures of diligence far outweigh the paltry promises that laziness offers. Christ experienced deep spiritual fulfillment as he labored, doing God’s will (John 4:34), and so will we as we shun laziness and embrace a pattern of diligence.
Conclusion
Scripture provides us with many incentives to shun laziness, avoid distractions, and make the most of our time. God made us and remade us in Christ to be people who are “zealous for good works.” While practical strategies can help us remove some friction from our daily workflow, they can never keep us motivated to persevere in a life of Christ-centered diligence. We must see that God has created and purchased us for his glory, lavished us with the gospel, and entrusted us with vital stewardship. By God’s grace, we must be convinced of the folly of laziness and the joy of diligence and recognize that this evil world system will never stop trying to pull us onto a path of ease and self-centered indulgence. Finally, we must embrace the truth that our diligence will richly bless others and provide our souls with a far greater satisfaction than laziness ever will.
