The Slothful Gospel

Are you in danger of becoming a Sloth for the Gospel? Are you lazy in your studying and sharing of the Gospel? I know I have run into seasons of great hunger for God's word, and I have also experienced seasons of tremendous laziness. What causes this kind of laziness? Laziness prizes many things, but gains nothing.

Sports, Social Media, Gaming, Shopping, Excessive Work habits, etc. They are our easy-bake mud puddle gods. Simply sit, add water, and worship. What gets you out of bed (or off the couch)? To withdraw, to procrastinate, to stumble through a blurry haze of work days just waiting for the next opportunity to get back on the couch, back to the workshop, back on Netflix, or back to the gym, that isn’t life. There is great freedom in having our eyes opened, in realizing that when we are lazy, our sedentary state is not innocent.
Someone or something is always pulling the chain around our neck: “Stop.” “Act.” “Indulge.” “Submit.” “Whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved” (2 Peter 2:19). Laziness is not the ok. It is active obedience to someone, to something other than Jesus Christ. The Lord offers us freedom from that: “Sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace” (Romans 6:14)- John Piper.

We use excuses such as our jobs, kids, house cleaning, etc.. Our so-called ministries keep us busy, but what God is our ministry based on if we are not indulging in prayer and His word? Instead we pridefully concentrate on the things that keep us from God. We all have our excuses. Some are that of busyness, some are that of frustration because of how our lives are turning out. Not realizing that when we exclude God from our lives, we become our own God. We make horrible mistakes and choices because we think we have all the right answers. Stop withdrawing from a world that doesn’t exist, one in which you think you have to control everything or else it crumbles. Addiction is one frantic attempt to escape from these pressures. We indulge in addictions because we despair. We are deprived of something we desire, and there is no end in sight, when everything we need is in His word.

We are living in scary times, days of uncertainty for many, and there is no way out, no place to run, no place to hide, except for those who are in Christ Jesus. Every answer to what we are facing has already been written. Even those of us who are in Christ face scary times, but our faith, our hope and our promises are in Him.

Do we love the world and the things of the world so much that we fail to love God more? 1 John 2:15 Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. Do we so pridefully love ourselves and our opportunities in life in a greater capacity than we love the Lord? He is the one who gave us these abilities and opportunities, and all for the purpose of growing His Kingdom. So let's put away our laziness for the Gospel, swallow our pride and humbly seek His forgiveness and grace. James 4:6 But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.

Today's Encouragement: Start your day off in prayer and ask the Lord to connect you with someone who is willing to help you with accountability. Ask Him to give you a study partner. One who will sit with you and dive into the word of God earnestly and with great joy.

Today's Scripture: Slothfulness casts into a deep sleep, and an idle person will suffer hunger.” (Proverbs 19:15)

Reviews

[Spamalot]

Interesting... You have 80 posts, damn few people have commented, yet you continue to post religious screeds on a writer's site, listing them as "stories."

Funny how the "God loves you," people ignore the evidence of the pandemic, plagues, the holocaust, racism... A building collapses and kills 70 people, but a baby survives and it's called a miracle, and everyone exclaims that that "God" saved her. But no one wonders why God wanted to kill those 70 people. That, they explain away.

1. Not one miraculous cure of the covid 10 virus by "God's" representatives on Earth. You would think that at least a few of the deserving would have been healed by prayer—especially by those noted as "healers." Kind of looks like their "healing" power was more showmanship than fact.

2. If God really cared, there would have been no pandemic in the first place. Remember, "Everything happens per God's plan." So it follows that all this suffering and all the deaths of the innocent was planned. Not quite the "merciful and loving" deity claimed.

3. If God was what you believe, and beliefs matters, Christians would be getting sick in fewer numbers than other religions, and your sect, fewest of all. (and if prayer worked, more kids would pass their math tests.)

But God isn't working on a cure, science is. And priests and ministers aren't treating the sick, doctors and trained medical people are.

Of course if you play the game, "Heads I win, tails you lose," "God" gets all the credit and none of the blame. And no evidence is too compelling to be rationalized away with a bit of double talk and "faith.," which means you believe and act on something being true in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.