Read the transcript from today's video devotional.
I'm a dad with three kids. Long gone are the lazy Saturdays where you sleep in. I remember the days in high school where I would stay up until 3 a.m. playing video games in the summer, and then I would sleep in and wake up in the afternoon. You missed half of the day, half of your social interactions, and you just let that laziness overcome you.
Praise God that I don't live that lifestyle anymore. It makes me sick even thinking about sleeping in that late. That doesn't mean that laziness doesn't have its own forms of creeping into my life. I choose to sit on the couch and scroll through my phone instead of taking my kids out for a bike ride or walking the dog. Choosing to watch a movie instead of mowing the lawn on a Saturday morning, even though it's starting to look like a jungle.
Laziness loves to slowly creep its way into our lives. I get it - we're human and we get tired. If we're not careful, that tiredness can overcome us in a way that risks our health. Especially when it comes to our faith, we cannot allow laziness to creep in.
Our verse today comes from Romans chapter 12, verse 11. The apostle Paul writes, "Never be lazy, but work hard and serve the Lord enthusiastically." There’s two parts to this verse that I want to break down today.
The first is this idea of not growing tired or not being lazy in the work that God gives us. Laziness comes with a lot of problems, and here's a few just to get us going.
Never Be Lazy
Laziness prevents us from growing. When I was in college, I was an avid cyclist and it was just in my nature to wake up early in the morning, get ready for a ride, and go out for 30, 40, 50, 60, sometimes even 70 to 100 miles. You build this sense of strength and it just gets your adrenaline going.
Over the years, I stopped cycling as much and I wasn't able to go out. One day I realized that I hadn't been out in forever. I jumped back on the bike ready to go, hit mile ten, and I'm like, "I don't think I can do this anymore." I had allowed laziness to creep in. I had lost all of the growth that I was experiencing at the time.
Laziness can also prevent us from helping others. My wife and I have this running joke that if she asks me to get her water bottle, I can typically expect that it's empty. She doesn't know it's empty, but I always feel like she's asking me to now actually do two things - to get her water bottle and fill it up.
I'll be honest, there are moments where I grab that water bottle and I go, "I could just pretend that I didn't know this was empty and choose the lazy route." In doing so, I stopped myself from helping my wife, even in the simplest of ways. We allow that sort of laziness to prevent us from helping others all the time.
Lastly, laziness prevents us from persevering. When my family moved across the country, we had about 2,000 miles to drive and we were packed into our cars with three kids and a fish. Yes, I said fish. That's a story for another time. We had mapped out the road, and every day we needed to get a certain number of miles under our belt.
There were days where we would get about half of those miles done and I’d think, "You know, I think that was enough for today. Maybe we just stop here and enjoy and get a hotel." That laziness would have meant that we wouldn't have gotten to our destination in the time that we were supposed to get there. It would have prevented us from persevering.
Serve the Lord Enthusiastically
Laziness is a hindrance when it comes to living out our faith. It causes us to stumble in our growth. It prevents us from helping others, and it hinders us from truly persevering for the Lord's will.
That's only the first half of our verse. The second half of our verse says, "but work enthusiastically." God doesn't want you to grudgingly overcome your laziness and do good for the sake of doing good. He wants you to see that He's inviting you into a life of purpose and fulfillment and satisfaction.
I want to encourage all of us today to watch out for that slow creep of laziness. I want us to enter into the joy of serving the Lord enthusiastically as we set our minds on His mission for His glory.
