Working by faith

“she [the ant] prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest.”
-Proverbs 6:8

All ages have had lazy people, but I think our age makes the problems so much worse. In older times, you could sleep late if you wished, but that would make it hard later to eat. When you had to grow your own food, the amount of work you put in had a direct result on the amount of food you got out of it.

But what if I slept late and didn’t work very hard today? It could be that my boss would fire me, depending on how late I was coming in and how bad of a job I was doing. More likely, I just wouldn’t get a very good raise at the end of the year. That might not be so bad. At my last job, in fact, everyone in the organization got the exact same percentage raise every year. It was a government job, and they cut out merit raises before I got there. So a little laziness there, as long as it didn’t get me fired, would probably have no effect at all!

So we’ve lost something in our understanding of laziness. We’ve lost that understanding that being lazy would have immediately and severe consequences. We could actually say that about a lot of the sins now. In a society that blames no one, we’ve done our best to get rid of any consequences at all for anyone’s actions.

Laziness is, however, a sin. And no matter what this society does to remove the consequences of sin, the heart of those consequences remain. That gradual numbing that sin brings remains, the numbing that continues unto death.

It is a deserved death too. We have lost the understanding of the value of things. We have lost the understanding of the value of time and resources. They are God’s! They are God’s, and He has loaned to us time, breath, resources, and even our bodies. They are not ours to do with as we wish. They are His, and we treat them so casually.

The wages of sin is death. We have offended God in all of our sins, including lust, pride, arrogance, hatred, greed, and even laziness. We have taken what we His and treated it with rebellion and distain.

The answer to this problem is not to try harder and see if you can earn your way into good favor. It’s faith. See, without faith we cannot please God. So the work of God is to believe in Him whom He sent. In repentance and faith we will be forgiven.

When we are forgiven, we are given His Spirit to guide us. The Spirit makes it so we can walk in accordance to His desires – no longer by sheer force of will, but by faith.

I don’t have to harvest my own food. But when I go to work, I can bring honor to God by working in faith. Even that, by grace, we can do in faith. It’s hard to be lazy when the Spirit has moved you so much.

If this is a problem, your first step is to repent and look to the Cross for forgiveness. If you fail tomorrow, then repent again. Over time, the Spirit will work in you. He will change you to look a little more like Him.