What I Write About

I write about the infinite number of intersections between every day life and the good news of the God who has come to get us.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Curing What Ails Us

Yesterday I was talking with an old friend about our joint work-aholic tendencies. There's lots of reasons why this is bad and lots of approaches to how to get healthy about it.

But the bottom line is this: work-aholism at it's core is un-belief in Christ. Jesus won't provide for me, won't advance me, won't take care of me, so I must do everything myself. I worship my own ability to get things done rather than trust in him.

Work is a good thing. Hard work is a good thing. But at some point it tips over from hard work as a result or overflow of a deeper trust in Christ into scrapping and clawing and pressing in out of my flesh in order to take care of myself.

To put it another way: work-aholism is a worship of work to be the thing that provides us what we think we need. All of our sin is a mis-spending of our worship. We were made to worship. Everyone worships something(s). Sin is the giving over of our worship to things that cannot satisfy us.

The call of God is to repent of all of our mis-spent worship in order to direct it towards the only thing that is going to meet those needs and fulfill the true purpose of our hard-wired need to worship.

That's what I'm thinking about this morning as I try to get my work done in faith, hope and love springing from a worship of Jesus rather than just me trying to muscle my way through my day to accomplish a bunch of things in my own strength or ability.

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