It's an everyday sort of problem - I don't even think we go a day without doing it. Sometimes that's all we are, and other times, we just choose when to be it. Most of the time, we make the conscious decision to do it - to become it. What exactly am I talking about? Well, I'm talking about being lazy. Everybody struggles with laziness; in fact, I don't know a single person that doesn't struggle with it at some point in their life. Some of us out there try to fight laziness, whereas others just accept it and become lazy. Yet, there are different forms of laziness. The first form is just being generally lazy. For example, not cleaning your house, ignoring homework, trying to worm your way out of responsibilities, etc. The second form is where we're too busy being lazy that we let our flesh (our sinful nature) get the best of us - I'll talk more about this later. God hates laziness, did you know that?
After spending my entire life in the ministry, I've become attune to laziness. It's something that now stands out to me (and which I have also participated in). Again, I'm not talking about being lazy like cleaning things up or just wanting to sit around; I'm talking about spiritual laziness. Spiritual laziness so undeniably prominent, it almost hurts. So what exactly is spiritual laziness? I'll give you three examples of things that I've learned and things that I've observed.
Not reading your Bible is a part of spiritual laziness. So often times we are "too tired" to read our Bible, but we're perfectly okay to go read a book or watch a movie or even go hang out with friends. We're willing to go to work, hang out with people or spend time as a family, but as soon as it comes to reading ones Bible, suddenly God hits the bottom of the list. How dare we put God at the bottom of the list after all He's done? Satan tries to trick us into thinking that reading our Bible is exhausting, but really, it's not. In fact, it's quite the opposite. I used to struggle with this type of laziness - I still do sometimes. I used to say that I was "too tired" or just "didn't feel up to it", and I was being unbelievably sinful when I was doing that. Talk about stupidity on my part!
The second type of spiritual laziness is serving. Where I live, people would rather shove their money in your face then actually do it themselves. This means that they'd rather give you their money to hire somebody, then to actually commit to the work themselves. Sure, they may have good paying jobs, but that doesn't mean they can't serve. When we don't serve, we're throwing all that Jesus did back in God's face. We're saying that Jesus was strange, and that his work was so lowly we wouldn't even dare think about doing the same thing. Jesus went and hung around with dumb sheep boys and obnoxious sailors; he sat with crazy children and poured his wisdom into fools. Why does it seem so hard for us to do the same? We don't want to help set up church on Sunday mornings because "we've got no time" or we don't want to be a leader in VBS because "we've got too much going on" and we can't help out in the youth groups because "kids just aren't our thing". But God calls us to be servants, so we must abandon that spiritual laziness, take up our cross and follow him.
The last type of spiritual laziness is commitment. For example, people say they want to "help", but they never want to commit. They say they want to serve or they want to have a stronger relationship with God, but for some reason, they let satan talk them into believing that they just can't commit to it yet. Or they can't make it to church on time because it's "too early", even though it's at ten in the morning and they're up for school by five. Or they sit and complain about how bad the church (or youth group, or worship band or children's ministry or bible study) instead of trying to help the church out. I used to sit and complain about how I just didn't like my youth group very much, till I realized that this world is not mine, that youth group is not mine, and I am not going to let my sinful flesh get the best of me. I'm on this earth for God, which therefore means that I need to commit to my church and my Jesus. It means that I need to be supportive and offer up my services and commit to whatever I do. "Commit to the LORD whatever you do, and he will establish your plans." Psalm 16:3 is what the Bible says, so why do we always try to be so flighty? We need to buckle down, stick with where God's got us and invest, instead of allowing satan to run our lives.
The Bible says,
"A lazy life is an empty life, but “early to rise” gets the job done." Psalm 12:27
We are not meant to be lazy. We are meant to be alive and on fire for Jesus! This means we should be spending time with him as much as possible for as long as possible. It means serving in his name, because we get to serve. It means committing to following him, supporting his church and being more like him. Being lazy isn't any fun; actually, it's kind of exhausting. So stand up and stop sitting around being lazy. It's hard to see the whole sunset, when you can't peek over the mountain.
