Patience Crucifies Sloth

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 I just wanna clear my name for a second. Uh, the reason we added one of sin from the seven deadly sins, uh, and you, if you’ll notice in a few weeks, we’re gonna combine some fruit to make it work, is really because I wanted to do the overview of Lent before we actually dove into Lent. So it’s my fault, but I think we’re all better for it.

I don’t know. Absolutely. Will you please stand?

Uh, Galatians five. I’ll start in verse 16. I say, then walk by the spirit and you will certainly not carry out the desire of the flesh for the flesh desires. What is against the spirit? And the spirit desires what is against the flesh. Now, these are opposed to each other so that you don’t do what you want, but if you are led by the spirit, you’re not under the law.

Now, the works of the flesh are obvious. Sexual immorality, moral impurity, promiscuity, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and anything similar. I am warning you about these things, as I warned you before, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And the law is not against such things now, those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the spirit.

So Father, we ask

God over these next few moments that you would, um, direct our minds. Um,

God, we ask that you would stir our hearts.

And help us form new habits as we respond to, uh, your word and the promise within your word that we, we can bear fruit if we’re willing to walk by your spirit.

So I ask now over these next few moments that you would help us remove any distractions that were coming in with, any anxieties, any worries, any fears, any thoughts, anything. Just help us to put them aside gently. And, and as we turn our attention to you, we ask that you would help us see that your attention is always turned towards us.

We ask that you would challenge us, comfort us, and convict us. And we pray all this in your name. Amen. You guys can take a seat.

Now I’m a big fan of late night tv, uh, discovering SNL David Letterman. Jimmy Fallon, uh, in college was, and I mean this as literally as I can, borderline life changing for me now. SNL, for example, changed the way I thought about comedy, socially aware cultural criticism that comes through the medium of a silly sketch comedy show.

That’s brilliant. David Letterman changed the way I thought about music because he always had the best musical guests. Jimmy Fallon was really just away from me and my roommates to laugh and put off the pressures of school while he got celebrities to play silly, embarrassing games that seemed to humanize ’em and make them more relatable.

But my favorite was, and honestly still is, Conan O’Brien and the Harvard grad who’s obsessed with history and intelligent self-deprecating humor redefined comedy for me and kept me entertained in between classes on campus, literally four hours. I binged Conan interviews with other celebrities, Conan interviews where he’s being interviewed, asked about his interviewing style and how he fuses his love of history with comedy.

I binged behind the scenes videos, blooper reels instead of studying, researching, writing papers and doing all the stuff that you’re supposed to do in college to get your degree. In fact, looking back, a lot of my downtime in college that wasn’t spent hanging out with my roommates was spent in my room watching YouTube videos of SNL Skits and Late Night Talk Show reruns.

Now, I didn’t realize that I had a problem until literally this week.

As I was writing this teaching, I decided to keep track of, uh, my wandering habits, uh, and procrastination patterns. I wanted to know just for my own self-awareness, where does my mind go when I want to distract myself from the pain and misery of research and study? Where does my mind go when I’m unmotivated?

Now I’m, I’m a 30-year-old man. I’m married. I have two kids, and if you were to look at my YouTube browsing history for the past week, it would be full of late night reruns, SNL skits and Conan O’Brien interviews, procrastination, distraction, sloth. Now we’re just about halfway through a teaching series. Uh, covering a few things.

One is we’re covering Lent, so we kind of set this up as a, uh, an examination of what it means to observe Lent throughout church history. Uh, followers of Jesus have spent the 40 days leading up to Easter, uh, to, to mark a, a, uh, a time of repentance, prayer, and fasting. And we’ve invited you, if you’re willing to consider doing the same with us.

We’re also looking at the seven deadly sins. So these are seven vices that aren’t named specifically in scripture, but that we see throughout scripture and have been identified by Christians throughout the ages as vices and sins that keep us in the cycle of flesh from the passage that we just read.

And to counter the seven deadly sins. We’ve also looked at fruit, the fruit of the spirit, specifically what Paul names here in Galatians five, the natural byproduct of a life lived with God. That frees us from that cycle up for today. Sloth. And I know what you’re probably thinking because honestly I was thinking this all week.

Is sloth really that bad greed? Sure, I get it. I, I probably struggle with it. I understand greed is a deadly sin. I get how that could kill us. Gluttony. Yeah, sure. I tend to indulge in extra dessert when I’m sad. I could see how that could eventually kill me. Maybe literally envy. I recognize bitter in my relationships.

I see that. I get it. I tend to cut people off when they hurt me too deeply or too often, but sloth, not me. For all the Conan interviews I watched this week, I still got this teaching done.

Or maybe not us. Here were hard workers. We believe nothing is handed to us. We have to work for what we want. In fact, most of us, if we’re honest, probably put in more work hours than we probably should. We have ambitions, responsibilities, dreams. Most of us just also need to pay the bills. And those of us who are super mature, we alize it.

We think of things like, oh, there’s so many lost people out in the world. The devil never sleeps. I’ll sleep when I’m dead. We need to partner with God to bring down the kingdom. We think of Proverbs six is our favorite verse. Go to the ant. You sluggard, observe his ways. In other words, don’t be lazy.

That’s not me. In fact, you might even be able to argue sloth is actually maybe what some of us need and a culture like ours, specifically East Valley, that is plagued with hurry, busyness, consumerism, workaholism. Maybe the very thing we need is a little bit of time off to relax, to slow down. To rest, to stop worrying.

Some call it laziness, others call it self-care. Okay. In moderation. Sure, yeah. Everyone needs a weekend. Friends binge now and again, slightly dangerous. In excess. Yeah, I guess I could see that. But deadly. Now, throughout church history, sloth has actually been seen as one of the deadliest sins of the seven.

It’s been named as second deadliest, only behind pride. Throughout Christian historical theology, the deadly sin of sloth is actually called sidia. And it comes from a Greek word, literally meaning a lack of love. And it goes back to the desert fathers and mothers. These were, uh, monks, essentially, members of the monastic movement.

Men and women who saw the corruption of organized government mandated Christianity and the apathy that it caused within the church. ’cause it turns out, if you force everyone to be Christian, essentially, no one really is. And so they decided to retreat from society and live the, the rest of their lives in the wilderness, literally in the desert, distraction free, where they could devote all of their time and energy into their discipleship to God.

But even they living lives fully set apart for devotion to God, free of distractions of society, consumerism, all of that stuff, couldn’t rid themselves of sloth. Ri as Pontus, the fourth century desert, monk and theologian called Edia or the Sin of Sloth, the noonday demon. He says he attacks the monk about 10:00 AM and besiege his soul until 2:00 PM anybody felt that it’s essentially like your entire, almost your entire workday.

It’s just right in the middle of it. It’s like, ah, it never ends. He says, he compels the monk to constantly look to the windows. He makes the days feel long. A Cedia sloth is the slow gradual progression from devotion to disinterest what was once a burning love inside of us. A desire for deeper devotion to God and experiences of his loves turns into malaise and inactivity, or a lack of love.

But the danger of sloth isn’t just that it keeps us internally disinterested. Now maybe the clearest picture of sloth at a large communal scale that we have is in the Book of Revelation. Now we’re gonna look at a few passages this morning, so feel free to get ready to do some flipping if you want or scrolling.

Uh, all of these will be on the screen so you don’t have to. Now, the Book of Revelation is a book for context written to persecuted churches to encourage them to endure and stay faithful even when suffering persecution, because this is the end, uh, message of the book of Revelation. Jesus has already won and Jesus will win again.

If you want more context of the Book of Revelation, we did a series on it a few summers ago. You can go back at our archives and look at that. Uh, but for our purposes this morning, the book of Revelation starts with a list of seven letters written essentially, from Jesus to seven future symbolic churches criticizing them for their failures in representing Jesus to the world around them.

In Revelation chapter three, starting in verse 14, here’s a letter to the church in the city of Odessa. Write to the angel of the Lord in Odessa, thus says the Amen. That’s the name for Jesus, the faithful and true witness, the originator of God’s creation. I know your works. You are neither hot nor cold. I wish that you were cold or hot.

So because you’re lukewarm and neither hot or cold, I’m going to vomit you out of my mouth. For you say, I’m rich, I’ve become wealthy. I don’t need anything, and you don’t realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked. I advise you to buy from me gold refined in the fire so that you may be rich white clothes, so that you may be dressed and your shameful nakedness not be exposed.

An ointment to spread on your eyes so that you may see as many as I love, I rebuke and discipline. So be zealous and repent. See, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into him and eat with him and he with me. Now od Dia was a real city. It was actually known for its hot springs, spas and medicinal treatment.

The church that presumably started there started strong and it was known as sort of the bank of the region. It brought in a lot of commerce, had a booming economy, and theoretically the church started, uh, serving people, using their spas and medical treatment to help those who needed it. As it brought visitors and travelers from all over the Mediterranean world into their city, they would also invite them into the church.

But somewhere along the way, they gave up, gave up their passionate love for Jesus, and became lukewarm. Neither hot nor cold, and Jesus’s response to this lukewarmness or this sloth isn’t a mild response. I will vomit you out of my mouth. Jesus says, notice he doesn’t say, Hey, pick it up a bit. Just turn up the dial a little bit.

Just do a little bit more and you’ll be okay. Now, there’s something apparently that Jesus sees in the inner world of this church, the inner hearts of its members that compels him to say, I’m disgusted. There’s something that’s gone horribly wrong in your hearts and thus in your community. That makes me want to have nothing to do with you.

I will spit you out of my mouth. But here’s the scary part. Notice they didn’t even know that they were in trouble. Verse 17, what does he accuse them of? This is what they say. I’m rich. I’ve become wealthy. I don’t need anything. Look at all the fruits of my labor. In other words, I don’t struggle with sloth.

How could you say this? Look at all the stuff that I have. What if workaholism, busyness, and hurry aren’t antidotes to sloth? What if they’re actually the classic symptoms of sloth? In other words, the scary part of this teaching or this passage in Revelation three is it’s possible to do more for Jesus than anyone else and still suffer from the sin of sloth.

So the question we want to ask this morning is how? How do you get there? What is sloth exactly? How do you go, in my case, from late night SNL skits to eventually being thrown up out of Jesus’ mouth? How do you connect those dots? Well, I think sloth is best understood in two parts, an internal experience and an external expression.

In other words, avoidance and apathy. So first avoidance, that’s the internal experience. See, sloth begins less as a sin and more as a wound. If its primary characteristic is inactivity, indifference, or ultimately despair, it’s not something that we do as much as it’s something that we experience. For example, Shelby and I, my wife, uh, we never fight ever.

Uh, but if we did, it would, it would happen. Uh, hypothetically late at night. Uh, when we’re both home from work, we’re both, the kids are asleep, the kids are down to bed, so we’re on the couch having a conversation, or maybe I’m reading and she’s watching something or I’m watching SNLs gets on my phone and she’s doing something else.

And, uh, maybe hypothetically she says something that she doesn’t mean, or more accurately, she says something that I misinterpret and make assumptions about what she actually meant. And then we get into it and it’s a back and forth, well, you said this and what did you mean by this? And it’s these little kind of passive aggressive digs at one another.

Hypothetically, of course this doesn’t happen. Hypothetically it’s late, which for us is like nine 30. We want to go to bed.

Hypothetically, it’s easier, so much easier for us to just say, it’s okay. Let me just shut. Let’s just go to bed. Then to put in the hard work of apologizing, having the car, hard conversations, fighting just a little bit longer to get to the core of what she meant and the core of what I was wounded by or where my insecurities come up and I can communicate those things.

It’s much harder to say, you know what? I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. It is so much easier to just go off to our little corners, the rest of the house, go to bed, and in the morning everything’s fine, and I know you’ve all been there. See, before slot is about inactivity and apathy. It’s about avoidance.

Choosing the small little thing that doesn’t seem to have any significance, that small fork in the road to either keep fighting, keep arguing, keep pushing through whatever it is that we so badly want to run away from, avoiding the difficult inner work of reconciliation, confession, repentance, or obedience.

See, sloth is so tempting because it gives us the false promise that avoiding your pain is more bearable than enduring it. Now, some of us do struggle with sloth, not because we’re lazy, but because we’ve been hurt so deeply wounded, so harshly that it’s become easier and easier to ignore the pain and hardship that’s required for healing to admit something like our prayers not being answered.

Our suffering has no end in sight, or our relationships are going nowhere and marked more by bitterness and resentment than joy and sacrificial love. One more Netflix binge. One more. One night stand, one more pint of ice cream. We’ll get over it eventually. And honestly, this might be the case in the short term.

It’s easier to slowly leave a friendship to consistently turn your attention away from those in need to soothe your suffering with Netflix instead of prayer to sidestep to avoid. But eventually, our continual pattern of internal avoidance and distraction move our hearts and our hands towards apathy.

And that’s the second part of sloth the external expression. Now sloth starts as an experience of woundedness, hurt or pain, but becomes an expression of neglect. The fork in the road makes us choose the easier way out. We shrug our shoulders at someone in need. We say, I’ll get the next person. We ignore the small impulse to apologize when we do or say something done hoping that people will just kind of forget about it and move on.

We ignore the grudge that’s growing from envy between you and a friend, and we bury it, letting it fester and turn into envy. Sloth is ultimately about inactivity and omission. It’s a sin of neglect, unlike envy. It’s not something that you do unlike gluttony. It’s not something that you feel, and unlike greed, it’s not something that you participate in willingly that hurts others.

It’s something that you don’t do. The avoidance internally from wanting to distract yourself from these painful experience turns you into somebody who is unable to experience or express the love of God. See what starts with a no to a small invitation from the spirit ends with a heart that’s entirely incapable of finding joy, experience, or fruitfulness in spiritual things.

And this happens slowly, so slowly. We don’t even notice it. Dorothy Sayers puts it this way. It’s not merely idleness of mind and laziness of body. It being sloth is that whole poisoning of the will, which beginning with indifference and an attitude of, I couldn’t care less, extends to the deliberate refusal of joy and culminates in morbid introspection and despair.

So it starts as indifference slowly turns into inaction and then hopelessness and then despair. So do you see what we’re describing here? It’s a sin so subtle. It’s gone unnoticed in our culture for thousands of years. It’s not the act of laziness, it’s what’s underneath. It’s the thing beneath the thing.

It’s what compelled me to binge late night videos in my dorm instead of studying and socializing. It’s what makes us turn the TV on for more friends. Reruns, when we get home from work instead of being present to our kids and our family. It’s what drives us to open TikTok when we’re bored, overeat, when we’re in pain, binge Netflix when we’re tired.

It’s why we look to numb our discomfort with alcohol, drugs, pornography, or ice cream. It’s the hidden sin beneath the sin. It’s what makes space in our hearts and our hands to give into the other deadly sins. It’s easier to numb our pain with greed and materialism than to face our discontent or put in the effort to practice real sacrificial generosity.

It’s easier to escape into food or entertainment rather than face the reality that we are unhappy and not fully joyful. It’s easier to avoid difficult conversations instead of letting bitterness and envy take root in our hearts. So eventually we go from avoidance and we move into apathy. We no longer care about reconciliation.

We no longer care about generosity. We no longer care about the poor and the marginalized. We start like the church in la Deia, vibrant, passionate about Jesus. This is where we end up,

and honestly, it just might be the reason that many of us feel stuck, hopeless, lost, or stagnant in our discipleship to Jesus. Now, the author of the book of Hebrews puts it this way in Hebrews chapter five, we have a great deal to say about this and it’s difficult to explain. So context, the writer of Hebrews to just explain who Jesus is to the cosmos.

And he says, I could say a lot more about this, but it’s hard to explain since you’ve become too lazy to understand. Although by this time, you ought to be teachers. You need someone to teach you the basic principles of God’s revelation. Again, you need milk, not solid food. Now everyone who lives on milk is inexperienced with the message about righteousness because he’s an infant.

But solid food is for the mature, for those who have the senses, for those whose senses have been trained to distinguish between good and evil. In other words, you should be in a better place than you are now. You should be experiencing the love, the joy, and the knowledge and the wisdom of Jesus in a way that you’re able to pass that on and express that to others.

But notice what he says. You’ve become too lazy to understand. You’re stagnant. You’re lukewarm. I can’t bring you any deeper because you haven’t said yes to the things that God is inviting you to say yes to. Now, all of these passages point to a painful reality that you can live your entire life around Jesus without actually following him.

Or as pastor and theologian a w Tozer put it, and this is harsh. It is possible to be a Christian and yet be a failure. So it starts as a small compromise, a decisive no to God’s invitation. Slowly over time gets you here in the spiritual wilderness, stuck, lukewarm, unable to get yourself off of the proverbial couch your soul is resting on.

That was heavy. I’m sorry.

So if that sloth, what’s the answer? Galatians five, Paul says, but the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience,

patience. See at first, it’s our impulse. When we hear about sloth and we recognize it within us to then decide, I’m just gonna work harder. I’m gonna put in more volunteer hours. I gotta wake myself. I gotta shock the muscles. I gotta sign up to serve more at church. I gotta do extra hours of Bible study.

Instead of five minutes of morning prayer, I’m gonna go to an hour. If the sin of sloth is defined by apathy and avoidance, we can be tempted to cure ourselves with a remedy of activity, busyness and Christian spiritualized workaholism, believing the lie that our productivity directly correlates to our maturity.

Dorothy Sayers again writes it, is one of the favorite tricks of this sin. The sin being sloth to disassemble itself under the cover of a whiffing activity of body, we think. But if we are busily rushing about and doing things, we cannot be suffering from sloth. And besides violent activity seems to offer an escape from the horrors of sloth.

See, the wrong way to respond to sloth is to work our way back to obedience. Do more for Jesus. He’s knocking at the door asking, how much do you really love me?

And the last passage for today is James chapter five. Again, for context, James, is the half brother of Jesus writing a letter, or maybe we don’t know, James might have been a collection of his teachings and writings put into one document to pass around the church. Either way, it’s a church, it’s a letter, uh, written to multiple churches from the half brother of Jesus about how to live the Christian life.

And much of it honestly, if you look at it through the lens of sloth, has to do with this idea, how do we balance the fact that we’ve been saved and reconciled to Christ with the rest of our lives? That we have to spend this side in eternity? How do we actually work? What do we do with our lives? How do we relate to others?

How do we endure suffering? And towards the end of the letter, here’s what James says. Therefore, brothers and sisters be patient until the Lord’s coming. You see how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth and is patient with it until it receives the early and the late reigns. You also must be patient.

Strengthen your hearts because the Lord’s coming is near Brothers and sisters. Don’t complain about one another so that you will not be judged. Look, the judge stands at the door. Brothers and sisters take the prophets, for example, who spoke in the Lord’s name as an example of suffering and patience. See, we count as blessed.

Those who have endured. You’ve heard of job’s, endurance and have seen the outcome that the Lord brought about the Lord is compassionate and merciful. Now, earlier in the letter, uh, James does write about works and just after this, he encourages the church that makes up these small groups of, uh, following, uh, Jesus followers.

He encourages them to actually do good works, put in the effort. Go and work hard with your hands. Reconcile with each other. Pray, ask for healing. If someone’s sick, bring ’em to the elders. Anoint their heads with oil. In other words, do something. But that’s not what he says here, here. He doesn’t say, you gotta work your way back into devotion for God.

You’ve become lazy. So prove to God how much you love him. Now, he doesn’t say obey God. He wants that proof. What he does say is, wait before all of this, he says, be patient. In fact, he starts the letter talking about enduring suffering in trials, and he says, consider it pure joy when you experience trials of various kinds because you know that your faith is being tested.

See, sloth is basically procrastination. It’s distracting ourselves with your vice of choice, be it drugs, alcohol, or or Jimmy Fallon, celebrity interviews and games.

We distract ourselves instead of enduring the difficult work of whatever it is God has called us to. And so we combat sloth not by doing more, but actually by doing less, by slowing down our lives, by learning to be present to ourselves, present to God, and present to others, choosing silence and stillness instead of entertainment and noise.

And at this point, I just want to clear something. I, I’m not against entertainment or noise at all. Everyone needs a good Netflix binge once in a while, I think. I don’t know. This March, I’ve regularly been sitting on my couch, uh, glued to the screen, watching March Madness Basketball games. I’m human too. I get it.

Sometimes it’s easy and we need the rest. But I know that I’m just as apt to turn the TV on when I’m bored or tired. I know how easily it is, how easy it is for me to scroll Instagram for hours or do something semi productive like reading or researching something that may or may not help me in a future teaching or something like that.

Instead of slowing down and facing an internal pain that I’m experiencing reconciling with my wife for this hypothetical argument that we may or may not have actually had. I know who I am and I know how easy it is for me to rob myself of the true rest that God might want to give me through the spirit.

Just on the other side of the pain I’m trying to avoid, and I’m not saying we all need to spend hours praying and reading our Bibles on Friday nights instead of watching severance or whatever your show of choice is, but I am saying that we are really good at finding ways to avoid our pain and feed our apathy.

God has so much more in store for you. Than just trying your hardest not to sin until you die and go to heaven. Life and life to the full. That’s what Jesus has on offer. The presence of the spirit of God in you and then working through you life and the kingdom that gives you the fruit you’ve always wanted, but it takes time.

What sloth does is it lies to us by telling us the waiting isn’t worth it. So what does patience do? James says, it helps us endure. See, we receive the fruit of patience when we are able to endure the suffering of living with unanswered prayer. When we’re able to endure the awkwardness of saying, I’m sorry, when you do or say something dumb, endure the season of waiting or pruning that God has you in.

Whatever that looks like. Endure the uncertainty of saying yes to the thing that you know God is calling you to do, but that thing that still terrifies you, enduring the pain that can actually move us back into the presence of God, the arms of Jesus, and the filling of the spirit. If we don’t numb it away like the farmer in James five, endurance means waiting and accepting that who God wants us to be, what he wants to do in us and through us takes time.

I stand at the door and knock. Jesus says, if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, here’s what the promise is. I will come to him and I will eat with him. That’s language of intimacy. In James five, we count as blessed those who have endured. You’ve heard of job’s, endurance, and have seen the outcome that the Lord brought about what is the outcome.

The Lord is compassionate and merciful. I am convinced that God at his core does truly want our deepest joy. Whatever season of pain or pruning you are in the middle of right now is not what God wants for you. What he wants is the outcome. I would argue that suffering is never the end of God’s will, though it might be the beginning.

See, sloth is a slow, silent killer, not because it keeps us inactive, but because it keeps us away from the heart of God. Incapable either of accepting and embracing God’s love for us or embracing and then express expressing God’s love for others. The philosopher Cornell West once argued that our capacity to give and receive love is only as great as our capacity to die.

Meaning we must learn to embrace the death of our wants, needs and desires for the sake of others if we want to experience true love. We must learn to embrace the work of killing our flesh, facing our restlessness, and naming our pain in order to experience God’s full love. Like in a marriage we grow when we don’t run away from the hard stuff, the difficult, awkward conversations, our desires for ease or our own expectations.

But it takes time and patience. So how do we practice patience if the fruit of the spirit are byproducts of a life lived with God, not virtues that we can create or superpowers we can summon when needed? How do we make space in our daily lives to allow the spirit to cultivate in us what we can’t grow for ourselves?

I don’t know, and I don’t mean that in like a funny, clever way. I honestly, I don’t know. Sloth, as I’ve learned this week, is actually something that is a deep rooted struggle for me. Me, but in my struggle, what I have sensed is a quiet question from God that feels like a whisper straight into my heart or a thought in my mind that seems to come from somewhere else.

It’s a question that comes up whenever I pick up my phone instead of being present to the kids after I come home from work. It’s a question that comes up when I scroll YouTube instead of writing a teaching when I open the fridge in the middle of my fast when I choose to catch up on the news via TikTok, which is a weird place to get news, but I just, I’m confessing instead of spending quiet mornings in prayer or when I’m tempted to shut down and go to bed, instead of apologizing for this, again, hypothetical argument that may or may not have happened between me and my wife at 9:30 PM on the couch.

And the question comes in two parts. First, it’s this, what are you actually avoiding?

Now, what’s the thing beneath the thing? Is it pain? Is it boredom?

Is it sin that I need to confess? Is it something I need to repent from? Is it a fear that I’m holding away from God? Is it a worst case scenario that I think is gonna happen? It’s plaguing my mind like anxiety. What’s the thing that I want to numb right now? And the second part is, where am I inactive? If there’s something that I’m avoiding, what would it look like for me to actually confront and name that pain to endure whatever level of suffering it may or may not cause?

What has God called me to do that I’m not currently doing? Where is apathy taken root in my life? Where am I tempted to say I? I don’t really care anymore.

See sloth is a silent killer,

but I think that’s where God meets us the most, is in the quiet and the movement of our hearts. Just as we make that decision to pass the person in, need to say no to the prompting, to not apologize, to not have the hard conversation, to not spend however much time you feel is appropriate in mourning, prayer and reading scripture.

Whatever it is, that moment, whatever that is, that’s the invitation. And we’re a community of grace here, so nobody has it figured out. But here’s what I do know, is that Jesus isn’t waiting for us to say or do the right thing. I think Jesus is just waiting for us to open the door ’cause he’s seeking after us standing.

And knocking. All we have to do is say yes. So why don’t we stand and respond?