[Gary Petty] I read one time that this was something that was posted, a notice that was posted on an employee bulletin board at a business. It says, "Due to increased competition and a keen desire to stay in business, we find it necessary to institute a new policy. We're asking that somewhere between starting time and quitting time and without infringing on the time devoted to lunch, coffee breaks, rest periods, storytelling, tickets selling, vacation planning, and rehashing of gossip, each employee endeavors to find some time to set aside as what we're calling the work break. This may seem a radical innovation, but we believe the idea has possibilities. It can conceivably be an aid to steady employment and regular paychecks. While adoption to the work break is not compulsory, it's hoped that each employee will find time to give it a fair trial."

But the six years that I spent working in radio advertising, I came in contact with a lot of different businesses, small businesses, big businesses. And one of the problems they all had every one of them was how do we find and keep good employees? That's a problem that they all faced. You say, "Okay, employees, what does that have to do with what we're going to talk about today?" Are you a good employee? Do you work hard? "What's that have to do with my Christianity?"

Actually, the Bible talks about having a work ethic. What does that mean? What does it mean that we are to have a work ethic? What does the Bible really teach us about work? There's an interesting story that we find in 2 Thessalonians 3. That Paul is making some personal comments here to the people of Thessalonica about a problem that they had. Picking it up in verse 6. He says, "But we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you withdraw from every brother who walks disorderly and not according to the tradition which you received from us."

Now, these people were disorderly. And he's actually saying, you know, these people have become so disorderly in the congregation that we're just suggesting you don't even talk to them. That's a pretty strong statement. Like what in the world were they doing? I mean, disorderly means that they're causing problems, they're destroying relationships. I mean, what in the world are these people doing to cause that kind of problem? You think well, they must have some heresy, you know that they're teaching or what are they doing? He says, "For you, yourselves know… He says… Let me give you an example here. "For you, yourselves know how you ought to follow us."

He's talking about him and some traveling companions who had been with him when he went to actually visit the church of Thessalonica. "How you ought to follow us, for we were not disorderly among you." Okay, well, we didn't create this problem when we were there so we tried to show you an example. He says, "Nor did we eat anyone's bread free of charge, but worked with labor and toil night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you, not because we did not have authority, to make ourselves example of how you should follow us." So he uses himself as an example. He says, “You know, when I came there,” with his ministerial companions, he says, “we didn't taking money from you to serve you while we were there.” But they worked day and night. And of course, we know that he was a tentmaker.

So he says, "We worked our own jobs and didn't take money, even though we could have. I mean, it would only be ethically right for the church to support us while we were there." But he says, "No, we didn't ask anything from you." So there's a problem here he's getting to that has to do with disorderly conduct. He says, "For even when we were with you, we commanded you this: If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat. For we hear that there are some who walk among you in a disorderly manner, not working at all, but they're busybodies. Now those who are such we command and exhort through our Lord Jesus Christ that they work in quietness and eat their own bread."

Boy, what kind of major problem were they having? Now, I don't know exactly, but the cause was that there was a large enough group of people in their congregation who just refused to work. They just didn't work. And it says there were busybodies. They spent their time just meddling in everybody else's business. So they were creating this constant problem in the church. Which I mean, that seems sort of odd to us today. I mean, I don't think I've ever been in a congregation where I've seen this exact problem where you had a large number of people just creating all this problem at church because they just refuse to work.

But there's an important statement he makes here. He says, "For even when we were with you…" I'm sorry, he says, "For if they shall not work, they shall not eat… If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat.” That's the point he's making. Now, the Bible is very clear in the absolute command to take care of the poor. Everyone has a responsibility to take care of the poor. Poor people who are there because some calamity has happened, because maybe they just don't have the skills to get certain jobs. Maybe they… you know, there's all kinds of reasons why someone could be poor. And the church is given and ancient Israel were given explicit commands to help take care of poor people. What Paul says here is, if a person is poor because they won't work, you don't take care of them.

Now, that seems strange too in the society we live in. And why would he say that? If the person is hungry, and he says no if it's because they refuse to eat, let them get hungry, and then they will go work. Let them get hungry then they'll go work. So he's making a point here. Now, once again, we have to put this in the context of why he makes this statement. There is in the congregation a group of people who cause nothing but problems in the church. They're meddling in everybody else's business or probably just showing up at people's houses expecting to be taken care of.

Although I have had… I have had as a pastor, a few people that do that. I've come across people who will go from church to church. And they'll come in and they'll spend three-four months in a church living with people, being taken care of by people always saying they're going to get a job. Sometimes I've seen it go on for six months and the people will take them in. A lot of times it's older people. Then they'll wear out there welcome there, and go someplace else. And eventually, it comes down to this person doesn't even look for a job. And so you have a conversation and say, look, "You just can't come in and take advantage of these people." I mean, in some cases, large amounts of money were given to then and then they disappear.

Then I get an email from another pastor that says, "Hey, so and so has showed up at my church and they just moved in with a couple of the elderly people." And I've seen men… it's always men. But I've seen men be able to do this sometimes for a couple of years before they get caught. Now, Paul would say, "Sorry, you don't work, you don't eat. We don't give you anything. You don't work, you don't receive shelter." He's talking about Christians taking care of Christians here. He says, "If you refuse to do certain things, then the church is not to take care of you." So this means work is important. This is an extreme example but this is where I want to start. It must be important for Paul to make these instructions to a church. If a person refuses to work, it's not that they can't work, or maybe they just don't have a lot of skills or whatever. And you know, they're doing the best they can, maybe they have a real low paying job because that's all they can do then we're supposed to take care of them, help them. “But if they refuse to work,” he says, “then you don't take care of them.”

So work is important. Work is an important part of who we are because work is part of our Christian character. Now, I'm going to talk about being a workaholic here. I might mention a couple of times. Being a workaholic is the other end of the scale. Being a workaholic is spiritually wrong also. When we put ourselves into our work so much that we're not having a right relationship with God, we're not taking care of our families, we're not taking care of ourselves. And recreation is part of life. Fun is part of life. So that's that other extreme.

But usually, we as human beings tend to fall on the sort of lazy side than the workaholic side. So we're going to talk about work today. Because it is an ethical issue. Now, I will say this when I talk about work here, and I've seen this happen in the church. I've actually had people come to me and want to counsel because they'll say, "You know, I realized that I'm preparing for the Kingdom of God. And since I'm preparing for the kingdom of God, I'm just a" and you can fill in the blank. “I'm just a construction worker. I'm just a salesman. I'm just a housewife. I'm just a office worker.” And whatever they fill in and they say, "Probably I need to get another job to prepare for the Kingdom of God." Your career isn't the issue, it's your work ethic that's the issue. It's your work ethic that's the issue, not what you're doing.

I used to tell my kids, "Find out what you're really good at, that makes you happy and go become the best at it. You may not make the most money, but you will be happy." When you're doing work you love, you're happy. Now, unfortunately, every job has drudgery. We'll talk about that in a minute. And you can be trapped at a job sometimes for a while that you hate. Okay, what do you do with that? Well, we'll talk about that in a minute, too. These are all real issues. This is practical Christianity, practical Christianity. So it doesn't matter what job you do. God doesn't care if you're an architect. God doesn't care if you're a boss with 100 people. God doesn’t… Well, I say He doesn't care.

What's really interesting is go through all the scriptures about employers. There are lots of scriptures in the Old and New Testament about employers. There's one of the laws in the Old Testament that says, "If you withhold your wages that you owe people as an employer, God will punish you." Is that a little scary? God says, "I hold that, personally, that's a personal issue. If people work for you, and you hold back their wages, then that's personal between Me and you. I will deal with that." So there's a lot of instructions about bosses and employers. But we're going to talk about employees today. Most of us are employees. There's a few here that might own your own business, but most of us do not.

So what does the Bible teach about work? You know, I talked about your jobs. Most people will have multiple jobs in a lifetime. What's really different than say 50 years ago, my dad, his dad, back then, most people had one career. Many times they worked for the same company their entire lives. That's not true today. Most of you, if you're young, you're going to have more than one career. You actually have more than one career. You may start out in something and end up doing something totally different by the end of your life.

In fact, the average person today will have three different careers. Now, we're not talking about three different jobs. You may have a career which you work for three or four different companies, and then another career and you work for three or four different companies. So it's changed from… it used to be you get hired by somebody, you work for that same company maybe your whole life. It's not that way anymore. Remember, it's not the specific job. It's the work ethic that's the Christian part of what you do. God doesn't care if you're a farmer. Be a good farmer. Like I used to tell my son he loved working on cars, I said, "Go be a car mechanic." "I can't make a lot of money." "Just go be the best car mechanic you can be." Now, he's selling insurance and loves it. So I was wrong on that one.

I used to tell my kids, "I can't determine what you're going to do, you have to decide that. You have to decide what you're going to do because it's your life, it's not mine." So, learn the work ethic, and you're going to be pretty much successful in everything you do. Now, I say successful, even if you do it right, bad things happen. In preparing this, I looked up probably 10 websites. They were business websites. They were management websites. One was a college website giving advice to students on reasons people get fired. And, you know, the number one was they just don't do their job. Like, number two was people fall asleep. That kept showing up all over. People sleep, you know. Number three was they're spending all their day on their cell phone, or, you know, they're just not involved in their work. There was all these reasons.

But then I saw another list from a business magazine. It was pretty interesting. It said, "We're going to tell you some other reasons why people get fired. The boss wants to give the job to his nephew,” okay. And then there were reasons why you get fired, which you are doing a great job and your manager becomes absolutely jealous of you and gets you fired. And I've known people that have gone through that. Got fired because they were doing a good job, and somebody got jealous.

So, okay, life, you know, there's no magic pill that says do this equals perfect success, that's not life. Sometimes you do it right and something bad happens. The difference is when you're doing it right you will find something else to do. You can recover from the problem if you're doing it right. If you're doing it wrong… I mean, you get fired from someplace three or four times just because it says you're insubordinate. You just aren't going to listen to your boss. You think he's an idiot, and you've been fired from three places because you think the boss is an idiot. Guess what the next boss is going to do, not hire you, right? They don't want to put up with that. So if you do it the right way, you have a much better chance of recovering from the bad things when they happen. Do it the wrong way and sooner or later you dig yourself in a hole.

What does the Bible say about work? Let's go to Colossians. Say well, this isn't a spiritual issue. Whether I daydream on the job, whether I play video games on the job when I should doing something else, that's not a spiritual issue. Colossians 3:22. Bondservants, now bondservants, so that was you worked for somebody because you owed them something. This is a type of employership. I mean, there were businesses in the Roman Empire where they hired employees. There were people that had bondservants. In other words, "you owe me something so you got to work for me."

There were people who… if you were craftsmen, especially, you would be hired out to different people. Of course, they had slaves, too. So Paul is just talking to a class of people that work for other people. He says, "Obey in all things your masters according to the flesh,” what? Now, not if they tell you to do something against God. Now, if your employer tells you to do something dishonest, you say, "No." And sooner or later, most of us have had to face that. I've had to face it earlier in my life. Or you just say, "I can't do that. That's immoral. That's wrong, whatever you're asking me to do."

I remember one radio station… I probably should have mentioned this before. I was really supposed to go date all the young girls that worked at the advertising agencies after… you know, not date, just go to the bar with them. I said, "I got a pregnant wife at home. I'm not going to go out after work and take these young single women to a bar." He said, "Well, you don't have to let them know you won't do anything." That's literally what I was told. "Just, you know, have some fun with them and then you get the account." And I said, "I don't want the account that bad." The owner of that radio station told me you know… it was the number one radio station in Austin, Texas. He said, "You know, you're a nice guy and in my experience, nice guys don't make it in a lot of companies." I didn't.

So you obey them in their job what they're telling you to do not with eye service as men-pleasers. In other words, you're not doing this because you just want to get on the good side of your boss. But in sincerity of heart. In other words, you do your job, you do it because you want to do the job right. Why? Because you're fearing God. "And whatever you do, do it heartily as to the Lord and not to men knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance for you serve the Lord Jesus Christ." What? He makes this a spiritual issue. When you go to work, you give all that you have because you think that you're serving God. "I'm serving God."

Why would you do that? Because to your employer, to the people you work with you are representing God to them. Believe me, they all figure out you're a little bit different. They know your religion is a little bit different. Wherever you are, you represent God. And it's that way when you go to work. So when you go to work you give everything you have. Look what it says in 1 Timothy. Here, Paul writing once again, 1 Timothy 6. He really spells it out here. He says, "Let as many bondservants as are under the yoke…” in other words, sometimes when you work with somebody else, you're under a yoke, right? You don't show up on time. And by the way, that's one of the reasons that kept coming up, people were getting fired. Now, certain companies are very loose with that policy, certain aren't.

And if you work for a company and said, "What time we start?" "Oh, 9, 9:30, you know, just sort of whenever you come in." And there's companies like that. Then you get a company that says, "We expect you here at 8:30." And you're there at 8:40 and they fire you. And you can say, "Well, the last company was like this. This isn't fair." And they say, "But you don't work with the last company. You work for us." And so it is a yoke to work for other people. Now it doesn't mean it can't be fun. I mean, I enjoy being a pastor. No, I love being a pastor. But there are days where it's tough. There's days where it's tough.

He says, “yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor." Why? I mean, all of us here have worked for some person that you know, wasn't worthy of honor, right? We've all been there. So why would you do that? And here's why. "So that the name of God and His teachings will not be blasphemed." So that the name of God won't be blasphemed. They may say, "I don't like you." They may not like you because you are so honest. They may not like you because you are obeying God, but God won't be blasphemed. And that's why I said, when you go to work, you represent God. When you go to work, you are there your work ethic is part of your Christianity. So yeah, we should talk about this. Yes, it is important. And yes, it is one of the keys to success.

And sometimes younger people, you know, struggle with… you know, we all did when… Although I didn't. When I was young, I figured out somehow, I don't know why, when I was about 15 years old, I made a list of all the things I wanted to do in life. You know, get baptized. Find me a good woman that will take me, have children. Okay, that was number three. After that, it was work in radio, become a television talk show host, become an author of books, work as a reporter for… I had all these things I was going to do. Some of them I've done, I tell you what, being a minister wasn't on the list. Some I've done. Some I haven't.

But we all struggle with, "What am I supposed to do with my life?" You will have lots of choices in life and you probably… whatever choice you make at 18, you're going to change. The important thing is, what is your work ethic? Because you can change. I mean, I've known people who were doctors and became something else at age 30 and have been very successful. They were successful doctors. Now, they're successful with something else. I mean, what a change. You become a doctor at 28, at 35 you change jobs. You can have lots of choices in life. The important thing is if you learn how to work, you actually are equipped to make those choices. And you'll be equipped to make the changes if you want to.

If you don't know how to work, you don't have the ability to make the changes. There are people who are trapped in jobs because they've never learned how to work and they can't get out of it. It's all they can do. Now, some people, it depends on your personality. You find a job and you like it, and you stay in it for the rest of your life. And that's great too. But you have the equipment to make the decision. You see what I mean? You have the ability to make those decisions because your character is right, your work ethic is right. Otherwise, other people make those decisions for you. So that's what this is about. And so you are following God. You are doing this because you represent God. Now, that would change a lot of things, how you handle a lot of things at work.

So that's the first point I want to make. You know, when you go to work, you're going to work there as a representative of God. Now, you have to accept that. If you don't accept that it's like everything else. You either accept you're a Christian or not, but we shouldn't call ourselves Christian if we don't believe that we are followers of Christ and represent Christ. If we're Christians, we're representing. What we do at work counts. What we do at work matters. I mean, you spend 8 hours, you know, 40 hours a week at least at work probably more.

And a lot of even your happiness depends on what happens when you work. You know, a lot of times people will drag home their problems from work and bring them home and have a rotten marriage because of the problems they have at work. Especially if they're both working, they both drag it home and, you know, one can't help the other and they're unhappy. And the real issue sometimes isn't the marriage. The real issue is what's happening at work.

The second point… Now, we're going to get down to some real practical… the first thing here is a little bit conceptual. We work to represent God. Okay, so that means what I do is important. The second is that a proper work ethic requires that there's a list, you accomplish the work that is assigned to you in the way that it has been assigned to you and in the time allotted. Here's your job, do it this way and do it in this amount of time. Now, sometimes you go back and say, "Hey, this way doesn't work." Sometimes you go back and say, "Hey, I can't do it in this amount of time." Sometimes you go back and say, "Hey, I finished early so I didn't go to sleep, or I didn't sit around and, you know, just call up and look at pictures of puppies. Instead, I've come and said, "What do you want me to do next boss?"

I mean, one of the reasons we hate work so much is we get bored because we're bored with what we're doing. You're never bored when you're locked into doing something and you're putting your effort into it. Proverbs 26. Here's where it shows laziness is a moral deficiency. It is a moral problem. Proverbs 26:13, "The lazy man says, ‘There's a lion in this road! A fierce lion in the streets!” In other words, "I can't go outside." They have an excuse for everything. I mean, the excuse is there's a lion in the street is silly. There's a lion in the street, it doesn't matter. In other words, the excuse doesn't matter. "I'm just not going to do it. I just make up an excuse."

"As the door turns on its hinges, so does the lazy man on his bed." I love that one. You know, you've heard an old creaky door that's all rusty and will hardly open. Although I have to admit it at 63 there's days that getting out of bed is like that. But it's literal, because that's the sound of my joints, okay. But we have to make ourselves get up and go. And there's a few people, most of us really can't believe it, they just wake up, jump out of bed. They're happy. They're ready to go. And it's, like, the rest of us, we just sort of walk around in a stupor for a while, and grunt for coffee and, you know. But you make yourself do it. More people have lost jobs because they simply won't make themselves do it.

And he calls this a lazy person. "The lazy man buries his hand in the bowl; and wearies him to bring it back to his mouth." Now you can imagine, you take your spoon and you stick it in the bowl and you just sit and stare and say, "Would someone feed me please?" It's an absurdity to this. "The lazy man is wiser in his own eyes than seven men who can answer sensibly." And that's very true. The more lazy we are, the more reasons we have for being lazy, the more reasons why it's somebody else's fault. And the more reasons why, everybody that tells us, "No, that's not how the way it works," we say they're either wrong or they don't understand, or "Hey, get out of my face. You're oppressing me." And so we stay the way we are.

So there is an amount of effort that we have to put into this. A small business had a sign hanging on the wall that said, "If you don't believe the dead come back to life, you've never been here at quitting time." You know, all work does have some drudgery. I mean, I have to admit, when I'm doing paperwork sometimes, I'd rather be out visiting people or, you know, working on a Bible study. I have certain paperwork I have to do. But it has to be done. So you pile through it, you know. I'll tell my wife, "I'm going up to my office. I'll be up there for three hours. I'm doing paperwork." And I find out when I tell her that she won't even talk to me for three hours. It's, like, "He's up there. Leave him alone." But you got to plow through it, you got to make yourself do it. It has to be done. There is a point we have to face no matter what the job you have. And sometimes when you start out in a job, you know, they give you the worst jobs to begin with then you have to do the worst jobs.

I think I've mentioned this before I worked… In the Worldwide Church of God, I worked in SEP. And I worked two summers, where I was in charge of the janitorial crew. Now, one of the things we had to do was the bathhouses every morning after hundreds of teenagers went in and destroyed it. We would get a dorm of maybe, you know, 30 teenagers, and now we had to go clean up something that was, like, out of a horror movie. I can't explain what 200 teenagers will do to a bathhouse, okay. And they would all be, I mean, griping and complaining. They didn't want to go in, So I had to give them the little speech all the time. That little speech was, "in life, you're going to be asked to do things you don't want to do. We have an hour to do this. We can go make this a game and I am…" the other two people I had working with me "we'll go in and help you do it. We'll get right…" I mean, the toilets were always clogged up. It was just horrible. "We will help you do this. And if we work as a team, and you do what we say, we'll be done in a half-hour. And then the other half hour, you have off. You can do whatever you want. You can go sit around." You know, all they ever wanted to do when they were done was just is sit around and talk. "You can do that. If you don't, you'll be here the full hour and only half the job will be done and you will hate it every minute."

And so we would go in, and for, you know, 20 minutes to a half-hour, we told them how to work as a team, we told them what to do, how to motivate each other. When one person slacks, everybody's got to make them work. And you know, they were always done in a half-hour. And then they had a half-hour off. Well, I can't say always. Because sometimes you get a group that just wouldn't do it. And an hour later, they were mad and grumpy. They'd be mad and grumpy the whole rest of the morning. They were upset. They hated it. How dare people make them have to do this? And they were miserable.

Now, everybody had the same job and it was just as bad for everybody. And you know, some groups came out of there, fired up ready to go, "Hey, man, we got a half-hour." Other groups after an hour were, "We hated this." And you know, it would take them a long time to get over it. The idea is at times, we just have to say, "The job has to be done," and we throw ourselves into it completely.

Many years later, I had a man come up to me and say, "Hey, you changed my life." I said, "I did. How did I ever change your life?" He said, "At SEP, that little talk you gave to us every time when we had to go in and clean out the bathhouse." I said, "Yeah?" He said, "I applied that to my life." And he says, "Now I own my own business and I'm quite wealthy." You simply attack the job at hand. And then you go do something else. But you attack the worst job by attacking it. You go into it. You do your work. Now, work ethic requires that you accomplish the work assigned to you, the way that it has been assigned, and in the time allotted. And so you do it.

The third point, a proper work ethic requires you use your time to give your employee a full day's work. You give them a full day's work. Say, "Yeah, but sometimes, you know, eight hours is a long time." I understand. But when I started to look at the reason people get fired, and so many of the times is because they're not working. They're talking, they're gossiping, they're texting, they're doing all different kinds of things.

Understand this, what if a friend of yours said, "Here. I can't go to the store. I'm going to give you $100 to go to the store and get all this stuff for me. Here's a $100. And since you're doing this for me, and it's so nice, you know, get yourself some lunch." You say, "Okay," and you took their $100. And you're supposed to be back in an hour. You come back three hours later and instead of the list, you have two things in a bag. And they say, "Well, wait a minute, you know, I had all this stuff." And you say, "Yeah, but, you know, I was having such a good time at lunch, picked up a couple of other friends and we used your money buying lunch and all I had enough was to get you this." You'd say, "You stole my money," right?

If someone did that to you wouldn't you say, "You stole my money?" When you go and work for a person and agree to work for them for a certain amount of money, and you don't give them a full day's work, I don't care how much the money is, the money isn't the issue. It's you that's the issue, who you are. And you don't give them a full day's work, you're stealing from the employer. You're stealing their time. "Here. I'm going to pay you to work for me." "Thank you. I'll take the money and I won't work." It's stealing. There's a point of dishonesty here. So we don't think that way. There's a point of dishonesty.

Ways that we waste time at work. "Oh good, another survey." No, I'm going to go to the Bible. Proverbs 14, a couple of places in Proverbs. Proverbs 14. There's a lot of benefits to work in our character and even some happiness. We'll talk about that in a minute. Proverbs 14:23. "In all labor, there is profit." There's a benefit from work. And once again, being a workaholic isn't the issue here. It's working that's the issue. When you are supposed to work you work.

"In all labor there's profit, but an idle chatter leads only to poverty." In other words, you spend all your time talking at work, on your computer at work, unless you're working on a computer, obviously, texting at work, sharing all your different plans and, you know, getting together all the people you're going out to dinner with afterwards, and you do all that while at work. You can end up in poverty because you're not going to have a job. You say, "Boy, that employer sure is mean and tough. What's their problem?" Now, remember, they paid you to work. They offered you money to work and you agreed to it. If you don't like the agreement, quit but don't steal from them.

You know, you're going to get in a bad job some point in life too. Once again, if you have the right character, if you have the tools, you'll be able to get out of a bad job. If you don't have the tools, guess what happens? "I can't get out of a bad job because I can't get any job," or you quit and end up what, doing nothing. I've seen people quit jobs. I knew a man one time who had been fired… I don't remember the exact number… It's been so many years ago. This was, like, 35 years ago. But I think he'd been fired from 12 jobs in 16 years all because of the Sabbath. I don't believe that. You might lose a job or two over the Sabbath, but if you're a good employee, you're going to find a job someplace. I think he's a bad employee. Now, a couple of times might be over the Sabbath but I don't believe all of them were.

Look at Proverbs 12:11. "He who tills his land will be satisfied with bread, but he who follows frivolity is devoid of understanding." In otherwise words, he who just…"All I want to do is have fun." Well, there's a time for fun, by the way, God is not against fun. There's a time for fun. And it's great when your work is fun, too. I mean, I have fun times at my job sometimes, and sometimes it's not. But when you just pursue having fun, instead of getting joy out of your work, he says, you don't understand what's going to happen to you. It doesn't work that way.

Proverbs 19:15 "Laziness casts one into a deep sleep, and an idle person will suffer hunger." In other words, when we are lazy, you know what happens? We get tired all the time. We lose a desire to achieve anything. Part of work is achieving something. It's achieving something. Now, some of you remember a couple of years ago, I kept using the example of how I told my wife I would paint the bathroom and then didn't do it. Okay. Well, I don't know, about nine months ago, I painted the bathroom, okay. But I have to tell you when I finished painting the bathroom… she wasn't there I thought I'd surprise her. And I looked around and I thought, "I really feel good about this." And then she walked in and said, "It needs another coat." So I put another coat on, and I felt good about that, too, right. When you accomplish something, you feel good and that is worth… You know, sometimes you don't work because of your boss and you don't work because of the money. Sometimes you work because in the end, "I did a good job. I did that." It's your character that counts. It's who you are that counts. And so you do what's right. Otherwise, you just get… the more lazy you are… Here's the strangest thing. You ever say, "Oh, I wish I had a day off with nothing to do."

Yeah, I do that and every once in a while I try to take a day off with nothing to do. And it's okay for a while then I start getting antsy and sort of nervous and sort of crazy like and then… then I have to tell myself, "Settle down. There's work to do tomorrow. It's okay." So you can't be a workaholic either. But it's funny, if I had nothing to do all the time, I'd be miserable. Wouldn't you? If you had nothing, no goals, nothing to do, nothing to achieve, you'd be miserable.

"Oh, I just wish somebody would take care of me." No, you don't, you wouldn't live life with somebody just taking care of you every moment. We're not designed to be that way. We're designed to go work and produce and achieve. All of us are every human being. Or we just get sleepy.

A fourth point is that a proper work ethic means that we exhibit a very high standard of honesty and morality. Let's go to Titus 2. Titus 2, I'm going to read this from the NIV. In the King James, it says bondservants here which is more of an employee relationship. But here in this translation… this is Titus 2:9. "Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not talk back to them." Okay, you just don't talk back to your employer all the time. Now, that doesn't mean you shouldn't give good suggestions. Most employers want a good… I mean, you might get some hard-nosed person that doesn't. But most employers want a good suggestion if they can see it's good. "Hey, if we do this would this make this better?" You know, because they know you now hey, you're concerned about the job. You're concerned about what you're doing. Your work is important to you. But he says, "And not to steal from them, but to show that they can be fully trusted, so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive." He says you be so honest, such a good upstanding person, such a moral person, that you make Christianity attractive to pagans.

"Boy, I wish I had more Christians like you working, you know, for me because you're good workers. I can trust you, people. You're not going to steal from me. I'm not going to have to worry because I can't figure out why.” You know, “I just bought a box of copy paper and half of it it's gone." "Oh yeah, I took it home. You know, my kids use it." That's stealing. And so we are to make… It's so fascinating here. Paul over and over again says, remember when you're out there working who you represent. Be moral and be honest. We should be very, very, very honest.

And don't think they don't notice. People notice whether you're honest or not. They do. They will notice whether you're honest or not. And this is more important than your job title. This is more important than how much money you make, your honesty. I've seen Christians sacrifice their honesty for more money, or sacrifice their honesty to get a higher position. And that's not what this is about. That higher position or more money means nothing to God. Honesty means something to God. So don't buy into this sort of American dream. "The more power and money I have, the more important I am to God," because that's not true. It's just not true. It's who you are as His child that's important to Him.

Let me just sort of wrap up with a few things here. Why do we work then? Okay, we work to… What's our benefit, if you will, from working? Constructive work gives us a sense of purpose and a sense of accomplishment in your daily life. You know, I'm 63. I know a lot of men and women that retire at 65. I couldn't imagine retiring at 65. I can't even imagine… I’ve got so much more to accomplish. In fact, I'm getting to the place that I'm even more serious about what I have to accomplish because, well, you know, I don't have a lot of time left here. I'm going to live another 30 years. I got more things to accomplish.

And so this constructive work gives us a sense of accomplishment. Even if our boss… see once again it's you get a benefit from working. What did God tell Adam and Eve? Go to Genesis 2:15. Genesis 2. It's a very important passage here. "Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend it and to keep it." "You are to work this garden." He didn't say, “Oh, here's the garden. It'll sort of grow itself. Just let everything run wild, it'll be fine." He says, "You are to tend it and to keep it." "You have work to do here, son, and you're going to like working. You're going to get up in the morning and you're going to enjoy going out and tending the garden." Without a sense of accomplishment, without things to do, Adam would have been bored, even in Eden. We are designed to accomplish things.

There's a study that was done in Harvard. And it's an interesting study because the first time I read of this study was in the 1980s. And it had started kind of back in the 1940s. I just read this week because I was looking at the study. The study continues on. Some of the people involved in this study in the 1940s are still alive and they're still studying them, these people at Harvard. The people who started the original study are all dead it's new, but they've been studying these… I think it was 465 boys. And they were all from inner-city, Boston. And they had all different backgrounds, and all different economic backgrounds, and educational backgrounds, and ethnic backgrounds. You know, they're just from all over the place. And so they started to go through them. What were they like at 15 or where were they at 25? So in the 1980s, these guys are in their 40s and 50s. Well, they're in their 50s at this point. And they found some very interesting things.

Now, as they continued on as they got older, into their ‘70s and ‘80s now, and '90s, they found that there were two things that changed their lives more than anything. One was the quality of relationships they had when they were younger. Were there adults who loved them or not? Oh, yeah that makes sense, doesn't it? That was the most… The number one impact on their lives, whether there were adults that loved them and interacted with them as children. The second one was whether they had work to do as a child.

You say, "Oh, we just put our kids in the salt mines." This was as simple as mowing the grass. It was as simple as cleaning your room. And in doing so, they found out that these young boys who had interactive relationships, people who actually cared for them, and taught them and interacted with them, and then they were made to work. Those were the two greatest factors in their success of life and how happy they were.

People who work and put themselves into their work are happier. They're not bored. They have purpose. And like I said, these jobs were just… "Okay, you're 15. Go get a job," you know. No. It could be as simple as, "Okay, you have chores, and you have to take out the garbage and you participate in what the family does." Or sometimes a lot… These boys came from broken families. Still, there was always some adults somewhere that interacted with them in a positive way. And they always had some value in their work. "I'm producing something, and as I produce something, I have value. I produce something and therefore I have value." And as they grew up that changed their lives.

One of the greatest gifts you can give your children… the greatest gift you can give your children is your love and your time. A second greatest gift you can give them is teaching them God's way. Now, you have to give them love and time before you can teach them God's way. "Okay, we're going to have school today. I'm going to teach you God's way and the rest of the time I'm going to ignore you." That doesn't work. You give them love and time first, and that builds the relationship that you can say, "let me tell you about God," and it means something.

If we don't give our children of ourselves, then somebody else gives them of themselves. And it's probably be the other kid next door. You see what I mean? We can't let other people raise our children. We have to give them our love and our time. Then the second most important thing you could do is give them God's way and teach it and live it for them. And the third most important thing you can do, make them do some chores, make them do some work. That there's purpose in work. There's meaning and work.

I could remember my dad telling me… we’re sanding floors, which is hard work. I was a teenager. He said, yeah, he says, "I worked hard, worked hard. My dad pushed me and pushed me. Because he was pushing me all the time. “Do this better. Work harder, do this,” you know, just all the time. He said that one day, he said, “Okay, you got to finish this job.” And he left. And he said, I thought, "Good. I'm going to take a cigarette break." Because he was a chain smoker before he came into the Church. He said, “But I couldn't. I tried, and I couldn't light it I had to go finish the job."

So when I was about 17, one day he said, "You got to finish the job." I said, "Oh, good." And when he showed up I'm just finishing it. And he said, "Yeah, that's what I figured how long would it take you to finish it." I thought, "Yeah, I just finished the job." He did the same thing to me that his dad did to him. We have to realize we teach them to work. And I sure was proud of that floor. I still remember it. I still remember that it was a Lebanese club and they had, like, a meeting room, ballroom in it. And that looked like a sheet of glass. That floor had been just sanded perfectly and finished perfectly. And it looked like… And I still remember that. I was probably 17 years old. I don't remember any of the girls when I was 17. But I remember that floor.

A secondary reason we work is to support our families. This is important to God. 1 Timothy 5:8. I don't remember any girls because it seems to me that I've been married… it seems to me, I've known my wife since I was a baby. It seems somehow we've been connected since we were children. I know that's not true. But it seems to me that way. So I don't remember anybody else. Yeah, she's always been there. 1 Timothy 5:8. "But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his own house, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever." Think about that statement. If you can work… Now, once again, sometimes we can't work or sometimes we're limited at what we can do or sometimes we just don't have opportunities.

I mean, sometimes you look at some… Darris McNeely just got back from a trip to Africa. And some of those people are doing as hard as they can and there's only so much money they can bring in. You can work 15 hours a day and you're never going to get out of a dirt hut. But they work, you know. You do your part. He's saying here the person says, "Nah, take care of me." He says you're worse than a person that's not even a Christian. See how much he ties this into our Christianity?

We have responsibilities. We work for other people. You know, and I will speak to the young men here. Guys, young men, when you marry and you have children, and especially if your wife says, "I need to stay home and take care of those children," your God-given responsibility is to take care of them. I don't care what the cost. If we can't do that don't get married and don't have children. Be man enough not to do it. Our responsibility is to take care of those if they need us. And, you know, sometimes women will have careers and then have two or three children say, "I can't do this. I can't do both of them." And we man up. How many hours a week do you work to do that? As many as it takes. As many as it takes. That's what we do.

And if we aren't willing to do that, you're not worthy of a wife. It's that simple. That's what Paul is saying. There's a loss of manhood that I'm concerned with. We sacrifice what we have to sacrifice for our families. That's part of work. Now, fortunately, hopefully, you have a job you don't have to do all that. But believe me, I know years ago, when I was a kid, I saw men work two or three jobs to feed a family, not because they had a great career. They worked two or three jobs just to feed a family. They would do whatever it took.

People had bigger families. The woman couldn't work. She had six kids. And that's what they did. Did they want to work three jobs? No. Why did they do it? It's what we do. We work to help those who are in financial need. I know sometimes some of these ideas are not popular in our society. The destruction of manhood is one of the most terrible things that's happened to our country. And now what's happening is destruction of womanhood. I mean, what God expects of women. If you destroy the men, what are the women going to do, right, what choice do they have?

And now where we have little three-year-olds that have decided that they're of a different sex. And parents who say, "Okay." A society cannot survive that, understand that. A society cannot survive that. Oh, it won't fall tomorrow, but it will fall. That is totally against the way anything is worked. Even the pagans knew that much. Even the ancient pagans knew that much.

Ephesians 4:28, "Let him who stole steal no more." So he's just telling people in church look, you got to change your… you know, if you used to be a thief, you're a Christian now. You got to stop being a thief. But notice what he says, "But rather let him labor, working with his hands, what is good, that he may have something to give him who has need." Paul actually says to people in the Church, "Okay, not stealing is the letter of the law. You and I have to go way beyond the letter of the law." He says, "Go work so you can help somebody else and give them a hand up. Go work so you can give to somebody else. Somebody gives you a hand up you go work and get somebody…" It's not, like, "Oh, good, somebody give me a hand up," keep giving your hand out. No. If someone gives you a hand up you go work and give somebody else a hand up. You and I are required by God to help each other in our times of need, and our times of poverty, and our times of old age, and our times of widowhood. We are required to help each other. It's at the center of God's way, that kind of love. And he says, start in the Church of God's, start in the house of God. And obviously with our own families, whether they're in the Church or not. That's where we just start.

And then the last reason, of course, is you and I have a duty to pay tithes and offerings to God. It's a duty. We should work because we wish to fulfill that duty. The work habits we form are part of our character. It's part of who we are. This is practical Christianity. "Wow, you've made looking at my cell phone, at my desk, some church issue." "No, it's practical Christianity. This isn't a church issue. It's Christianity issue." Work is important. And every day you have an opportunity when you go to work to be dependable and responsible and to show people what a Christian looks like. We're honest, we work hard, we're trustworthy. Those are all words that came up in what we've talked about here.

Also, you could be a whole lot happier when you just work hard. I don't care what it is. Scrubbing floors, cleaning toilets. I mean I think of all the things I've done in my life, sanding floors, painting houses. Well, I did have one job I failed miserably at. It was being a roofer. And the guy hired me… his son hired me and I said, "I don't know anything about roofing. I know nothing." He said, "Yeah, well, don't tell my dad. We just need some guys to work." So I spent 12 hours on the roof, trying to watch everybody else and figure out what they were doing. So at the end, the guy said, "You know, you're a hard worker, but you know absolutely nothing about roofing." And I said, "I know I don't." He says, "Well, I'm going to pay you because you're a hard worker, but I got to hire somebody that knows about roofing." I said, "I understand. I didn't tell your son I knew anything about roofing." And of course, they all laughed. They thought it was sort of funny. I was so glad I got fired from that job. I hated that job. But you know, I wasn't going to quit. I had told him I'd work the summer. I was going to work the summer and I thought, "By the end of summer I'll figure out how to be a roofer." But I was so glad I didn't have to figure out how to be a roofer. But I said I would. You know why I was going to do that? Not because I have great character because my dad had drilled me so much I had to finish the job. Even it was going to be all summer, I was going to learn how to be a roofer. So I was glad. And don't ask me to roof because I have no idea how to do that.

But these things make us happier. And it's these things that make up our work ethic. These are the traits that God is looking for. And these are the traits, not your job, but these character traits that God is going to use to serve Jesus Christ when He comes.

[Rudy Rangel] Happy Sabbath. Time is something that we all see a little bit differently, isn't it? When you're young, you have all the time in the world. Time to do whatever, all my plans, have all the time in the world. But when we start to get a little bit older, we… it's a lot easier to start to number our days, isn't it? Start seeing, you know what? This time is precious. The time that we've been given is precious. I don't feel like I have all the days in the world anymore to do all the things that I want to do with my life. We see time as valuable, not something to be wasted.

We talk a lot about time. A lot is written about time. There are lots of blogs, books on time management. How to make the most of your time. How to make the most of your work/life balance. How do I balance all the things that I need to accomplish at home with all the things that I want to accomplish in my career? How do I do that? There's tons written about it. How much time do we actually have? How much time do we have? If you live to be 70 years old, in your lifetime you have 613,200 hours in your lifetime if you live to be 70. That's, you know, a big number, a big number we can deal with.

Let's break that down in a week, though, because that's how we manage our time. What am I going to do this week? How much time do you have in a week? Well, that's easy, 24 times 7. You have 168 hours this week, 168 hours. But do you really have 168 hours? I mean, if you plan on sleeping, eight hours every day is allotted. Eight hours every day is allotted. So, we need to subtract from our 168 to really decide our usable hours. Subtract 56 hours. That's assuming everyone gets eight hours of sleep. Does everyone get eight hours of sleep? Nobody. Okay. Well, let's assume because that's what we should be getting for our health. If we subtract 56 hours, that leaves us with 112 hours a week. That's still quite a bit, isn't it? Well, if you're an adult and you have a full-time job and you work 40 hours, that time also is already allotted. So, we take away another 40 hours, 112 minus 40 is 72. I'm no mathematician. I had to write these numbers down, just so you know. But as soon as those 40 hours start, you're not just right there are work. The average American, they spend 26 minutes each day driving to work. So, that's an extra four hours a week on average that you're spending just in your commute alone.

So, if we take our 72 and we minus… subtract 4, we're down to 68 hours, 68 hours that you can decide to do with your time whatever you want, 68 hours. That's how much time we have. What did you do with your 68 hours this week, the time you can choose to do anything you want? Did you spend time doing chores? Did you spend… some of us work overtime, did you spend any extra time at work? Time with family? What about those spiritual matters? Did we take time for prayer and Bible study? Did we take time doing good for others? When you think about having 68 hours, do you feel like that's a lot or do you feel like it's a little bit too little? I think that our views may differ on that depending on also our age once again. Today, I'd like to talk about time, hopefully, to get us thinking more intentionally how we spend our time.

Let's start in the book of Psalms. Let's go to Psalm 90 today. Psalm 90. Psalm 90:10, "The days of our lives are seventy years; and if by reason of strength they are eighty years." The New Living says it this way, "Seventy years are given to us, some even live to eighty, yet their boast is only labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Who knows the power of Your anger? And as we fear You, so is Your wrath." Verse 12, "So teach us teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom." The New Living says, "Teach us to realize the brevity of life so that we may grow in wisdom." It says here in verse 10 that we have 70 or 80 years if we're lucky. And you know what? Those numbers really do add up for us today. Even with all of our medical advances, the average American lives to be 78 years old, just over 78. So, it fits with scripture even after all these years and all that we've done, 78. Now, if you live in Canada, I know there's some Canadians watching online, your average is actually 82. So good for the Canadians, also sorry, Judy, for moving you to America and losing four years of your life.

This is important. The time that we've been given is a gift. It's a gift. We shouldn't take it for granted and we can't get caught up in the cycle of life that is so easy to do where we just continue going on our days and not really thinking about how we spend our precious time. You have 68 hours to choose to do whatever you want to do. What do you plan on doing with your 68 hours? The difficulty is that we are often… we feel like slaves to the commitments that we've made. We've made these commitments. You know, we have work, we have jobs, we have other promises we've done, and we're continuously running around and around and we're getting tired, and by the end of the day, we just want to sit on the couch and let Netflix just wash all over us. But Ferris Bueller told us when we were young that “life moves pretty fast, and if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it.” That's pretty smart for a teenage kid but it was actually the writer of the movie who wrote that. But that's what life feels like. It does feel very fast.

We know what God told Daniel. He told him to shut the book up because, until the end time, many shall run to and fro. And isn't that what it feels like? It feels like we're just running to and fro. Sure, knowledge is increasing, but man, at what cost? That's what it feels like sometimes. And to be honest, it's easier to just not really think about it. It's easier to… I'm just going to get up and I'm just going to do it again and I'm going to do it again and not really take stock of how I'm using my time because that's just something else on my plate that I have to deal with. It's just easier to continue on and not really assess how I've spent my time.

So, where do we go from here? Let's go to Ephesians. Ephesians 5. Ephesians 5:15 says this. "See that you walk circumspectly,” that's not a word we use every day. In my margin, it says carefully. But "See that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time because the days are evil. Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is." Walk circumspectly. Be diligent. Be diligent with how you use your time. And then it says here, "Redeeming the time." Redeem it. Take that time. Use it for yourself. When you look up this word redeem, it has this sort of connotation of a transaction and it's interesting because that's how we talk about time today. You say I spent time. I spent time doing this. I spent time doing that. We talk about time as a transaction. We're spending it. And maybe that's a good way for us to think about it because when we spend it, it's gone. It's gone. I spent two hours watching Netflix this week, I'm not getting that back. Maybe that's the way we should think about our time. We shouldn't look at it as something renewable. We have 68 hours this week and we're not going to get those 68 hours back. When we spend our time, it's gone. Our time is precious. It's precious.

I remember the first time in my life, and it's usually when you're in your 20s something big happens in your life and someone dies and you think, “Wow,” you know, “this person I was close to, I looked up to,” and a tragic accident happens. That happened to me when I was 25, newly married, there was this man in my congregation, larger than life character, boisterous, you know, jovial, everything you could say about him. He was just a fantastic person, one of the most encouraging people I know. There was a lot that we learned about him actually on the day of his funeral. He was a traveling salesman and oftentimes he would ride his motorcycle and in-between visits he would go visit some of the widows in the church area. He would go and sit and have coffee and tea and these things we never knew about him. He was just a fantastic person. Unfortunately, he was on his motorcycle one day and someone, not to any fault of his, fault of his own, pulled out in front of him. They didn't see him and it ended his life. It's usually those times when we really start to think about, “Wow, just like that.” Just like that and it's over. We have to really see our time as precious because it is. What I had found in my own life is if I don't consider how I'm spending my time or anything that I'm doing, it just breaks down. If I'm not intentional about how I use my finances, it starts to break down. If I'm not intentional with how I use my time, that breaks down as well. We cannot let the time that we have just slip away. It's very precious. Let's go to Proverbs 27.

Proverbs 27:1, "Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring forth." We don't know. The man at my church had no idea that he was going to get into a motorcycle accident. And it's not just tragic things like that. Other things can really change how we see our time. If we have a trial, a health trial, something that we can't control and it has now taken all of our time and our effort, it shapes how we will plan our week, and our day, and our month, and all the time that we have. We just don't know. And we like to think that we are in control. I know I feel that way. I absolutely feel like I am completely in control of everything I do. But is that true? I mean, to an extent, yes, but we just don't know. It says here don't boast about tomorrow for you do not know what a day may bring forth. James says something very similar to this. Let's go to the book James. James 4:13, "Now come, you who say, ‘Tomorrow… today or tomorrow we will go to such and such city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit’; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? Is it even a vapor that appears for a little time then vanishes away? Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.' But now you boast in arrogance. All such boasting is evil." Verse 17, “Therefore, to him to knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is a sin."

There's a lot happening in these few verses so let's break it down. Can we make plans? Because it says, you know, don't say I'm going to go here and I'm going to go there. Can we make plans? Well, of course, we can make plans but we never want to live our life like God is not in the picture, like we have not submitted ourselves to Him and He's not part of our planning. The other thing we have to understand, and this is the hardest part for all of us, is I'll make plans and it doesn't come how I planned it. It comes how God planned it. That's when it's hard. That's when it's difficult. How do we handle that? How do we handle that as Christians, faithful Christians? It's difficult.

Verse 14 says, "For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and vanishes away." For a little time. I never do… I never have props but I'm going to do a prop today. What is a vapor? I didn't ask for permission for this so we'll see how this goes. It's better to ask for forgiveness I was told by Mr. McNeely. I'll go ahead and out him. What is a vapor? This. I'm going to show it to you. Are you ready? Here's a vapor. That is the vapor and now it's gone. That little bit of a smoke vapor, that's how much time we have. That's how much time we have.

Sixty-eight hours each week, that's what we get to choose what we do with our time and it's easy to assume that our time will continue on. You know why? The sun rose this morning, it rose yesterday, it rose the day before, and it's easy for us as humans to say,”Oh, it's just going to continue on” until something tragic happens and then we're sort of shaken. We realize I don't have all this time. What did I do with all the time that I had? What did I do with it? If the Lord wills. That is yielding ourselves to God's plan. When we say “Instead you are to say, ‘If the Lord wills,’” that yields my plans with my time. I'll yield to God for that. God should be part of our planning. And we should be making goals in life. That's good. That's good for us to do. Those goals should include spiritual goals. We should be seeking God's direction in our planning. Every time that Israel would go out and they would not seek God's counsel before they went out to battle, it didn't go so well. They needed to put… to use… to seek God in their planning.

Verse 17 here in James, it seems like it comes out of nowhere. So, it's talking about planning and then all of sudden, “Therefore, to him knows to do good, does not do it, to him is a sin." It seems out of place at first but if we really think about what's being said here. All right. Well, what it's talking about is you shouldn't just be making plans without God in your life. You have a little bit of a time, the time of vapor, so with that time don't forget to do some good. Don't forget to do some good because if you know to do it and you don't, that's a sin. Some of our 68 hours should involve doing good. We know that we should be and if we don't, if we don't do it, it's a sin. Oftentimes we talk about sin like don't do this, don't do this, don't do that, that's what we read, but also if we don't do good, that too is a sin. If you feel like sometimes at the end of the week you feel like “Where did all my time go, I didn't get anything done that I wanted to,” it's a good time to consider how we spend our time. We don't want to live years and years and look back and say “What did I do with all the time that I had? What did I do?”

As I was preparing this message, I looked… I was going through the web and I actually noticed a lot of blogs, personal blogs, about people in their 30s and they were talking about how “I wasted my 20s.” There were quite a few. "I wasted all of my 20s,” all gone, and they are lamenting the fact that they had wasted an entire decade. Titles like "How to Move on After Wasting Your 20s." That was a Medium article. That's a personal blog that someone wrote. "What can I do in my 30s if I feel like I wasted all my 20s?" When you're young, you feel like you have all the time and the next thing you know you blink and you're 30 and all that time is gone. And it's when you hit those decade markers, it's definitely a time for reflection. It doesn't matter if you spent your time wisely and you were completely content with all the decisions you made in your life and how everything turned out, those time markers, those decade time markers are something that stops all of us in our tracks and we start to consider, “Wow, what did I do? What did I do with these last 10 years?” We can't escape those times. There are also times in our lives where God needs to make some course corrections in our lives because He is involved in our lives. We have yielded ourselves to God and He will at times step in, especially when we need course corrections spiritually.

Let's go to the book of Haggai. Not a book that we go to very often, Haggai. Jonah, Micah, Nahum. It's after Zephaniah, or as Judy called this yesterday, “Hey Guy.” Hey Guy 1. A little background in the book of Haggai. This was after the Babylonian exile so Jews are starting to return from Babylon and they were permitted to go back to their homeland. We're familiar with the stories of Nehemiah and Ezra, Nehemiah building the wall, Ezra setting up some civil things. Sixteen years pass at this point and they still have not completed the work of the temple. What they had done is they began focusing on their own houses. They began focusing on their own affairs. And Haggai is called by God to talk to the Jews.

Let's start in verse 3. "The word of the Lord came by Haggai the prophet, saying, 'Is it time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, and this temple to lie in ruins?' Now, therefore thus says the Lord of Hosts, 'Consider your ways.'" Verse 6, "You have sown much and bring in little; you eat but do not have enough; you drink, but you are not filled with drink; you clothe yourselves, but no one is warm; and he who earns wages, earns wages to put into a bag with holes." Verse 7, "Thus says the Lord of hosts: 'Consider your ways! Go up to the mountains, bring wood, build the temple, that I make take pleasure in it and be glorified,' says the Lord." Verse 9, “'You looked for much, but indeed it came too little; and when you brought it home, I blew it away. Why?’ says Lord of hosts. ‘Because of My house that is in ruins, while every one of you runs to his own house.’"

They all just get back from exile, and you know, start tinkering with the temple and then decide, well, it's time to sort of do my own thing now, get my own house in order. They begin to build their own houses and he addresses some of these things in verse 6. They start to sow, they start to plant, they eat. But he says they're doing these things but they're still not filled up. Why? It's because they have left their spiritual house in disarray. The spiritual house where they were to go and worship God at the temple, they left that in ruins. For us that translates a little bit differently today, doesn't it? It translates with how I prioritize my spiritual life. How do I prioritize my spiritual life? Is God's spiritual house the temple that has put His Holy Spirit in, am I fixing that up? Am I fixing the temple that He has placed His name and He is living today? Am I working on that?

They were not putting God first and everything that they were doing, all the efforts they were putting into sowing and drinking and eating and warming themselves and filling their pockets with money, it felt like nothing. Why? Because spiritually, they were bankrupt. They had to put God first. They needed to go and fix that temple. And the people do hear Haggai. They hear Haggai. But isn't that true of ourselves today? We can fill ourselves with whatever we want, we can work hard, we can feel happy with how we worked, but if we don't put those spiritual matters as a priority in our life, at the end of the day, it still feels empty. And we trick ourselves. We say you know what? I worked hard and my feet hurt and I need to put my feet up and I need to play video games for four hours tonight and I need to watch Netflix, I need to be on Facebook for the next three hours after that, and you know, I'll pray tomorrow. But in the end, why it feels empty is because it is. We trick ourselves. You and I, we're supposed… we're called to a life of doing, physically, yes, but spiritually, spiritually, we are to be doing. We fill ourselves with these leisures.

And when we think about… Go to Ezekiel 16. We think about the sins of Sodom, we often think about the sexual sins of Sodom, but in Ezekiel, it gives us a little insight that us in a very rich nation can learn from. Ezekiel 16. Ezekiel 16:49, "Look, this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: She and her daughter had pride, fullness of food, and abundance of idleness." Idleness, not I-D-O-L, I-D-L-E. They lived a life of leisure. What's interesting, these sins, these are all very self-indulgent sins. Self-indulgent sins are widely accessible to the richest nation in the world, us. God tells us to enjoy the fruit of our labors, yes, but we have to make sure that we are doing all the right things spiritually. The Bible reading program says this about this excerpt in Ezekiel. It says “The wealth and prosperity of Sodom had plunged it into such spiritual laxity that the people fell headlong into utter rejection of morality and restraint. Therefore this idleness brings about spiritual idleness.”

Matthew 25, Jesus gives us a parable. And I won't read the whole parable. I will just get to the crux of the matter here. It's the parable of talents, and at the end, verse 25, when the laborers are confronted…  Sorry, verse 26, “But his lord answered and said to him, ‘You wicked and lazy servant, you knew that I reap where I have not sown, and gather where I have not scattered seed.’" This servant was idle. This is the one He said “You should at least put it in the bank. I gave this to you and you just sat there with it and you did nothing. You were idle.” God has opened our minds to the truth and He has given us His Spirit and we are to grow. We are to grow and to do and to share what we've been given. This servant in this parable did nothing. There is no time for complacency in the life of a Christian. Every day we drink water because our life depends on it. We have to drink water. And it's interesting outside of your house, if water sits, what do you say? It's stagnant. What happens to it? Water that is not moving is dangerous. Water that is idle, it's sitting there, breeds disease, and contrast that with the living waters that we're supposed to be living by, God's Holy Spirit that moves and is restorative, cannot be idle.

The life instructions of a Christian are full of action words: ask, seek, knock, do, run. We're physical people and God gave us physical things to teach us spiritual lessons and we are to act on those things. He knew that we needed these type of reminders because each day we get up and we'll just say, “Well, I'm just going to do the same thing I did yesterday. That's how I'm going to use my time.” But the fact of the matter is the God that we worship, He also, too, is busy. Jesus told the disciples, "My Father has been working now and I have been working."

How do you spend your time? My goal of today is to get us to think about how we use it so that we are intentional. We just don't let the days keep coming at us. We just get up and do the same thing because what we have is precious. It's precious. And when we spend our time, we don't get it back. Don't go through this winter and come up on the spring Holy Days and ask yourself “Where did all the time go? What happened to it all?” It has to start today. It has to start today. There's a quote from The Music Man and the character Professor Hill is trying to get this girl to go take a walk with him and she's like “Maybe not today, maybe tomorrow.” And he says, "If you pile up enough tomorrows, you'll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays." If you're in your 20s and you're listening to this, this is a fantastic time to live a life that is productive. You are laying the foundation of your spiritual life today. Take time to set those foundations. Your physical goals and life goals, that's important, too. Make sure God is a part of those.

Let's go to Romans 12 as we end here. As we make our plans for the next week, let's keep this in mind, the promises that we've made to God. Romans 12:1 says this, "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. Do not be conformed of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." We've given up our will. We've given up our will and we told God I will follow You. I will follow Jesus Christ. That has to be a vital component to our time. Make sure that we're being transformed every day. That this day was not just a wash but that I was productive today. Make sure that we're being transformed daily. You have 68 hours this week to do whatever you want to do. How are you going to spend it?