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During our morning Zoom prayer time, we read a devotional that included an illustration about the amazing Charles Spurgeon. Spurgeon was an English preacher in the 19th century who drew large crowds during his frequent sermons, wrote books on prayers and Bible commentaries, and still had time to read six books a week! He lived his life “full throttle.” One of his famous quotes was “The sin of doing nothing is about the biggest of all sins, for it involves most of the others… Horrible idleness! God save us.”
Yikes! Who, when reading about everything this man accomplished, doesn’t feel like they are idle? I was the first in the prayer group to speak up about my reaction, but we all felt it. With our reaction spoken aloud, the group had a good laugh about the reading – a guilty laugh, but a good one. The intent of the illustration was positive encouragement, but the effect on our hearts was not. We certainly felt more guilty of Spurgeon’s “horrible idleness” than motivated to implement the biblical idea to “make every effort to grow in God’s grace and live for him.”
To be honest, I didn’t need those words or that guilt piled on me that morning. It had been “one of those weeks” already. At one point, I called Pastor Michel and rescheduled a meeting because I knew that the mood that I was in was not going to be helpful for building up the church! I had navigated into a place of discouragement that day and was not ready to try and move forward. I had been reflecting on our current place in church/community life and dreaming about what could be, but in doing so I felt overwhelmed with the amount of work that needs to be done. I was feeling that much of that was a result of the idleness of the past year and a half – certainly a forced idleness, but one that I am afraid will have become a habit for us and one that will be tough to get past. This new habitual idleness sits with me and from what I can tell, it is going to sit with all of us in the community. And this idleness will only hold us back from our mission and vision as a church.
Thankfully, I read another devotional an hour or so later that calmed me down and gave me a new insight toward this idleness. It doesn’t say that idleness is good, nor does it give us permission not to “make every effort to grow in God’s grace and live for him.” It simply put it in a better perspective. Another 19th century British preacher and revivalist’s words reminded me that I was not going to help us get to a new space by feeling guilty or even hating idleness. We will only get to this new space, this renewing of our mission as we regather the church, with a life-giving connection with Jesus.
Henry Drummund wrote, “Stay right where you are. Don’t return into the hustle and bustle of life until the Lord has turned and looked on you again as he looked at the thief upon the cross, and until you have beheld the ‘glory of the love of God in the face of Jesus.’” This says to me that our motivation cannot come from a frustration with idleness, but that could point us toward Jesus. We need to hear Jesus speak his love over us, we need to receive his Spirit as it is poured out upon us, and we need to respond to his invitation to join him in the mission.
So, do we have a lot to do in the church? Yes! Do we need a little push to get going again? Yes! Do we feel the damage or at least the danger that is present in our current state of idleness! Yes! But, do we feel guilty about where we are? No! Guilt does nothing to deal with our true reality. The best we can do is to put a good face and a good effort on top of our troubles. What we need is just the opposite, we need to sit in that idleness, that space where we are currently living, and see Jesus “look upon us.” It is there when Jesus looks upon us that we can behold God’s glory and be moved into a space where we can “grow in God’s grace and work for him.”
