The Religion of Work & Leisure

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org It's good to be here, and we are in the third of four weeks on this series we're calling Seculus, which is a combination of secular and religious. And you might be going like, what? Yeah, it's a made-up word, okay? And I wasn't that creative. And actually, I read a book this last summer called Seculosity by David Zahl. And in it, he's a Christian author, and he said, everything has become church, basically. That is, what used to be religious, where you knew what was religious, traditional religion is giving away in the United States, and all of a sudden, everybody's more or less secular, but at the same time, everything is taking on religious significance. So that romance, as we talked about last week, I ruined romance right before Valentine's Day for you, romance, just our busy schedules, everything seems to be doing this, right? You can find people who are on a religious quest about the food that they put in their body. Do you notice that? Have you ever met anybody who will just talk your ear off about what's pure and impure about food, and they want to cleanse themselves? Those are spiritual words, by the way, and we're talking about stuff that's going into your body, and Jesus said, it's not what goes into your body, it's what comes out of you that makes a difference about purity, okay? Yeah, I remember, I had a Haitian cleanse a year ago, I don't know if I remember. I came back from Haiti, and boy, did I have a cleanse for about a week and a half, but I don't think it purified me in any form, it just, I lost a little weight, not the way to do it. Anyways, today, we're looking at a third area, probably the most prominent in our society, of how we try to find our significance, our identity, our selves, our salvation, and you know what it's in? Work, and if it's not, it's in your leisure. So we're going to be looking at work and leisure, and we're going to start with a passage from the Gospel of Luke, as kind of the basis of what we're talking about. So you can follow along on the screen, or on your smartphone, or tablet, through the You version of the app, under events, you can find us there. But let's read Luke 6. On a Sabbath, while he was going through the grain fields, his disciples plucked and ate some heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands. But some of the Pharisees said, why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath? And Jesus answered them, have you not read what David did when he was hungry? He and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat. And he also gave it to those with him, and he said to them, the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. On another Sabbath, he entered the synagogue and was teaching, and a man was there whose right hand was withered, and the scribes and the Pharisees watched him, to see whether he would heal on the Sabbath, so that they might find a reason to accuse him. But he knew their thoughts, and he said to the man with the withered hand, come and stand here. And he rose and stood there, and Jesus said to them, I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it? And after looking around at them all, he said to him, stretch out your hand. And he did so, and his hand was restored, but they were filled with fury and discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus. Work and leisure. I know we all have different relationships with that, and I want to recognize that. Some of you right now are looking for work. You're looking for more work that you're struggling right now to make ends meet. You're trying to figure out how it's going to work. And so you would like to have something more to do to be able to take care of your life and your family more work. There's others, though, that they don't want to work. In fact, they struggle with work because they struggle with any motivation to do the job that's in front of them, and they might even procrastinate. We'll get into that a little later. And still others put all their energy into their work so that they have nothing outside of work. I mean, they are just consumed by it, and we have people like that in our society. And still others say, work, no, I don't put my... But you are religious about your leisure, and so much so that your leisure consumes your life and your schedule is just totally full with all the stuff you've got to do because you're trying to have fun. Now all of this is going on in a society that back in the 1930s, there was a man named John Maynard Keynes. Have you ever heard of Keynesian economics? He was the economist that predicted in the 21st century, if things kept going the way he thought they would, that we would all be down to a 15, 15, not 50, 15-hour work week. We'd have so much leisure time because eve...