Sloth

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. Have you found a favorite yet? One that you could identify with? Is there one of the seven sins that you say to yourself, I can get rid of six, but oh, I need this one really. Or the worst trap is, do you say, I'm getting rid of six, I need just one more time. How many cigarettes have I seen my dad put down when he was trying to quit smoking? How many habits? How many chocolate ice cream cones? How many trips to the computer for pornography? How many opportunities? Just one more time. Seven deadly sins. So I'm going to try something new here today, and that is, instead of the physical thing, I'm going to try to telepathically change the slide. Watch this. Oh, it worked. Okay, good. That's hard to do. Sloth. Sloth is my favorite. Not because I want it to be, but because I think, by definition, sloth is that which absolutely invades me. Sloth is that which absolutely engulfs me. And I would offer a part of every other sin. John gave me sloth, and I thought, what is he trying to say to me? I knew it was going to be interesting, because I would have picked gluttony. Gluttony is a little easier to preach. I've been on cruise ships before. I've witnessed people who make a living out of that one. But sloth. So, as I started to jump in and dive into sloth, which is kind of a funny thing, I saw this, and thought, oh, that's good. Anybody see the movie with their grandkids, Zootopia? Excuse me. How old do you think I am? Or Young People. It's got a scene in it that's just hilarious that we couldn't bring it over for copyright reasons. But it is, as you may recognize, it is a sloth. When I started to search the scriptures and search online, I found this clip come up. We can't use it for copyright reasons, but it's about the interaction between the rabbit, who talks really, really fast and really, really wants results really, really quickly, and the... I was waiting for that to happen. That's me in East Texas. To any of my East Texas friends that are watching, I love you. And I arrived in Chicago, I grew up in Chicago, and I arrived in East Texas for my first call. And Chicagoans are used to talking pretty fast and getting things done, so I'm spitting them out and ready to move on. But not in East Texas. I go pick up Ben Newcomb for lunch. Ben, I love you. In the feed store. And the pace changed dramatically. I walk into that feed store and all of a sudden, time stood still. They were in no hurry. Doing all right? Doing all right. Can you just feel the angst build up inside you? Is he going to ever move on? So this is sort of the most superficial understanding of sloth. It's a cute cartoon, it's an irritation, it's a desire to speak fast and get quicker results. And I think the desire to get quicker results and speak fast is getting more and more profound, right? I mean, good night. We can get results and we want a faster phone. Because my phone is taking so much time. And I say to my mom, what do you mean it's taking so much time? Well, you know, it's I don't know, she doesn't know how to count nanoseconds, but she's telling me about nanoseconds. So we're there. So let's go on something deeper. This is what really we're getting a little bit deeper into this. This is what we want like this. John gave me sloth and I just kind of, John, I said, John, what do you want me to do? What direction you want me to head with with sloth? And he said, I don't know and I don't care. I said, John, I know you guys, you've been through a lot lately. You've been having some, you know, real struggles and passing of your mom. I mean, I get that. I said, but give me some direction so I can bring to the congregation some some place to go, something to root it in and make sure I'm in line with the other six deadly sins that you've been preaching. And what did he say? It's like who's on first. So it really is at its essence. I don't know and I don't care. I don't I don't want to know. Ignorance is bliss kind of phenomena. It's a little deeper into sloth. It's I don't know and I don't care. Now we're getting a little bit more into the integration of human nature. This is where I saw that's where I kind of was led to thinking about. I don't know. I don't care. It's a creed that I use when I started experiencing compassion fatigue. I mean, I want to help out, but it's like, oh, where does it end? How do you stop? Where does the boundaries, how much energy? More and more of us are experiencing compassion fatigue because we see lots and lots of opportunities to serve, to give, to love. But even with the best of motivations, we still end up kind of with an I don't know. I don't care defense mechanism that keeps us at a distance. And that, too, is sloth. Click. So there's a little bit of a lag. We're working on that. So these are two scriptures we're going to take a look at. That's kind of built into what we'r...