Christians and the Workplace, Part 2

Thanks for coming back. Appreciate it. Glad you guys are here.

We started talking about work last week and what that looks like for the believer, specifically in their realm of habits. And tonight we're looking at something a bit different. If you have your Bibles, you can go to 2 Kings chapter 5. That's where we'll be at tonight.

This is the chart that we used last week to describe where we're going, where we're heading. Last week we kind of set the stage for habitual living, so that was the first week. This week we're here in the ordinary means of grace and what that looks like in our lives.

Again, with the big bulk of us still focusing on habits, then a bit more on the ordinary means of grace and what that looks like. Our passage in Kings will focus on that specifically, but then we also have a bit of conversation about work to be had at the end. But 2 Kings chapter 5 is where we're going to be at for the majority of the bulk of the passage that we have tonight.

We're going to read it and we'll pray and then we'll get into it. So again, 2 Kings chapter 5, we'll start in verse 1 and we'll go down to verse 14. 2 Kings chapter 5. He who has ears to hear, let him hear what God has said.

Hear the living and active word of God speak. Verse 1 of chapter 5. Now Naaman, captain of the army of the king of Aram, was great, a great man with his master and highly respected because by him the Lord had given victory to Aram. The man was also a valiant warrior, but he was a leper.

Now the Arameans had gone out in bands and had taken captive a little girl from the land of Israel and she waited on Naaman's wife. She said to her mistress, I wish that my master were with the prophet who is in Samaria. Then he would cure him of his leprosy.

Naaman went out, I'm sorry, went in and told his master saying, thus and thus spoke the girl who was from the land of Israel. And the king of Aram said, go now and I will send a letter to the king of Israel. He departed and took with him ten talents of silver and six thousand shekels of gold and ten changes of clothes.

He brought the letter to the king of Israel saying, and now as this letter comes to you, behold, I have sent Naaman my servant to you that you may cure him of his leprosy. When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and said, ah, am I God to kill and to make alive that this man is sending word to me to cure a man of leprosy? But consider now and see how he is seeking a quarrel against me. It happened when Elisha, the man of God, heard that the king of Israel had torn his clothes, that he sent word to the king saying, why have you torn your clothes? Now let him come to me and he shall know that there is a prophet in Israel.

So again he's claiming he can heal him of his leprosy in some sort of way. Verse 9, so Naaman came with his horses and his chariots and stood at the doorway of the house of Elisha. Elisha sent a messenger to him saying, go and wash in the Jordan seven times and your flesh will be restored to you and you'll be clean.

But Naaman was furious and went away and said, behold, I thought he will surely come out to me and stand and call in the name of the Lord his God and wave his hand over the place and cure the leper. Are not Abanah and Pharbar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them and be clean? So he turned and went away in a rage. Then his servants came near and spoke to him and said, my father, had the prophet told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much more then when he says to you, wash and be clean? So he went down and dipped himself seven times in the Jordan according to the word of the man of God and his flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child and he was clean.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear what God has said. Let's pray.

God, thank you for this night. Thank you for your word and another opportunity to discuss habits and work and our relationship with man and our relationship with you. Please give us wisdom as we talk about a beautiful subject this evening. And we ask this on your name. Amen.

All right. No crazy stories. No Chick-fil-A stories this week. I'm sorry. There's only so much damage you can do in five hours at one place.

So that was pretty much it. Maybe other stories about my different work experiences. But mainly tonight, again, the work and habit is mainly what we're focusing on.

Last week, we talked about habits and what they are. And I think it's important that you understand that you're never too old or too young to start a habit. And so tonight we're gonna look at more specifically what a habit is, the definition of that, and get a more complete picture of the truth.

This game is really a game of puzzles. These talks, these messages that I give to you all, it really is puzzles. Just giving you small pieces at a time to hopefully get a more complete picture of Christ and God's word and who he is.

I believe it was A.W. Tozer that says it takes a whole Bible to make a whole Christian. So you need everything to be a whole Christian. You can't just say, well, if I'm a man or a woman, or I work here, I work there, or I am married, or I'm not married, I do have kids, I don't have kids.

I only need things that pertain to me and are relevant to me. You need the whole counsel of God to be a whole Christian. So this week we focus on five other areas of habits.

Phones, devotions, relationships, specifically with marriage and others, conversations, and your night routine, bedtime. So last week, again, we looked at habits, why we should keep it, but we didn't really define the word habit. So I'm going to give you all a definition of the word habit, I think is important.

I give you guys, I'm giving out books because I think it's important to give you guys books so you guys can learn more from the word of God. But also, more specifically, Jonathan Edwards had a collection of writings called The Miscellanies, and it's really complex. I've tried it, and I'm not very good at it.

So I have one Google document that has hopefully everything that I know on it, and that's really hard to consolidate everything you know. Like if you had to sit down and write every single subject matter that you know, it would take you a really long time. So I couldn't really start over from the beginning.

I had to kind of start with where I was and start moving things over into that document. It's really hard to do that, but that's why I also give away books, because ideally you write down, you take notes, then you spread the knowledge to other people, and you get into a habit of doing that with other people. It'd be nice if you had friends or people or church members, family members, that could be in the habit of trading books with one another.

Really good books, you should read this. Really good book, you should read this. I don't need the book, they blessed me, here it is for you.

If it's that good, buy another one. So habits are really important, and this is a good definition for it. A rhythm and routine that is set by a pattern of consistent behaviors, good or bad, that leads to an automatic action or a reaction to something.

It's important to know that you can't think yourself out of a pattern that you didn't think yourself into. Our thoughts become our words, our words become our habits, our habits become our character, and our character becomes our destiny. So how do these habits work?

I want to be clear, I do all my notes typed. I have to type them, because if I keep going too far over here, it's going to be too long, and I understand that last week and this week and next week and the week after, there'll be like a lot of information. And for some people, it's not only do I talk too fast, but this is too much sometimes, and that's okay. So if you ever want the notes, I will send them to you.

I have the digital version of them, I have the PowerPoints. If you want them, I will send them. Please, because again, I think this is good stuff.

I think someone told me last week, they said, man, this is just, this is really convicting. Like wow, were you convicted? I don't teach anything unless I feel convicted to teach that, because I need to make that a pattern in my own life. So these habits aren't set in stone in my life.

These are things that I'm working toward, because I think they're biblically rooted, which we'll look at tonight. But habits specifically, modern neuroscience shows us that habits occur in the deepest part of our brains called the basal ganglia. Pretty sure I butchered that name.

But these are the parts that churn on autopilots, while the higher order thinking does its work. So this is important for, let's say you're, you know, buckling a child into their seat belt, then you can also talk to them about safety. So you can allow your fingers to do works that you've done habitually to then think about things that are maybe of a higher order.

And that's the purpose of habits. You can do things, like I can move my hands as I talk, I can walk as I talk, because you habitually walk all the time. It's a habit of walking, a habit of doing something, and you can't just think your way into a habit or think your way out of a habit.

It does take a lot of practice and getting used to. They say typically it takes about 30 days to form a good habit. So 30 days of consistently doing something, and the habit has a higher likelihood of being performed in your life on a consistent basis.

But habits, as the board says, also allow you to sin. Again, they're good or bad things. No one wakes up addicted to something.

You have to think of the so-called seven deadly sins that people have made really popular today, and these are sins that just kind of creep into our lives. And I wanted to map them out because it's interesting. They actually kill you, not just spiritually, but also physically.

And these bad habits ruin your life. Sin was really the thing that kept us from living forever. When Adam and Eve fell in the garden, we'll talk about that a bit later tonight, that's what kept them from living forever.

Their relationship with God was fractured. They were then separated from God in the garden. Again, sins don't just kill you spiritually, but also physically.

Think of wrath. Chronic anger floods the body with cortisol, adrenaline, blood pressure rises, stress accumulates, and the body wears itself down. It's interesting because all these seven deadly sins are really a blueprint for accelerated aging and disease.

The second one is envy. Constant comparison creates chronic dissatisfaction within your life. The nervous system remains in a state of deficiency, stress goes up, and joy goes down.

Third one is greed. No matter how much you acquire, you're never satisfied, so your brain begins to adapt to every win, and then goes on to the next one immediately. Again, perpetual dissatisfaction, and your nervous system is ruined because of that.

Fourth one is lust. Pleasure becomes compulsive, dopamine pathways become altered, the reward system is dysregulated. Satisfaction decreases, but craving increases.

Pride prevents correction. You stop adapting, you stop listening, and in science, the lack of change and adaptation leads to decline. Think of sloth, the absence of movement, growth, and challenge.

The human body was made to adapt under resistance. Without it, we deteriorate physically, emotionally, and physically. And then you have gluttony.

This one's a big one. That's one I think the church has not done a very good job at being firm on. Overeating causes inflation, damages the cardiovascular system, and raises the risk of chronic disease.

This is the second cause of preventable death in America. Second leading cause, right next to smoking. When you see someone smoking, you're like, what the heck, that is so rude.

But if you see someone who's maybe struggling with gluttony, eating a Snickers bar, we don't have the same reaction because we've come to accept gluttony in our day and age. And it's interesting because all these celebrities who tricked us into thinking that being body positive are now on Ozempic and leaving the rest of us unhealthy, gluttonous, obese individuals with their bodies. We've made overeating acceptable and it kills 300,000 people a year in America.

These habits are ruining our lives. A famous study done in 2012, BMC Public Health, found that North America accounted for about one third of the world's excess biomass, that's weight, attributed to obesity despite only making up about six percent of the global population. These are sins that we've just become used to.

We just accept them. And again, these are habits that we slowly fall into. I had horrible eating habits before I met my wife and then I found out what good food tasted like and now I eat great.

But it's important that we look at these habits, good or bad, and put them against scriptures, put them against the Word of God, and see that we as individuals need to have habits that lead to godliness, not further from that. All these sins create a combination of sin, stress, addiction, isolation, or disease. Again, they don't just damage the soul, they damage the body.

And these sins, when turned into habits, quietly ruin us. And so we need to cultivate godly habits. So tonight we're going to look at three different things.

An ordinary means of grace, work, and habits that are worth cultivating, specifically related to our work. It's important again to think about the habits that you have in your own life. So each discussion, message, talk, sermon has a question, a primary question.

This is the primary question for tonight that I think is important, that if God has promised to give you new life, and new life abundantly, as the book of John says, why do we look for God in the extraordinary and not in the ordinary? I've lived a quarter of a century, 25 years, very short, but I think that I've realized that what makes someone extraordinary are those that do the ordinary extra.

There's an excellent book called Green Pastures, Ordinary Means of Grace for Ordinary Believers by Ryan Davidson. I forgot to bring it tonight or else I would have handed it out. I'll do that next week. And what I enjoy about it is that it doesn't just focus on spiritual gifts. You know, the conversation about spiritual gifts in the modern church is very odd to me personally.

I think it's important that as Christians we talk about spiritual gifts but that we can fall into a sort of trap with those gifts. They're mentioned in the Bible. We know that God blesses and gifts individuals and even gives certain individuals with gifts to the church.

And the issue comes typically with the sign gifts, Cessationism or Continuationism, and people fight a lot over that. Now don't hear me say that these issues aren't important because any belief is often an indicator of a deeper conviction, but we get so hateful over these conversations. But spiritual gifts have become more of a conversation recently.

They haven't been a conversation for a long time. In the early 1900s, 1906 specifically, was the first wave of spiritual gifts being talked about more broadly. The conversation exploded public consciousness with the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, here in California, led by William J. Seymour.

The revival sparked the classic Pentecostal movement debate, shifting focus towards spirit baptism, miraculous gifts, and speaking in tongues and prophecy. The second wave was then seen in the 1960s. This period marked the charismatic movement which brought the conversation of Pentecostal denominations, of course as we've come to know it, the health and wealth prosperity gospel as we've watched this summer.

It's generally dated to 1960 when Reverend Dennis Bennett of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Van Nuys, California, publicly shared his experience of receiving the Holy Spirit. Then the third wave was in the 1970s and 1980s, popularized by theologians like Peter Wagner. This period saw conservative evangelicals engaging deeply with spiritual gifts.

Seminal books and teachings frame these gifts as practical everyday tools for ministry, church growth, and daily Christian living. And here's the issue is because I think we have spiritual gifts and God has gifted individuals, but then we'll look at that spiritual gift and say because I have X gift, I have to serve in X ministry. If I have to get to service, I have to serve in a ministry that's oriented towards service.

If I have to get to teaching, I can't be an usher. I can't work in the bagel ministry. I have to be in a teaching role of some sort.

But it's interesting because again I think that our goal is to become a more well-rounded Christian. I'm not saying don't use the gifts that God has given you, don't exercise those gifts, but if we then start to fall into a trap where it's like well, I don't have the gift of service so I'm going to serve in this ministry instead. Why not work on the gift of service? Why not work on being more servant-minded towards other people? And when it comes to the ordinary means of grace what I enjoy about Ryan Davidson in his book is that he understands that God has given us ordinary means in which we can experience them on a daily basis that aren't just found within your spiritual gifts.

Because ultimately you can use your spiritual gift on a Sunday or on a Wednesday, but again your work isn't always related to your spiritual gift. What you do for your job, your occupation, or what you do at home is not always related to your spiritual gift. And so the way in which you do your spiritual gift, the way in which you engage with other people, we can often then start to section off and say well this is my gift so I serve here and that's all that I do.

Instead it should be my job as a believer is to be a good Christian. That's it. I don't need to be the best singer or the best preacher or whatever it is.

My job is to be a good faithful Christian. Faithfulness is beautiful and it's sorely lacking within the church. I mean when we're looking, we have plenty of needs in our church in many different areas and people will come in they'll say I just feel like no one, no one connects with me when I come.

And then like you'll watch them on a Sunday or a Wednesday and they're the first ones out the door. Like you can't tell me that we're not going after you if you're running out here so fast, I can't even see you when the service is over. And so when we talk about spiritual gifts and the ordinary means of grace, Ryan Davison does a really good job at explaining what these are.

And these are the four different types of things that he discusses that he thinks are important and that what he sees as ordinary means or ordinary channels of grace. The word which is read and especially preached, the sacraments, baptism in the Lord's Supper, prayer, and then the Sabbath. You can also link the Sabbath rest in there.

We'll talk about that more in the fourth week. But these are delivery vehicles that God himself has appointed to carry his extraordinary grace into your ordinary life. This connects back to the passage we read in a second which I'll get to in a little bit.

But in Acts 2:42, turn there if you can. Book of Acts chapter 2. Keep your finger in 2 Kings but go to Acts chapter 2. Acts chapter 2 specifically in verse 42 we get Peter's sermon, we get the ingathering, and we kind of see the birth of the church. First sermon ever preached by Peter in Acts chapter 2. And in verse 42 of Acts chapter 2 it says, they were continually devoting themselves to the apostles teaching into the fellowship to the breaking of bread and to prayer.

Everyone kept feeling a sense of awe and many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles. So it's interesting because again the church that had just witnessed the Pentecost, tongues of fire, 3,000 saved in a day, the very next thing they do is not something radical. They devoted themselves to one another.

They devoted themselves to the word. They devote themselves to prayer. The most spirit-filled church in history focused on the ordinary means of grace and not supernatural means in order to feel something because they become numb to the goodness of God.

Prayer, devotion, eating at a table, fellowship with one another, these words are persistent, they're continual, they're habitual. The fire of the Pentecost was sustained by a routine of the early church. And if you don't have a routine, it's hard to sustain the goodness of God.

I've been a youth pastor so I've gone to camps. I've been a youth student so I've gone to camps. I was a teacher at a Christian school in which we went up to a camp every single summer, I'm sorry, fall, September.

It was the second week of September. We'd go up to this camp and we have a great time. It was a three-day camp.

We had 400 students there, all the faculty there, wonderful. The last night we have this time we're around a big fire pit and all these kids give testimonies and it's wonderful and every single year it seems like it gets worse and worse and worse because kids come back down the mountain and they'll come to my classrooms and Mr. Sparks like someone went up there to go speak for the thing, like with the fire pit, and then they came back home and they just weren't acting like what they said. Why is that? It's very easy to get caught up in the emotion of the Christian life but the habits and the routines are what sustain the fire in your life.

So notice what this does to last week's question, when I talked to you about the legalist, because even with this whole Pentecostal and getting on fire quickly and the spiritual gifts, and we get very wrapped up in what I can do for the Lord rather than just being with the Lord, and the best way to be with the Lord is through the ordinary means of grace by prayer, devotion to God's Word, being with God's people, the Sabbath.

When was the last time that you just sat down in your room and just prayed for like an hour, 30 minutes or just read God's Word by yourself to try to really get into it in silence? I got work, I have kids, I got I got a life, I got things I got to do. It's very hard to sit down and be fully ingrained to the Word of God. So now you have some sort of mystical feeling of doing good work.

So the legalist and the mystic actually make the same mistake but from opposite directions. So we talked about last week the legalist thinks that grace comes through performance and then the mystic, the thrill seeker, sees that grace comes through experience but the saint looks away from himself to the means that God appointed and says that God promised to meet me here in the ordinary means of grace, through prayer, through worship, through meditation on His Word, and through Sabbath rest. If you're relying upon God to express Himself to you in some mystical, extraordinary, radical way, you're going to be spending your whole life trying to make up for the bad habits that you've kept because you're waiting for God to do something.

God promised to meet you in His Word at a table, on your knees, in your house and that's not settling for less. That's taking God at His Word and I've had many people come up and ask me, you know, your application, spend more time on your application. There's really no point in spending more time on application.

We have to spend time meditating on the Word of God and who He is, taking God at His Word. Go back to 2 Kings if you weren't already there because this kind of takes the conversation about the ordinary means of grace a bit more seriously. These are some things to consider from Naaman specifically in this story.

This is a great story because it kind of highlights exactly what I was just saying. Trying to find God in the super spiritual, the overly dramatic, rather than finding God in the most ordinary means that you can. In your work, with your friends, holding open the door for someone.

Very small things. So the first one is that God delivers extraordinary grace through very ordinary means. Very ordinary means.

Again, with prayer, the sacraments, baptism, communion. These are great things that we can partake in. Number two, devotion to the ordinary, not pursuit of the spectacular is what sustained the early church.

And then the third one, the habits of your household let you experience the fullness of the ordinary means of grace.

So Naaman is a great man. He's a commander of the army of Syria. He's a five-star general, man of valor, but he's a leper. And so he hears from this little servant girl, and again you can already notice God's grace working in very small ways for the smallest of people. A servant girl or servant would be considered very lowly.

So he hears through a servant girl that there's someone that can heal. And there's a prophet in Israel. So Naaman does what great men do.

He assembles a spectacular solution, right? Horses, chariots, silver, gold, bringing all these things, nice garments. He arrives at Elisha's door with a fleet ready for some massive production. And Elisha doesn't even come outside.

He says, go wash seven times and then you'll be restored. So look at verse 11 of chapter 5 of Kings, 2 Kings. But Naaman was furious and went away and said, behold I thought, and then that's the key word right there, I thought.

I thought when I came here, I was going to receive some massive blessing. You're going to come out, wave your hand over me, do your mystical stuff, and then I'd be healed. And a lot of times, how often do we receive an answer from God and we think it's a totally opposite of what we should be getting? I mean it's very clear that if you don't have something, you're not ready for that.

And I think it's really hard to see no as an answer. No is an answer. My favorite answer when I was a teacher was no.

It was amazing. I'd find clever ways. I would sing it to the kids.

I'd pull it out of my pocket. No. It was great.

I loved saying no. It was great. And so then they would come and ask me all these weird questions.

No. No. We're good.

No is an answer. Yes is an answer. So when we say, I prayed for this job. I prayed for this person. I prayed for this car. But God didn't answer my prayer because I don't have it.

No, God answered and the answer was no. And so Naaman comes expecting a big production. Elisha doesn't even come outside.

And so he's furious. He's upset. But again, that word “I thought”: Naaman already scripted some sort of miracle in his mind.

He wanted the prophet, the drama, the hand-waving, the moment. And what he got was a repeated habit. Seven times.

Go wash yourself. We hear a shower seven times in a day. Good.

That'd be weird. It was too ordinary for him. He even says, are not the rivers of Damascus better than all the waters of Israel? He almost walked away from this healing because the way that it was presented and packaged to him offended him from the beginning.

And who talks sense into him? It's not the prophet. It's his servants. This is so good.

Verse 13 says, then his servants came near and spoke to him. He said, my father, had the prophet told you to do some great thing would you not have done it? How much more than when he says to you, wash and be clean? That's the answer. Like if he had said, do this miraculous thing and then God will come down.

And how many people do you know that just say, if God just sent his son down right in front of me, I'd believe. He did that 2,000 years ago and they crucified him. So for you to put the impotence on God to do a miraculous work for them to you start getting going into your habits, you're going to stay isolated in your habits, your bad habits, for the rest of your life.

But again, he asks for repetition. Not radical. And the repetition sometimes I think can feel beneath us.

The repetition of doing these things again and again, the habits. We don't want to do that. No one brushes their teeth 365 times in one day expecting that to take them through the rest of the year.

In the same way that you can't go to the gym for 24 hours a day once a month and say, I worked out 24 hours this month. You worked out one day and you took 30 days off. And so again, the consistency is what builds a strong relationship, not intensity to something.

When I was in high school, all these guys on Valentine's Day would get these girls, these massive teddy bears and they're walking around with them so happy and I was single and upset and so I'm sitting there watching all their happiness and two, three days later, they're broken up because the intensity of the relationship relied upon those big days, Valentine's Day, birthdays, Christmas, but it didn't rely upon the consistency of the relationship. Consistency will be intensity every time. And the habits that we have sometimes feel mundane.

Now the intro has been long enough, so I want to dive into the final two parts of tonight, one of them being the habits. Last week, we talked about these sorts of habits. We looked at waking, mealtimes, and discipline.

And I want to focus first on screen time. I'll put some of the tips up there, but I will go through them. There's also some verses with them that I think are really important.

How you deal with screens is really important. I know that's ironic because you all stare at a screen as well, taking notes on it, but Psalm 101 verse 3 says, I will not set before my eyes anything that is worthless. So if you had to go back, imagine it, if tomorrow morning you woke up and I was at your front door, I said, hey, here's a replay of your day yesterday and you just spend your whole day watching what you did yesterday.

And then marking down how many worthless things were before your eyes. That'd be horrible. Horrible.

And so when we talk about the worthless things that are before our eyes, a lot of times it comes from what's on our phones. This book, again, that I talked to you about last week is written by Justin Early, and he makes it very clear that the fight for screens is a fight for formation. For formation.

And I want to start off with this one because this really plagues society. Our lives and our work revolve a lot around our phones and screens. The U.S. Department of Health and the Children's Health Council found that teens who spent over three hours on social media have double the risk of mental health issues, suicide, depression, anxiety.

The average teen today in America spends three and a half hours on social media, not their phones, but social media. According to Harmony Healthcare Information Technology, the average American spends five hours and 16 minutes a day on their phones and nearly 12 hours across all screens. All sorts of screens.

Facebook's founding president, Sean Parker, said that social media has a social validation back-loop. That just means we need to give you hits of dopamine every once in a while. And then he said this, quote, we know that we are exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.

Why aren't we fleeing from these things? It's very easy. And I've talked to students all the time when I used to teach, and I just can't get out of it. I'm so tired.

School's so stressful and cross countries is so hard. So I'm so hard, I just can't do it. So I typically ask them, can I see your screen time? And a lot of them, no, no, I know what I need to do.

And so one kid actually gave it to me. I said, dude, you spend 10 hours a day on your phone. Four hours are dedicated to a game on your phone called Brawl Stars.

I have no idea what that is, but it can't be productive. These things are ruining us and they're meant to be addictive. Listen to this.

I had a student give a speech on this, and I told him I'm going to use this in one of my messages one day. He said this, the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions did research on dependency rates. Dependency rate or the rate of dependency is in addiction science measures how likely a person is to become physically or physiological dependent after trying a substance.

So after trying it, how likely are you to become physically or physiologically dependent upon that substance? Listen to this. The dangerous substances, weed has a 9% dependency rate. Cocaine has a 20% dependency rate. Alcohol has a 22% dependency rate. But the highest is social media with a dependency rate of 40%.

Smartphones capture imagination and stories. That doesn't make them bad, but it does make them powerful. It's important to know how to use these habits wisely. This is why I want to discuss it first, because again, I think they're about forming your minds.

If you don't take control and allow Christ to form your mind, your phones will gladly do so. If you don't teach kids or people that nature is inherently beautiful, they will become satisfied at looking through nature on their phones. I had kids in high school that stated clearly, they'd rather stay at home on the weekend and be on their phones and go out with their friends, like proudly.

I asked them, like, what are you doing this weekend? I'm just going to stay home. You have any friends? No, like they're going to the beach, but you know, I'd rather be at home. What are you going to do? I was going to probably like bedrot or something, you know, just be on my phone.

And then this is what they do. And again, that's just with phones, but there's different ways to waste your time. But again, if we don't teach kids, ourselves and others, that silence is a sacred place where God literally speaks to us through his word, then screens will make sure that we never discover it.

So the healthy habits, how do we implement them? Number one, develop phone zones, screenless car rides. Next time you drive, no phones, no music, no movies, just talk. Now I get like some people have small children, you know, that's different, like put a movie on for them.

But even that, like I've gone out to the grocery store and if a kid's whining, give him an iPad, you know. So try to do screenless car rides. But again, phone zones, no bedrooms, no dinner tables.

And it's hard. Again, these are not things that I perfected. These are things that I want to cultivate in my own life as well.

And then even on Sabbath rest, two hours without my phone. And again, I've talked to kids about this before and they say how freeing it is to feel like no one can get in contact with them. Like two hours I'm gone, no one can get in contact with me.

And everyone will say, I'm not addicted to my phone. I could really be off of it if I wanted to. Just try it.

Try to go a full day without your phone. Second one is to choose good content over new content. That's a really good one.

That's directly from the book. Choosing good content over new content. That's why I brought up the Disney movies last week.

I don't like modern Disney. Everything post-frozen is atrocious. I love the old Disney.

Those are really good timeless stories. So choose timeless things over new things. New doesn't mean good.

And then your media should expand and educate. And lastly, time with others is always time away from phones. If you're at a table, the phone should be off of the table.

And again, that's something that I struggle with myself, but it's a necessity. That's the longest one.

The next one then is family devotions. This is good. Colonel Richard Husband was a pilot in the early 2000s. He was the captain of the space shuttle Columbia, which was destroyed upon its re-entry to earth in 2003.

He died in February of that year. And we lost seven astronauts that day. It was a day of mourning, but we did not hear that Richard Husband was a godly man.

He had children. He was going into space for 18 days. So he left his children 36 recorded videos, taped videos on little cassettes to do devotions in the morning and at night for every single day that he was gone.

And he died coming back down to earth. So I wonder how much weight those devotionals carry for his children today. We've become incredibly busy in this world with schedule, sports, fine arts, and whatnot.

And the world is an incredibly busy place. Listen to Job 1:5. This is when the days of feasting had completed their cycle. Job would send and consecrate them, rising up early in the morning, offering burnt offerings, according to the number of them all. Job said, perhaps my sons have sinned and cursed God in their hearts. Thus Job did continually.

I have a really good friend. His name is Craig and he's currently in Texas and he's single. He wants to marry someone. And so we talk frequently.

And he said, you know what? I'm praying for the salvation of my children already. I don't know who they are. I was like, I'm married.

I want to have kids. I should be doing this. And so I've started incorporating that habit into my life.

But waking up, making communion, or I'm sorry, making intercession on behalf of your family is so important. Devotion times, being together, it was a habit. Listen to what one writer says about family worship.

He says, if we leave the humble dwellings of the primitive Christians, it is true that we shall find the practice of family worship become less and less frequent. But how glorious, gloriously it appears at the epoch of the reformation. How great an influence it exerted then upon the creed, the manners and the intellectual development of all the nations, which returned to primitive Christianity.

It is not very long since it was still to be found in all evangelical families. If our fathers were deprived of its light, our forefathers were acquainted with it. It flourished, especially in the evangelical provinces of this kingdom and many precious remains can still, we trust, be found here.

He then goes on to say, my brethren, such has been in all times, the life of piety. And will we be Christians or will we be not? Shall we invent a new mode of piety, which will harmonize with the world? Or shall we hold fast to that which God has commanded us to possess? Shall we not say and looking at what worship, which passed from the tents of the patriarchs to the houses of the primitive Christians and was finally established in the dwellings of our fathers, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

And then there's 2 Timothy 3:14 through 15. It says, you, however, continue in the things you have learned to become convinced of, knowing from whom you have learned them. And that from childhood, you've known the sacred writings, which are able to give you that wisdom that leads to salvation through faith, which is in Jesus Christ. So cultivating these habits of doing worship with your family, reading with your family.

And if it's just you with friends, there are Bible studies that we have at this church. There are Bible studies that you can start. There are resources I'd be happy to give you, book studies to go over, to be in communion with other people if you don't have a family to be in communion with.

So some habits to cultivate. You have to make it a habit of asking other people what their souls are learning. When was the last time that you asked someone, what are you doing for devotions? What do you read in the morning? What do you read at night? How's your prayer life? Those are good questions to ask those that you know.

Find a place when your family or your friends are gathered. Again, this can be mealtimes, mornings, evenings. And it's really important to learn what to say no to and teach your kids the same.

My parents made sure every single Sunday I was in church and I missed baseball. And I hated it. I wanted to go play baseball.

And so until I was like 11, 12, 13, I finally started to realize this is pretty important. I should probably be at church. I like youth group. I don't want to miss youth group. I like church. I don't want to miss church.

And now it's my parents, of course, have been a God-send, by the grace of God, to instill that into me at an early age. Because of how many individuals I see at the school I used to work at, who will take Sundays off for any reason that they can. Any reason that they can.

So it's important to learn things that you have to say no to. And again, it's not just a Sunday morning or a Wednesday evening. Also during the week.

Is there a time from, you know, 6 to 7 p.m. at night or from 8 to 9 a.m. in the morning where it's no, like our family's together for this portion of time. And then for those with children, progressing appropriately is really important as well. Going with bedtime prayers, after dinner devotions, breakfast devotions, inviting them to pray and read early with you.

Teaching them to devote their time on their own and then sharing readings. Those things all kind of happen as you get older. And again, if you're not sure where to start, these are great ways to start.

Praying, being in God's word. And then we get caught up on how much we should be reading rather than how much we should be applying to our souls. And then lastly is reading books and catechisms.

This is a good website. This is online. Like it's free.

It's called the Westminster Confession. It's a shorter catechism. And they just have little confessions on there.

It's very simple. What is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. And some people have pushed back on this saying that they should memorize scripture.

And they can and they should and they will if you just take the verses underneath them and pair that with the statement. It's very easy to teach a kid just to memorize a Bible verse then regurgitate that. But then to teach them, this is what this verse means.

That Romans 11:36 talks about God and who he is and being the end of all things. Our end of all things is also founding God. And we do that by glorifying God.

That's our chief end. So this, again, there's a free website, the Westminster Standard. You can go look it up.

It's great stuff to go through on your own for your own soul or with your family as well. The next one is kind of together. Number six and number seven, conversation and relationships.

We were made for relationships. Made for relationships. We'll talk about this next.

Now, I can't wait for next week. I almost wanna give it right now. Next week's gonna be great. And we're gonna talk about what God declared was good. The word good was tov. And the first thing that was not tov in Genesis was when God said, it is not good that man should be alone.

So man is made for relationships. You have two relationships. You have horizontal relationships and then you have vertical relationship, singular.

Your horizontal relationships are with those that are around you, but then your vertical relationship is with God. The 10 commandments are very simple, right? When they asked Jesus, what is the greatest commandment? He said, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. So I love how Voddie Baucham puts it, because he says that the first four commandments are summed up in loving God.

And then numbers five through ten are about loving your neighbor. So when they asked Jesus, what's the best commandment? He basically says numbers one through four, closely followed by like numbers five through ten. They're all important, but loving God and loving neighbor is how that's summed up.

And the greatest way that we show this is by loving others well. So what do we do? Serving others well comes down to doing our jobs well and not getting in their way, being able to be interrupted by other individuals. Ultimately, if the way that we show love or the way that we show that we are disciples is how we have love for one another, then we have to love one another well.

John 11:35. This is how they will know you are my disciples by how you have love for one another. And I mentioned earlier with the spiritual gift things, how hateful we can get in conversations and how heated debates can get over secondary issues.

Again, I do believe that secondary issues can quickly form into something else. So it's important that you still discuss them, but we can very quickly turn into hating one another. Go to Ephesians chapter four.

Ephesians chapter 4, if you have your Bibles, this is just like, this is the benchmark verse on corrupt speech and on talking. It's interesting because I did that thing on AI a couple of weeks back in June. And I saw a couple of people do an experiment where they asked AI, if you were a Christian, what would you focus on right now? And nearly every single model focused on the speech of the Christian every single time, because the speech is the clearest indicator of your heart's condition.

And so again, rather than recording your whole day, making you go back and say, was this worthless, transcribing your entire day and then having you read that before you start your next day. When I talked to my speech students about how you should give a speech, I said, the best thing to do is to record yourself. And you record yourself, you put it down, you listen to it.

I listened to my sermon last week and I was disgusted. I don't like the sound of my voice. Most people don't like the sound of their voice, but that's how you sound.

And so let's listen to it. Do you like it? You can change it and then look at it, but turn it all the way down. Watch yourself as you speak.

How are your hand motions? What do you look like? What are your facial expressions like? And then the third thing is that you turn the volume back up and then you write out every single thing you said and you can't skip anything. All the ums, ahs, filler words. I love talking about filler words. They're gross. They're everywhere. I'll pray for you. Sometimes it even becomes a filler word. It's very quick. We don't know what to, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll pray for you. So we have to use our words wisely.

And Ephesians 4:29 is great for this. It says, let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth. How many times I've been asked by individuals, is cussing a sin? Am I allowed to say certain four-letter words or not? And it's not just about four-letter words. It's about the wholesomeness of these words, making you complete, the mature man made in the image of God.

It goes on, it says, but only such a word as good for edification, according to the need of the moment, said it will give grace to those who hear. That's great. Paul says that your mouth can be a means of grace to other people.

Colossians 4:6 says the same thing. That speech should be gracious, seasoned with salt. And think about how much of our day is conversation.

Group chats, lunch tables, hallways, the car. Every one of those is either corrupting or constructing. And there's no third category of neutral words.

Christ says you'll give an account for every careless word you've said. So habits to cultivate. I think it's important to ask one real question per conversation and actually wait for the answer and listen to the person.

Listening is so important. If you want to be a good communicator, because I'm a communication major, I studied this. You got to be a good listener.

Communication comes down to listening and how you understand the people that you're talking to. Secondly, you have to be kind to others. Proverbs says that what is desired in a man is kindness.

And take advantage of car rides, dinner, downtime, hangouts, and invite people to be with you. Fourth one is, refuse to be a courier for gossip. You have to kill gossip at the ears, not the mouth.

It's not just enough to hear, or not just enough to stop it and not say something, but even the hearing of gossip. And practice the ministry of following up, circling back to what you ask people about. Hey, can I pray for you? Yeah, pray for this. Great, I'm gonna follow up with you in a couple of weeks.

Last one, bedtime. Oh, this is good.

This one will be short. We talked about habits in the wheel and we looked at waking up last week and now the last one going to sleep. And I'll kind of talk about work and play next week and what that looks like.

But I told you that the importance of a good morning and good night routine is that it knows that your day will start and end no matter what happens in the middle, your day will start and end the same.

So here are habits that I put into my day that I think are important, at least for my night routine. I try to work out each night. I will clean the house each night. I will do dishes each night. I will try to pray and read with my wife each night.

Those are just basic things you can maybe implement. You can listen to podcasts or sermons as you clean or do whatever else it is that you need to do. Psalm 4, verse 8 says, in peace, I will both lie down and sleep for you alone. Oh Lord, make me dwell in safety.

And we started last week with waking. And remember the morning shows, Lamentations talks about that his grace is new.

And bedtime is the other bookend. It shows that sleep is an act of faith. Every night you resign as the manager of your life and give that over to God with faith that you'll wake up the next day to do the goodness of God.

You close your eyes with tasks, unfinished problems, unsolved and conversations unresolved. And you hand the world back to a God who does not slumber as Psalm 121 verse four says. And this is why bedtime is the perfect hour for two habits the church has practiced for centuries, which is examining, reviewing the day before God. Where did I see grace? Where did I sin? And secondly, confession. The person who ends the day in confession and trust wakes up ready to receive mercy that is new in the morning.

And those two habits feed off of each other. One that I've put in that I won't elaborate too much on for all of this is turning off your Wi-Fi. My wife and I got this little button in our house that turns off the Wi-Fi at night.

And for the first like three days, it doesn't come with like which one is on, which one is off. I don't know why. I think they did it just to frustrate you because I couldn't figure out which one was which.

I kept turning off the Wi-Fi like crucial parts of the day. And so turning off your Wi-Fi at night, it's a great thing. It's $20 on Amazon.

I'll send you the link. I'll buy one for the first person that wants one, I'll buy it for you. You still get up to your Wi-Fi and it turns off your Wi-Fi for the night.

It's great. So these are just habits to incorporate. So how does this relate to work? Oh, we got 15 minutes.

Here we go. We talked about waking meal times, discipline, screen times, family devotions, conversation, relationships, and bedtime. Next week, we're going to discuss work and play.

It's going to be great. But I want to talk briefly about work as we finish because they're interrelated in a fun way. And I want us to end with a proper understanding of what work is.

Work is one of the most habitual things that you will ever do. I told you that the series is on work. So I want to spend a bit of time explaining what work is before we end.

First, what work is, we must start where the Bible starts. And that's in Genesis 1, which we'll go to next week, Genesis 1 through 4. The God who made you is a worker. The opening sentence of scripture, God is not sitting back on a cloud.

He's working. He is Creator. The very first way in which God describes himself to us is as Creator.

God created. He is the Creator. He is then the sustainer, holding the whole thing together because he's also the provider.

And he came in the flesh. He was a carpenter for 20 years. And so when God makes his creatures in his image, he sets them in the garden and then he hands them the plants to work in, to subdue it.

The first command ever spoken over human beings is Genesis 1:26, to rule and to subdue the earth. And so how are you doing a subduing the earth? Not your profession, not your occupation, but subduing the earth.

So a couple of things that I think are important. Number one, work was God's idea before the fall. Work is not a result of the fall. Hard work is a result of the fall, but work itself is not a result of the fall.

So if you think I gotta get a job, I think it's really important to change your language from got to, to get to. So if someone says, what are you doing on the weekend? Yeah, I gotta go to church. I get to go to church. I get to read my Bible. I get to have a job. These are all good things because work is a good thing.

So work was God's idea before the fall. The second one is that all of work is an act of worship. All of work is an act of worship.

And we knew this because of three things. Number one, work is fulfilling. Work is the fulfilling thing for human beings.

It brings satisfaction. It brings meaning. There was a study on retirements and how the suicide rates of men increased the earlier they retired.

Ephesians 2:10 talks about doing the good works that God has prepared for you. I had a student ask me yesterday because I still coach cross country. He said, what do you think about work? I love my work. I love what I do. I get to work at a law firm. I think it's great.

I get to teach God's word. I get to coach you guys living the dream.

You're going to retire? I'll stop having a profession. Maybe I'll stop getting income. I'm never going to stop working.

Working is a good thing because it's fulfilling. And the second thing is that work produces satisfaction. Proverbs 13, verse 4 talks about that.

You need to work for satisfaction because that is how God made it before the fall. And thirdly, work shapes your character. That's why it's an act of worship because it's slowly forming your character.

But after that, this is kind of the final thing I want to talk about tonight, which is why work broke in the beginning. Next week, we're going to look at like a full-fledged discussion on work and what that is. But it did break in the beginning.

Something happened. There was sin. So hold on to the truth that work was God's idea before the fall was here before.

It's not a result of sin. But you don't live in a garden anymore. The ancient pagans had it backwards.

They thought work was a curse from the Greek gods, labor that was only for slaves. Work came before the fall. And so the fall did not create work.

The fall broke work. And when Adam reached for the fruit, all of creation cracked. And the curse fractured three relationships, your relationship with God, your relationship with people, and your relationship with work.

And I love how Johnny Ardavanis puts it, who's another great guy that next week's sermon's mainly inspired by, who I'd encourage you to look up. Again, Johnny Ardavanis. He says that the curse goes for the jugular when it goes against work itself.

Now the ground fights back, thorns and thistles, sweat on the brow. Work that used to be pure worship now becomes the place you go to prove you are somebody, the platform for your pride, the grind that leaves you feeling like a cog in a machine chasing after the wind. That's interesting because the deepest crack of the curse isn't Eve going for the apple.

I think we could say like, well, what was the first sin? Well, it was Satan and pride in heaven and law on earth. What was the first sin? It was Eve. I think I might need to disagree with that because we would like to say, you know, Adam takes responsibility because he's the head of Eve. Romans 5 talks about that. Through one man, sin entered the world, all that kind of stuff. But ultimately, I think the first sin was passivity from Adam, abdication of his responsibility.

That in and of itself, the passivity from Adam being absent, is the sin that plunged humanity into the race, the human race into sin and corruption. And then we have to sit in that. Apathy sits at the heart of a lot of our work.

We're apathetic, we're lazy towards things that we know we should be doing. It's very easy to look busy at work or to say or lie about more than what you're actually doing. It was Adam, either standing next to his wife or absent from his wife.

We don't know where Adam was. It doesn't say where he was in Genesis, but doing nothing while the serpent talked and deceived his wife. So the drift toward doing nothing is not a small, harmless flaw. It's the oldest fracture in the curse. And it stands today in the work that we do in the laziness that often creeps up.

And laziness is not a small vice. It's a tragedy. It's not neutral. It's lethal.

We have somehow filed laziness under some sort of personality quirk. Procrastination. There's now something called hyper procrastination.

It basically just means that you have a lot of tasks to do. And so you will put off a really important task, but do other small tasks. So if you have like a big paper that's due, let me go clean the car out.

Just want to do that. Or let me go, you know, clean up my room. Let me go through all my socks, make sure I have ones that have no holes in them and then throw those ones out.

You're procrastinating a bigger thing, but we're doing work in weird ways. Laziness is lethal.

Last passage we'll turn to, go to Proverbs 26. This is the clearest indication that laziness is lethal in our lives. Proverbs chapter 26. Not only is it eroding your soul, but it's visible to the rest of the world as well.

I'm sorry, Proverbs 24, excuse me. Proverbs 24, verse 30. Page or two back.

Proverbs 24, verse 30 says, I passed by the field of the sluggard and by the vineyard of the man, lacking sense and behold, it was completely overgrown with thistles. Its surface was covered with nettles and its stone wall was broken down. When I saw, I reflected upon it.

I looked and received instruction, a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest. Then your poverty will come as a robber and you're want like an armed man. Proverbs also talks about that he who is slack and the day of distress has limited strength.

That's why it's important to start your mornings off right and to end your days right. The lazy person makes excuses. The lazy person loves ease. The lazy person never finishes what they start because the lazy person is self-deceived.

So three quick things about laziness. Number one, laziness is saying, God, you've given me nothing of importance to do.

When you're lazy, you're sitting there and you're saying, God has given me nothing important to do in the moment. That's why I can waste my time. You might not agree to that.

You might say in the moment, no, don't worry. I'm just reflecting. I'm just sitting.

I don't know if I ever told you guys this, but I used to wake up every morning before high school and pray for people that I knew. And it started because my sophomore year, I became the president of that Christian club that my brother gave to me. And I wanted to wake up at 4 a.m. and pray for people that I knew.

And I just didn't pray for a lot. I kept falling asleep the whole time. And I was like, I got to wake up later and pray for more people more intentionally.

But it's very easy to look like you're doing something when in all actuality, you're doing nothing. You can fake praying by just sleeping if you would like to. And no one would know.

But laziness is throwing your life away because again, God has not given you anything of importance to do. We have many talents, but they are dormant. And we need to get up and develop our body, our minds and our relations with God because we live in a fallen world that has corroded our work.

Laziness secondly leads to decline. Laziness leads to decline. It doesn't look like rebellion.

It's small compromises over time. Costi Hinn talks about that, that you drift into ruin through thousands of small decisions. So again, laziness is saying, God, you've given me nothing of importance to do.

Secondly, laziness leads to decline. And thirdly, laziness burdens others and reveals a heart issue. It burdens others and reveals a heart issue.

Proverbs 18, verse 9 talks about joining laziness with destruction. Laziness is not isolated. It's infectious.

There was a study done on the workplace, like in cubicles, that if you work within 15 feet, 15 to 25 feet of someone that's more productive than you, you will get more productive. But if you work 15 to 25 feet away from someone that's lazier or doesn't get work done, you're more likely to decline in your work progression. So here's why we spent the whole night on habits.

It's because laziness is the anti-habit. It's the slow erosion of every rhythm that we've just built in the last seven parts we talked about. It's a tide that pulls waking and devotion and conversation and rest at night back out to sea.

You do not drift into diligence, but you do drift into sin. You do drift into a ditch. You do drift into bad habits.

And the ordinary means of grace in the seven habits that we discussed in these last two weeks are not a to-do list for impressive Christians. They are how grace fights the oldest fracture in you, which is laziness. If you can't master habits and fight laziness, the conversation of work next week means nothing.

So next week, we'll look at the last two, which is work and play. And we build the full picture of how a person set free by grace actually labors and actually rests. When you do your work, you're not just changing diapers or answering emails, but you're doing work for Christ.

Your work is not just a task, but it's an offering to God. The believer works for an audience of one, and we as believers should be the hardest workers. That is why I think this series applies to every person.

It's a multi-generational series because work ultimately is worship. It's worship aimed at our neighbor. So before next week, I want you to think about that.

The work that you have, work is worship aimed at your neighbor. What are you doing for your neighbor to point them back to Christ with the work that God has given to you? It doesn't matter if you're male or female, young or old.

God has given us all different things. Men are naturally faster. Women are naturally more flexible. Men often lead with logic. Women often lead with empathy. Four out of every five suicides are men. One out of every three women are depressed.

But the point was never to prove which person has it harder, male or female. It was never man versus woman. God made us equal, not identical in the work that we do.

You are guaranteed to be better at someone at some specific thing, but that never makes you better than someone. And we must work wisely with what God has given us and not be lazy or apathetic. Because if I asked you, what is the opposite of love? You'd probably say hate.

I would argue it might be something different because with hatred, there's still an investment of emotion into something. And oftentimes we demonstrate love by showing what we hate. The fear of God is to hate evil.

I would say that laziness and apathy is actually the opposite of love. Laziness does not care. When we see evil being done and someone does nothing about it, they don't care.

That is the opposite of love. God is calling us to live in a way with love that is not apathetic. And there's no greater way to do that than with the work and the habits that we have in our daily life. Let's pray.

God, thank you for this night. Thank you for an opportunity to discuss habits and work.

Thank you for your word that is made clear in which we can look at different figures in the Bible. Look in that story of Naaman and Elisha to see that your grace, your goodness appears to us in the most ordinary ways throughout our day. Through prayer, through reading of your words, through the two sacraments of baptism and communion, beautiful things you've given to us to remind us of the ways in which you ordinarily show grace to us.

God, allow us through our work and through the efforts that we put in to see the mundane moments of life as extraordinary moments to see your grace and to display that to other people. We thank you that we can discuss these seven different areas of habits in our lives, about how we wake and how we are disciplined and how we do our meals with other people, how we go to bed, how we use our phones, how we conversate with one another. And we pray that we cultivate habits that are righteous and godly and are focused and aimed on glorifying you.

And Lord, as we talk about work next week, please bless the work that individuals are doing this week. Allow them to see that the work they're doing is good work, that the work of a preacher on a Sunday morning is no more or less glorifying than the work of someone who's a mechanic or a plumber or a nurse or a stay-at-home mom. Lord, allow us to see that the work that we do brings glory to you and allow us to work to our fullest.

And we ask this all in your name. Amen.