Next week I plan to resume the series on procrastination (unless of course I don’t get to it until the following week).

But today I have the privilege of featuring a recent interview with my friend Jerry Bridges. Jerry is the author of numerous excellent books such as The Discipline of Grace (NavPress, 2006) and The Gospel for Real Life (NavPress, 2003). Last week I invited him to join me in the studio to discuss a very helpful practice for living a cross-centered life, captured in the little phrase “preach the gospel to yourself.”

It was in the writings of Mr. Bridges that I was introduced to this phrase. The interview provided an opportunity to ask him where the phrase originated, what it means, and what difference this practice has made in his life.

The interview also includes some discussion of sports. It’s in this section of the interview that you will hear Jerry Bridges and me deliver a special joint message for all New York Yankee baseball fans. Be listening for that.

As you listen to this short interview I think you will discover for yourselves why I am so thankful to God for this man.

You will find the audio download of the interview here. Or listen to the interview online:

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Related: Interview with Sinclair Ferguson

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My tendency is to charge into the day intent on getting stuff done, attacking my to-do list motivated by self sufficiency rather than by humble dependence upon the grace of God revealed in the gospel.

And given the active presence of pride and self-sufficiency in my life, it is imperative for me at the outset of each day to devote time to humbling myself before the Lord and acknowledging my dependence upon him for all that awaits me.

As I devote myself to this spiritual discipline, the words of Proverbs 3:5–7 frequently inform my meditation and prayer:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil. (ESV)

Alongside my open Bible, I find the exposition of these verses by nineteenth-century pastor Charles Bridges in his commentary on Proverbs to be helpful and insightful. He writes:

Let our confidence be uniform. In all thy ways acknowledge him (Proverbs 3:6). Take one step at a time, every step under divine warrant and direction. Ever plan for yourself in simple dependence on God. It is nothing less than self-idolatry to conceive that we can carry on even the ordinary matters of the day without his counsel.

He loves to be consulted. Therefore take all thy difficulties to be resolved by him. Be in the habit of going to him in the first place—before self-will, self-pleasing, self-wisdom, human friends, convenience, expediency. Before any of these have been consulted go to God at once. Consider no circumstances too clear to need his direction.

In all thy ways, small as well as great; in all thy concerns, personal or relative, temporal or eternal, let him be supreme.
 
-Charles Bridges (1794–1869), from A Commentary on Proverbs (Banner of Truth, 1846/1968) pp. 24–25.

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Related posts in this series:

1. Are You Busy?
2. Confessions of a Busy Procrastinator
3. The Procrastinator Within
4. Just Do It

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I tend to procrastinate. So to fight that tendency, I’ve posted the following quote from a nineteenth-century preacher under my computer monitor. I hope these words inspire you to attend diligently to the most important matters each day, by God’s grace.

It reads:

No unwelcome tasks become any the less unwelcome by putting them off till tomorrow. It is only when they are behind us and done, that we begin to find that there is a sweetness to be tasted afterwards, and that the remembrance of unwelcome duties unhesitatingly done is welcome and pleasant. Accomplished, they are full of blessing, and there is a smile on their faces as they leave us. Undone, they stand threatening and disturbing our tranquility, and hindering our communion with God. If there be lying before you any bit of work from which you shrink, go straight up to it, and do it at once. The only way to get rid of it is to do it.

-Alexander MacLaren (1826–1910), Scottish preacher

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Related posts in this series:

1. Are You Busy?
2. Confessions of a Busy Procrastinator
3. The Procrastinator Within

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If I am busy, I must be productive, right? A busy man is a faithful and fruitful man?

Nope. Busyness is no guarantee of productivity, faithfulness, or fruitfulness.

But why? What distinguishes a fruitfully busy schedule from a non-fruitful busy schedule?

I think it comes down to two important points: understanding our sin and understanding our roles. Today we’ll look at our sin and later we will look more closely at roles).

In the last post we looked at Walter Henegar’s candid account of how he procrastinated in getting to the root of procrastination.

In seminary, Mr. Henegar noticed a three-fold pattern of procrastination in his academic life:

• If it’s not due tomorrow, then I’ll take my time and put off the work.
• If it’s due tomorrow, I’ll start the project, stay up late, and drop all my other priorities.
• Once I’ve finished, I’m entitled to a reward.
  

And then Mr. Henegar enrolled in a seminary course on counseling, where he began to uncover the hidden side of his procrastination. He realized that “my prickly branches of procrastination were being nourished by unseen roots growing deep in the chambers of my heart” (p. 41).

He’s referring here to a diagram called “The Three Trees,” developed by the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation (CCEF). The diagram, based on Luke 6:43–45, presents the situations of life (illustrated by sun or heat) that reveal the roots of sinfulness or godliness in our lives. These roots reveal what we really want and believe.

Under the heat of life’s circumstances, we sometimes respond in a godly way, revealing healthy roots that lead to fruitfulness (illustrated by a fruitful tree). Or these situations tempt us to respond sinfully, revealing a bad root and a lack of fruit (illustrated by a fruitless tree). The gospel is the centerpiece of the diagram, giving hope to the fruitless (through repentance) and reminding us that all godly fruit is a result of the gospel in our lives.

When he began recognizing the heart issues involved, Mr. Henegar continued through his semester with a closer watch on the roots of sin that nourished his procrastination.

This is how he describes his discovery:

I began to feel like I was really figuring myself out, and it was still early enough in the semester to think I was staying on top of things. I’d notice when I started slipping blatantly into procrastination, and it was easy enough to stop—at first. But soon midterms hit, and everything quickly fell apart. I found myself pulling all-nighters again, and it was back at square one. Ironically, though, I still had to work on an assignment for my counseling class. I reluctantly dove back, this time trying to get at deeper issues. It wasn’t hard to begin naming things.

Pride was surely operating: every time I pulled an all-nighter to finish a job, I was protecting my reputation before my friends and superiors.

Fear of others was closely related. When I had those mild panic attacks, the fear of others’ disapproval was foremost in my head.

Laziness wasn’t the main thing, but it definitely played a part; sometimes I just didn’t want to do anything.

Pleasure-seeking and escapism were big players, too, though I generally confined myself to acceptable thrills like watching movies and binging on Ben & Jerry’s. (p. 42, emphasis mine)

Mr. Henegar did the right thing after this discovery. He repented of his sin. He repented to his wife for the presence and effect of his sin. And he turned to a group of friends from his local church whom he offered “a standing invitation to show me my sin—and to remind me of the gospel” (p. 44).

What Mr. Henegar discovered was the simple truth that underlying our procrastination—putting off the most important duties we are called to accomplish—was not so much a busy schedule but a sinful heart.

The good news for all of us who are procrastinators is this: The gospel addresses these sins, provides forgiveness of sin, and gives us the power to weaken sin and cultivate true diligence. In the gospel we find hope to address the procrastinator within.

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Related posts in this series:

1. Are You Busy?
2. Confessions of a Busy Procrastinator

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In the past I thought that as long as I wasn’t idle, I wasn’t lazy. Not true. In fact, my laziness often shows up in the form of busyness.

  And this was the same discovery Walter Henegar made in his life, as he explained in his candid autobiographical article “Putting Off Procrastination” in The Journal of Biblical Counseling (Fall 2001).

“I procrastinate,” he writes. “I’ve been doing it most of my life. If a particular task is even remotely unpleasant, my first and persistent tendency is to put it off. It’s not that I’m lazy; I’m actually very busy. I just wait as long as possible to do the really hard stuff. I always pull it off in the end, but it regularly makes me miserable” (p. 40).

Here is a glimpse into his life:

When I got married, my uncle, who married us, joked about my well-known tendency right in the middle of the ceremony. His sermon was about the necessity of change in marriage, and looking right at me, he said, “One who is a procrastinator…will put that off as long as he can.”

And that’s exactly what I did, though married life made it increasingly more difficult. My designated crunch times now belonged to my wife as well, and I had to push her away to get last-minute work done.…Can’t she just cut me some slack?

She did cut me some slack, but only as much as her chronically ill body would allow. Repeated hospital stays and constant bouts with pain forced her to lean heavily on me to take care of her—and our two children. If marriage is God’s cold chisel for sanctifying us, then children only sharpen the edge. The three of them drove my work responsibilities deeper into my free time and farther into the hours of the night. I slept less and less. I still managed to pull most things off, but the quality of my work suffered, and my list of un-done to-do’s grew. I was continually weary, discouraged, and feeling sorry for myself. A couple of times, in the throes of last-minute working, I even experienced something like panic attacks. I envied my more disciplined friends but saw little hope of becoming like them. (pp. 40–41)

As he began studying his heart, Mr. Henegar discovered that his sin operated from three predictable manifestations of what he calls his “flow chart of if-thens”:

• If my task is not due anytime soon, put it off.
• If the task is due tomorrow, cast aside all other responsibilities and focus on this one task.
• And after accomplishing a large task, take a break and reward yourself.
  

As he continued to study his own heart, he began to understand that although his day was filled with busyness—and even with genuinely good activities—he was procrastinating. “There I was, buzzing diligently around the room, while that thing, the one thing I needed to do most, sat unheeded in the middle of it. I wasn’t just a procrastinator; I was a work-around-er” (p. 41).

Then came the decisive point in his life when he learned more about this procrastinator within.

About two years ago, a counseling class in seminary challenged me to give Scripture a shot at diagnosing my problem and setting a course for change. What captured my imagination was the biblical metaphor of a tree, and the suggestion that my prickly branches of procrastination were being nourished by unseen roots growing deep in the chambers of my heart. A hope even flashed that I might uncover the root, and somehow cut it out once and for all. In retrospect, this second hope was a reflection of my procrastinator’s heart, always looking for a shortcut or a silver bullet. (p. 41)

But there was no shortcut.

Next time we’ll discover how Mr. Henegar confronted the procrastinator within.

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Related post: Are You Busy? (11/12/08) 

 

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Lazy? Not me. I’m busy. Up early, up late. My schedule is filled from beginning to end. I love what I do and I love getting stuff done. I attack a daily to-do list with the same intensity I play basketball. Me lazy? I don’t think so!

Or at least I didn’t think so. That is, until I read about the difference between busyness and fruitfulness, and realized just how often my busyness was an expression of laziness, not diligence.

I forget now who first brought these points to my attention. But the realization that I could be simultaneously busy and lazy, that I could be a hectic sluggard, that my busyness was no immunity from laziness, became a life-altering and work-altering insight. What I learned is that:

• Busyness does not mean I am diligent
• Busyness does not mean I am faithful
• Busyness does not mean I am fruitful
  

Recognizing the sin of procrastination, and broadening the definition to include busyness, has made a significant alteration in my life. The sluggard can be busy—busy neglecting the most important work, and busy knocking out a to-do list filled with tasks of secondary importance.

When considering our schedules, we have endless options. But there are a few clear priorities and projects, derived from my God-assigned roles, that should occupy the majority of my time during a given week. And there are a thousand tasks of secondary importance that tempt us to devote a disproportionate amount of time to completing an endless to-do list. And if we are lazy, we will neglect the important for the urgent.

Our Savior understood priorities. Although his public ministry was shorter than one presidential term, within that time he completed all the works give to him by the Father.

The Father evidently called him to heal a limited number of people from disease, raise a limited number of bodies from the dead, and preach a limited number of sermons. As Jesus stared into the cup of God’s wrath, he looked back on his life work as complete because he understood the calling of the Father. He was not called to heal everyone, raise everyone, preach copious sermons, or write volumes of books.

While we must always be extra careful when comparing our responsibilities with Christ’s messianic priorities, in the incarnation he entered into the limitations of human life on this earth.

So join me over the next few days as we discover the root and nature of laziness, so that we might devote ourselves to biblical priorities and join our Savior in one day praying to the Father, “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do” (John 17:4, ESV).

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No one has taught me more about biblical counseling, progressive sanctification, and how to evaluate my heart in the shadow of the cross than Dr. David Powlison. If you are not familiar with David, you can get to know him well in this candid and colorful interview with Mark Dever. Download the 70-minute interview audio here or listen here:

Life and Counseling with David Powlison

If you are looking for more from David, I highly recommend two of his books: Speaking Truth in Love: Counsel in Community (New Growth Press, 2005) and Seeing with New Eyes: Counseling and the Human Condition through the Lens of Scripture (P&R, 2003). Though I recommend the entirety of each book, readers new to David will get an excellent intro to his teaching by starting with two chapters of Seeing with New Eyes: chapter 8 (“I Am Motivated When I Feel Desire”) and chapter 13 (“What Do You Feel?”). Enjoy!

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Five days after the 2004 presidential election, my friend Al Mohler preached at Covenant Life Church a message titled “After the Election.” What follows in this post are a number of lengthy but very helpful excerpts from that message that will provide you with a biblical perspective, regardless of who becomes the 44th president of the United States. I encourage you to take a few moments to read them.

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We are here on the Sunday after a national day of decision. And when I was asked to come and to preach to you on this day and to speak about the meaning of the election, we had no idea what would happen on Tuesday that would frame the background of our discussion today. In one sense it really mattered. In another sense it really didn’t.

We are living in one of those awkward moments when we are trying to decide what is really important, not only in terms of the present, not only in terms of our nation’s trajectory, but in terms of eternity.

We, as Christians, had to come together on a day like this in a service of worship to bring ourselves into the counsel of godly wisdom and to seek to unthink the thinking of the world. And this is so difficult because the seduction of worldly thinking surrounds us.

It is very easy for us to turn everything into a sociological calculus. We can explain these things on the basis of sociological patterns, voting demographics, and all the rest. It is very seductive for us to fall into some kind of amateur political science. We can map red and blue America. We can come up with the voting patterns. We can look precinct by precinct. It is very seductive to think we can psychologize this and determine why people made the choices they did in the voting booth. It was because they were afraid of this or afraid of that or they were hopeful of this or they had this need that was represented in this vote.

We could turn ourselves into therapists, psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, and we could pool all the wisdom that the secular world has to offer, and it would be an interesting conversation that in the end would tell us nothing about eternity.

So we are coming together this morning to think about what the election means. And in contrast, in order to do that faithfully, we are going to have to talk about what the election means and what the election doesn’t mean. We are going to have to talk about what is at stake and what wasn’t at stake. And we are going to have to try with godly wisdom, submitted to the authority of Scripture, to put all of this together.

In the Christian world, we face a perpetual temptation either to minimize the importance of the political question or to maximize it.…There is the temptation in both directions. We can trace the history of the church, and we can see at various times the church has been more tempted to go in one direction of unfaithfulness and at other times in that other direction of unfaithfulness. But our responsibility, perhaps most acutely on the Sunday after an election, is to get our hearts and minds together and submit them to the Word of God and ask: What should we make of all this?....

We are reminded that the political process is important, but it has its severe limitations. It is so important that I believe it is no exaggeration to say that by our political process we must contend for righteousness, uphold the dignity of law, uphold the administration of justice. And we do so as a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, knowing that justice is God’s gift and command and expectation to his people, that when God removes a sense of justice from a civilization, what follows is God’s judgment and wrath poured out in sheer chaos and dissolution.

We should be thankful insofar as we recognize [that] our opportunity to vote in this society is a Christian obligation to bear witness, even through that vote, to what we consider to be most important. That means at times we as Christians have to vote against our economic interest for a higher interest. We have to vote against our personal interest for a more significant interest.

With an issue like human life and human dignity on the line, a vote that would lead to the further destruction of human life or a failure to vote in a way that would restrict the destruction of human life is a vote that makes a citizen complicit in the taking and destruction of human life. There is no innocence. There is no neutrality.

Augustine, the great Christian theologian of the fourth century, tried to help the church understand this even as the Roman Empire appeared to be crumbling and eventually was destroyed, was fallen, and was no more. Writing in his famous book The City of God, Augustine said we must remember that there are two cities: a City of God and a City of Man. The City of God is ruled by a heavenly sovereign. It is the eternal city. It will never pass away. And there is the City of Man. It is God’s creation. In this age it is administered by sinners and has only a hint, at its best, of the grandeur of the City of God. At its very best it only hints at justice. For at our very best, our justice is tainted by our own finitude and our own sinfulness and our own limited wisdom. But in the City of God, justice reigns supreme because a just God administers his justice directly.

The same thing is true as we pass through all the virtues and all of our understandings of how God would order a society. But Augustine wanted his church members to remember that the City of Man is still important, because God created the city and put his redeemed people in it to make a difference for eternity.

Each of these two cities, Augustine said, has a love. In the City of God, the only love is love of God. It is an undiluted, undistracted, unrefracted love of God. But in the City of Man, there are many loves. Most of them are loves for the wrong things. All of them, even at their very best, [are] tainted by human sinfulness. Augustine said that love of neighbor should, in the City of Man, compel us to political responsibility, political honesty, and even political action.

But even as the church, the redeemed people of God in the City of Man is busy at work at policy, at politics, at strategy, and at tactics. All these things that do matter. The redeemed people of God must always have our hearts set on the City of God.

The apostle Paul put it this way. He said, “But our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20, ESV). We are citizens, first and foremost, of a heavenly kingdom. But in this earth we are also, in this age, citizens of an earthly kingdom, and we must show the glory of God by being God’s people at work for good, at work for righteousness, at work for that which will preserve and protect and nurture. But most importantly, we must be in this age at work preaching the gospel, an issue that has no direct political allegiance, but does have political meaning, political extension, and political implications. We must understand that the main responsibility of the church in every age, whatever its government that is around us in our society—whether we be in the Roman Empire with Caesar sitting on the throne, or whether we be in some kingdom where there is some lesser king who considers himself a sovereign monarch, or whether or not we are in a representative democracy where we elect our own leaders, or if we are in any form of government imaginable to mankind. The one thing we must know is that this government, at its very best, is only an incompetent core of sinners doing, we hope, their very best.

Incompetent, not in a human comparison with each other, but incompetence in the theological perspective that there is no government that will solve the problem of human sinfulness. There is no government that will come up with the end-all solution to human poverty. There is no government that will reach into the hearts of men and turn those who plot murder into those who no longer have such plans. No government will ever be able to reach inside the human soul and bring about transformation or regeneration.

Government, according to Paul in Romans chapter 13, has very specific, defined responsibilities. The first is to maintain justice, to punish the evildoer, to maintain the rule and administration of law—that law to also correspond to God’s moral law. And in the New Testament, we have very clear indications of the Christian responsibility. We are to pray for our leaders. We are to pray and we are to respect the king. And by extension, that means in our situation the government we elect, and especially the president and others who have the most strategic and important constitutional responsibilities.

We need to pray for our president. We need to pray for all of those who are in elected office. We need to pray for all of those that are in appointed office. We need to pray for all of those who are in the part of the ongoing mechanisms of government. We need to pray because those are men and women making very real decisions that will have very real impact in the City of Man.

And we know from the perspective of the City of God, they are often brushing up against matters of eternity without knowing it.…

I am thankful that we can, on this Sunday after the election, as Christians, come together and seek some theological sanity, and do so in a way that will mobilize us and prepare us for the big job that lies ahead.

I am thankful that as we stand here today, we come in the name of the one true and living God who is the electing God and not the elected God. We are here in the name of a sovereign, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. His name is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. We are here in the name of the triune God who reigns over all things. We are here in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ our Redeemer. We are here in the name of One who reigns over the affairs of nations, who looks down upon the affairs of men and sees grasshoppers, insects in debate, insects in decision, hopping bugs with the weighty affairs of state [Isaiah 40:22].

Scripture says that the Lord God shows his sovereignty in the rising and in the falling of nations, in the waxing and in the waning of empires. With biblical discernment, our task is to look to the affairs of the world and see the action of God, the judgment and the mercy of God outpoured as God’s sovereign and perfect will will dictate and as God’s humble people should observe.

We are people that know politics is important, but not ultimate. We know that politics has its place, an urgent and important place where, in the City of Man, decisions are made that can make the difference between life and death, injustice and justice, mercy and no mercy, commonweal or common disaster. But we also know that there is in this world at its very best only a hint of the kingdom that is to come, where God’s reign is supreme.

No government will ever be able to say, “Every tear has been wiped away.” No government will ever be able to say, “The blind have received sight and the deaf have received hearing and the lame now walk.”…That power is God’s alone.
 

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Lakeview Christian Center, the Sovereign Grace church in New Orleans, lost their church building to floods during hurricane Katrina in 2005 (see this video for the details). On Sunday, the church celebrated the grand opening of their new building, with nearly 1,000 in attendance. C.J.’s message from the morning is now online:
 
Deepening Our Delight
C.J. Mahaney
Jeremiah 9:23–24
November 2, 2008
Grand Opening; Lakeview Christian Center; New Orleans, LA
55:32 run time; 25.4MB MP3
 
Download here.
Listen here:
 

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