Page 66 - Advanced Biblical Counseling Student Textbook

highest motivation in everyday living; earning a paycheck; changing diapers and cooking dinner;
disciplining children; or keeping the car clean and the lawn mowed?

It all starts with the “first and great commandment.” When you love God with all your heart, soul and
strength, obeying His commandments is no longer legalism but a love motivation.

Jesus said, “If you love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15).

The Apostle John wrote, “Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments. He
who says, ‘I know Him’ and does not keep His commandments, is a liar and the truth is not in him. But
whoever keeps His word, truly the love of God is perfected in him. By this we know that we are in Him”
(1 John 2:3-5 NKJV (my emphasis)). 102

Counseling those who lack motivation.

Quite often a person who lacks the motivation to accomplish things in his life suffers from what the
Scriptures call laziness or slothfulness. Christians work hard (by grace!) to guard against the lust of the
eyes, the greed of the eyes, and the pride of life (1 John 2:16), but we can neglect seeing how laziness is
detrimental and sinful. Yet sadly, don’t we know the saying, ‘Idle hands are the devil’s playground?’ all
too often proves true in our lives?”

It’s quite important to identify laziness as a sin since the consequences of laziness negatively impact our
relationship with others, our well-being, and our eternal destiny. Ultimately, God made us to be workers
and representatives of His creative glory on earth. This is why we’re called image bearers. Failure to live
productively is then a failure to live as the creatures we’re made to be. Nothing less than God’s glory is
at stake when we live lazily and refuse to be motivated. 103

Proverbs 24:30-34 is the description of the lazy individual’s land being overcome with thorns. One of the
principles of interpreting biblical texts is to examine what Scripture says on a certain topic elsewhere
throughout Scripture. We call this task biblical theology. In this instance, the key idea is what happened
to the lazy person’s land: it’s overcome by thorns. We know from Genesis 3:17-18 that part of the curse
Adam brought on the world is that he would no longer labor in a luscious garden but in terrain
overtaken by thorns. So, to look at the lazy individual in Proverbs 24 is to look at a person overcome by
the curse of sin. After establishing that laziness is a vivid picture of the curse of sin as found in the
Garden of Eden, we can look at all the passages in Proverbs that describe unmotivated individuals and
the consequences of laziness.
The solution is the gospel. Jesus came to reverse the curse of sin and, connected to that, to reverse our
foolish behavior. Christ redeems us from our sin and enables us to obey His commands and find the
biblical motivation to live for His Father’s glory. Christ also becomes our wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:30-31).
Practically, this works itself out in our lives as we seek to live productively for God as a response to grace
and live productively to help others. One of the negative consequences we rarely consider is how our
laziness harms others. Paul dealt with this in the Thessalonian church on several occasions (1
Thessalonians 4:9-12; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-12). Being lazy means we put a burden on others to care for

102 Hackett, p. 1-2, 2018
103 https://www.biblicalcounselingcoalition.org/2011/11/16/help-i-cant-get-motivated-interview/

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