{"id":7006,"date":"2026-05-24T03:35:18","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T07:35:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bibliatodo.com\/En\/christian-news\/the-lies-that-workaholism-tells-us\/"},"modified":"2026-05-24T03:35:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T07:35:18","slug":"the-lies-that-workaholism-tells-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bibliatodo.com\/En\/christian-news\/the-lies-that-workaholism-tells-us\/","title":{"rendered":"The lies that workaholism tells us"},"content":{"rendered":"

For most of my career, I have functioned as if my worth depended on the quality, intensity, and output of my work. This is the deep lie at the center of workaholism\u2014a disease with many faces.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

It can manifest as selfish ambition, shameless posturing, or unapologetic greed. In the life of a Christian, and especially a pastor, it often wears the more acceptable, even admirable, mask of devotion. Long hours, limitless availability, and a lack of boundaries, all in the name of \u201cserving,\u201d are common for pastors and others in caring professions, which makes the underlying sickness difficult to see.<\/p>\n

In The Mercy King<\/a><\/em>, I wrote about my own workaholism, an experience that is far from rare.<\/p>\n

Eugene Peterson once wrote something that jolted me like a smelling salt. He said that the adjective busy<\/em>, placed before pastor<\/em>, should sound to our ears \u201clike adulterous<\/em> to characterize a wife or embezzling<\/em> to describe a banker. It is an outrageous scandal, a blasphemous affront.\u201d Peterson argued that we too easily flatter one another with our crowded calendars, treating overcommitted lives as evidence of importance rather than as signs that something has gone wrong. He identified two roots of this dynamic: vanity, the desire to appear indispensable, and laziness, the failure to sit still long enough to discern what truly matters. The result is that we submit our calendars to everyone else\u2019s expectations\u2014what the Bible calls the fear of man. Pastor and theologian Jack Miller called it being an \u201capproval suck.\u201d<\/p>\n

Workaholism is not the necessary price of success, commitment, or devotion. Not at all. In most cases, it is a betrayal of those very things.<\/p>\n

Peterson was writing to pastors, but his diagnosis reaches far beyond church work. Every vocation, paid and unpaid, has its own version of these pitfalls. The attorney must bill her hours before going home. The executive drowns in emails at midnight. The physician carries a patient load 30% heavier than average. At home, parents cannot sit down because there is always one more load of laundry, one more email from school, or one more child who \u201cneeds\u201d something unnecessary right now. The caregiver manages a family member’s illness while working a full-time job. The volunteer is the first person their church, school, and neighborhood learn to call.<\/p>\n

In every case, a crowded calendar is interpreted as evidence of responsibility and significance. While that can be true, it can also mask an addiction to work, productivity, and busyness that no amount of activity will resolve.<\/p>\n

The Lies of Workaholism<\/h2>\n

Lie #1: Your worth must be earned.<\/h3>\n

Theologically, every Christian knows this is untrue. We confess, sing, and preach grace weekly. But somewhere between our confessions and our calendars, a different gospel takes root. We begin to operate as if the love of God, or the approval of others, must be bought with our hustle and productivity\u2014with sermons delivered, chapters written, deals closed, patients seen, rooms cleaned, and children shaped. The inner scoreboard of our lives never turns off, and the bar for a passing grade keeps getting raised.<\/p>\n

Lie #2: Stopping is dangerous.<\/h3>\n

Many of us work hard not because we love the work, but because we are afraid. We fear what others or \u201cthe system\u201d will say or do to us, or worse, what the stillness will reveal about ourselves. Staying busy is an effective strategy for avoiding our unhealed grief, unresolved conflicts, and unhealthy fixations. We run hard to outrun these things. When we finally slow down, anxiety resurfaces, and we realize we have stopped operating as human beings and started operating as human doings.<\/p>\n

Lie #3: Your work holds the world together.<\/h3>\n

This lie is hard to resist because it flatters us. It suggests that the company, the family, the ministry, or the marriage depends on us being fully engaged and \u201con\u201d at all times. So we take a prerogative that belongs to God and place it on our own shoulders. As the ancient pastor Hilary of Poitiers put it in a phrase Peterson loved to quote, we become guilty of \u201ca blasphemous anxiety to do God\u2019s work for him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tim Keller connected this to the language of idolatry. In Counterfeit Gods<\/em>, he explained that a good thing becomes a counterfeit god:<\/p>\n

when its demands on you exceed proper boundaries. Making an idol out of work may mean that you work until you ruin your health, or you break the law in order to get ahead.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Work, a gift, is treated as a god. And the gods we serve always demand more than we can give, and they never deliver what we seek from them.<\/p>\n

The Sabbath commandment is, above all, a command to remember: \u201cRemember that you were slaves in Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out\u201d (Deuteronomy 5:15). Sabbath is the practice of remembering that you are no longer a slave, so you can stop living like one. Your production does not determine your worth or your survival. Taking a full day each week to worship, rest, and replenish anchors you in the truth that you belong to God because of who He is and what He has done in Christ\u2014not because of who you are or what you have done in your striving.<\/p>\n

When we refuse that rest, we are not just ignoring a commandment. We are reenacting the drudgery and defeat of Pharaoh\u2019s Egypt.<\/p>\n

Originally published at Scott Sauls Weekly.\u00a0<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That is the deep lie at the center of workaholism, which is a disease with many faces. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7005,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"featured_image":"https:\/\/www.bibliatodo.com\/En\/christian-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2026\/05\/the-lies-that-workaholism-tells-us.jpg","featured_image_thumbnail":"https:\/\/www.bibliatodo.com\/En\/christian-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2026\/05\/the-lies-that-workaholism-tells-us-90x60.jpg","featured_image_medium":"https:\/\/www.bibliatodo.com\/En\/christian-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2026\/05\/the-lies-that-workaholism-tells-us-300x157.jpg","yoast_head":"\nThe lies that workaholism tells us - CHRISTIAN NEWS - LAST MINUTE<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.bibliatodo.com\/En\/christian-news\/the-lies-that-workaholism-tells-us\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The lies that workaholism tells us - 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