Pray without Ceasing, Work without Easing, and Talk without Teasing

As a result, they do not live the rest of their earthly lives for evil human desires, but rather for the will of God. 1 Peter 4:2

The passage bears repeating before commenting, “they do not live the rest of their earthly lives for evil human desires, but for the will of God.” Is this a message our generation can grasp or are we so dependent on grace and mercy that we have given up on righteousness and holiness? Verse 3 defines what we are not suppose to engage in “debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing and detestable idolatry” Webster defines debauchery as “extreme indulgence in sensuality” The list is inclusive of one thing, sin, the distinctions are simply made for emphasis. Peter admits that before we were born again many of us participated in these activities but he sets a pastoral limit when he declares “you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do” Meaning “don’t do that stuff anymore” A pastors.com survey indicated that 54% of pastors had viewed pornography within the last year. If half of the leadership in the church is participating in a form of debauchery no wonder we are not hearing messages that state we can live the rest of our lives free of earthly human desires.

Verse 1 of this chapter tells us that we can be “done with sin” and tells us how. It says to arm ourselves with the attitude of Christ. That may be too abstract to wrap our arms around so let me suggest three things to begin. Pray without ceasing, work without easing, and talk without teasing. If we continue to these three it will be God that we are pleasing.

Pray without ceasing.

Believers fail in this regard because they separate the normal routines of life from the spiritual life. A. Saphir’s work on the Lord ’s Prayer from the 1860’s states, “In the Lord Jesus Christ we see most clearly the union of prayer and life, the harmony and continual interpenetration of the two spheres of life – communion with God and work on earth.” Interpenetration is a new word for me. In theological terms it “refers to the mutual inter-penetration and indwelling within the threefold nature of the Trinity, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit”. As implied generally it means a mutual penetration of two things. In reference to our topic it is prayer and work.

Work without ceasing.

Over time I have increasing defined my theology around Sabbath keeping, or resting on the 7 day. This sounds glorious and in fact is glorious, but if I dedicated myself to resting on the Sabbath I am obliged also to honor God and work for six days. Idle hands are indeed the devils workshop and extended leisure has been the demise of many believers. Many congregations would do well in encouraging their pastors to work and additional job. The sweat of the brow is often a better motivator to prayer than the inactivity of a pastor’s cell or office. I suspect a busy man, worn down with a day full of labor is strengthen in his spiritual resolve in comparison with a bored man who is thirsting for entertainment and finding it in illicit sin.

Talk without teasing.

Men and women work in closer proximity in this generation than in any other. That work is also more separated from home than it has been in many other generations. That being true the opportunity for sin and the difficulty of living the rest of our earthly lives free from evil human desire becomes more difficult. One of the keys to our success is how we talk with the opposite gender in the work place. Playful teasing, coarse joking, are often create cracks in spiritual armor that left unattended leave the Christian soldier vulnerable to attack. Such teasing also indicates a lack of prayerful consideration for our co-workers and means that we are stealing time from productive work that the Lord has assigned us to. This may sound harsh and exacting but it is the casualness of our attitudes that is causing the routine nature of our sin. Jesus armed himself with prayer and his attitude was that he would live all of his earthly life for the will of God. Our attitude is to be the same, the availability of mercies that are new every morning, should not be accompanied but the necessity of those mercies, especially as it relates to sins classified as debauchery.