The lies that workaholism tells us
For most of my career, I have functioned as if my worth depended on the quality, intensity, and output of my work.
That is the deep lie at the center of workaholism, which is a disease with many faces.
It can wear the face of selfish ambition, shameless posturing, or unapologetic greed. In the life of a Christian, and especially in the life of a pastor, it usually wears the more acceptable, even admirable, face of devotion. Long hours, limitless availability, and zero boundaries, all in the name of “serving” are all too common in the lives of pastors and others in care professions, which is exactly what makes the underlying sickness so hard to see.
In The Mercy King, I wrote of my own workaholism:
Over time, sincere devotion turned into anxious striving. Joy was replaced by pressure, and rest by workaholism. What began as faithfulness started to feel more like fear, the fear that if I stopped moving, everything might come undone, including me. Eventually, it did. The weight became too much.
This experience is more common than it is rare.
Eugene Peterson once wrote something that got my attention like a smelling salt. He said that the adjective busy, placed in front of pastor, should sound to our ears “like adulterous to characterize a wife or embezzling to describe a banker. It is an outrageous scandal, a blasphemous affront.” His argument was that we too easily flatter one another with our crowded calendars, treating over-committed lives as evidence of importance rather than as signs that something has gone wrong. Peterson identified two roots that give rise to this dynamic. The first was vanity, or the desire to appear indispensable. The second was laziness, or the failure to sit still long enough to discern what actually mattered. The result is that we submit our own calendar to everyone else’s. The Bible calls this the fear of man. Pastor and theologian Jack Miller called it being an approval suck.
Workaholism is not a necessary price of success, commitment, or devotion. Not at all. In most cases, it is actually the betrayal of such things.
Peterson was writing to pastors, but the diagnosis reaches much further than church work. Every paid and unpaid vocation has its own version of the same pitfalls. The attorney has to bill her hours before she can go home. The executive is drowning in emails at midnight. The physician carries a patient load that’s 30% heavier than the average. At home, parents can’t sit down in their own living room because there is always one more load of laundry, one more email from the school, one more child who “needs” something unnecessary right now. The caregiver manages a family member's illness full-time while also working a full-time job. The volunteer's church and school and neighborhood have all learned to call him first.
In every case, the crowded calendar is interpreted as evidence of responsibility and significance. And in many cases, that’s true. But it can also mask a sickness, a work and productivity and busyness addiction, that no amount of activity and output will resolve.
Workaholism lies to us in several ways.
The first lie is that our worth must be earned.
Every Christian knows better than this in both theology and theory. Those of us who are churchgoers confess grace, sing grace, and preach grace at least weekly. But somewhere between our confessions and our calendars, a different gospel sneaks in. Functionally, we begin to operate as if the love of God, or the approval of others, or both, must be bought with our hustle and productivity. With sermons delivered and chapters written, with deals closed and patients seen, with rooms cleaned and children shaped and numbers grown. The inner scoreboard of our lives never turns off, and the bar keeps getting raised on what qualifies as a passing grade.
A second lie is that stopping, or even slowing down for a minute, is dangerous.
Many of us are not working hard because we love the work. We are working hard because we are afraid of what other people or “the system” will say about or do to us, or even worse, what the stillness will reveal about us. Staying busy day and night is an effective strategy for not thinking about and contending with our unhealed grief, our unresolved conflicts, and our unhealthy fixations. We run hard in order to outrun these sorts of things. And when we finally do slow down, our anxiety resurfaces, because we realize we have stopped operating as human beings and started operating as human doings.
A third lie is that our work is somehow going to hold the world together.
This lie flatters us, which is why it is so hard to resist. It tells us that the company or the family or the ministry or the marriage depends on us being fully engaged and “on” at all times. So we take a prerogative that belongs to God and put it on our own shoulders. We become, as the ancient pastor Hilary of Poitiers put it in a phrase Peterson loved to quote, guilty of “a blasphemous anxiety to do God's work for him.”
Tim Keller tied it to the language of idolatry. In Counterfeit Gods, he wrote that we know a good thing has become a counterfeit god “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.” Work, which is a gift, gets treated as a god. And the gods we serve always demand more than we can give, and they never give us what we are trying to get from them.
The Sabbath commandment is, above all, a command to remember. “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out” (Deuteronomy 5:15). Sabbath is the practice of remembering that you are not a slave anymore, so you can stop living that way. Your production is not the key to your worth or your survival. Taking a full day to worship, rest, and replenish each week keeps you anchored in the truth that you belong to God because of who He is and what he has done in Christ, not because of who you are and what you have done in your striving.
When we refuse that rest, we are not just ignoring a commandment. We are reenacting Pharaoh’s Egypt, and the drudgery and defeat it represents.
Originally published at Scott Sauls Weekly.
Scott Sauls is founder of Healthy Leaders, Inc. and The Sycamore Community, equipping leaders to live with honor, purpose, and emotional health from a gospel-centered perspective. In pastoral ministry for over thirty years, Scott served flagship churches in New York City and Nashville and planted churches in Kansas City and St. Louis. He has also taught preaching at master's degree programs and is the author of seven books, the latest of which is The Mercy King. You can learn more about Scott and access his written and spoken content at scottsauls.com.
