One summer while I was in church camp I had a preacher friend ask me, "Do you work 40 hours a week? There are many preachers out there who don’t."
And what if a preacher or anyone else, for that matter, were hired to work 40 hours a week and they didn’t work 40 hours a week? That would be stealing.
Idleness is stealing time from an employer. Idleness is not working hard. And it could be not working at all!
It was said of preacher John Wesley that he traveled over 250,000 miles on horseback over a period of 40 years preaching the Gospel. He preached 40,000 sermons. He wrote 400 books and knew 10 languages. At 83, he was annoyed that he couldn’t write more than 15 hours a day without hurting his eyes. At 86, he was ashamed because he couldn’t preach more than twice a day. He complained in his diary that there was an increasing tendency to lie in bed until 5:30 in the morning. (In other words, he thought he was getting lazy)
John Wesley was a hard worker. Few people today work as hard he did. And I realize that we all have our own pace, but some are purposely slow because they don’t want to work.
(From a sermon by Steve Shepherd, "Keep Away from the Brothers")