I am just before leaving for the beach.  Anne and I will be joined by our immediate family and her family to enjoy a week at Hilton Head.  I am looking forward to the week and will be seekng both to relax and to be refreshed.  I want to have time with the family and time alone.  I want to read a lot.  I want walk on the beach in the early morning and listen to Piper sermons and Sproul lectures.  I want to enjoy my quiet time watching the sun come up and I want to enjoy watching the sun go down each night.  I am looking forward to it and  I need it.  A vacation is nice and necessary.  But we have taken in our society that necessary time and very nice word and turned it into a plural and a passion.  Here is the unseen and unaddressed idol for far too many in our culture.

Western Eurpoe has become the culture alone that exceeds ours in shorter work hours and longer play periods or vacations/holidays.  We are right behind them.  There was a time in both when a work week was not measured by the clock but by the sun.  One worked simply from the time the sun rose until the time the sun set.  A vacation or a holiday was usually one week per year and in our culture that week revolved around Indenpendence Day that was spent is some relaxing activities.  But no more.  We measure a work week now by hours.  We measure vacation by multiples.  Very few who are under my age would ever be satisfied with a week away out of fifty-two; I know some who feel unappreciated and unloved if they don’t get away at least one weekend out of every month and four to six weeks a year.  We cruise.  We cavort.  We commit ourselves almost unashamedly to the pursuit of personal pleasure.  And we justify it by the stress in our lives due to the work in which we are engaged.

We need in our culture a recovery of the realities of the Reformation at least one of which was the understaning of work as “vocation.’  John Calvin the great magisterial reformer in Geneva would teach that all work is given to us by God and is to be engaged in for His glory.  He taught in fact that we will be judged by the way we do our work because all of life is lived out under the sovereignty of God and is to be lived for His glory.  Steve Lawson in a recent and very brilliant lecutre on Calvin reminded his listeners that it is no accident of history that the best watches came from Geneva.  Those men and women were raised in an environment where they were taught to do their work as unto the Lord so as to bring paise to His name.  Is that the way we do our work?  Do we recognize that we will be judged as much by how we work as by how we worship?  And do we see at all that a life lived only or ultimately for the pursuit of pleasure not only does not please God but also is idolatrous?

I am ready for a week at the beach.  In fact, when I finish this little bit; I will be wrapping up my morning at the office and will begin this afternoon to set my affections toward the sun and surf.  That is good and right.  But if at the end of the week, I am on my way home grieving over the ending of the week and looking forward to the next pleasure pursuit, then I could be in danger of worshipping a false god at a fake altar.  I do believe that the pursuit of pleasure is for many a way to escape a very painful life.  It allows them to live with some fantasy while not being able to face reality.  That is idolatry.  God calls us to live in the context of reality with joy in what we do knowing that whatever pain or problems we face, God’s grace is always sufficient.

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