I read somewhere that the only human being who never had a messiah complex was the one who actually was the messiah, namely Jesus. (If I was more efficient, I’d have a referencing system.)
The rest of us fall into various degrees of trying to trying to rescue parts of (or all of) creation, instead of realising that Jesus has already done that and has charged us with much more modest and realistice tasks.
Pastors, who one might think would model the life of freedom in Christ quite effectively, are among the most guilt ridden and failure focused individuals you might encounter.
At MGPC we heard Paul, one of our elders, give a talk on biblical productivity over breakfast last week. He commended a paper (collated from a number of blog entries) by C.J Mahaney as being very helpful.
You can find a pdf of the articles here. WARNING: Busy people beware, it is 36 pages long. It is formatted with a narrow column of text on each page, so it is not as bad as it looks. Perhaps you could read the 17 parts, one each day. Don’t try and skip to the practical bits, it’s all pretty practical.
The August issue of The Briefing has an article entitled Sloth: Is it our problem? in which Ben Underwood seeks to show that our busyness and toil is just evidence we’re caught within sloth’s grip. (From the blurb) The guilt prone will doubtless be agog at the thought that they could be busy and slothful at the same time. More guilt.
The basic thesis seems to be that sloth is not doing nothing, it is failing to do what we should be doing. Unfortunately the article is not one of the ones which is available free, but if you’re curious you can purchase either a paper for download copy of the issue here. If you’re not a subscriber you should be.
Lastly, Kevin DeYoung has written a lengthy blog post on the difference between being a busy Christian and a productive one. He admits that it is a large post, so again you may want to invest a couple of sessions in reading it.
In a (largely western) world where people in general, including Christians, have never been busier, but seem more and more dissatisfied with their productivity, these careful, biblical, practical essays are a great help.
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