We are joined one last time by Dr. Richard Lentz, who serves as the vice president for academic

affairs and the dean of the main campus of Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, which

is just north of Boston. Dr. Lentz is also the author of a fascinating book that releases

this winter's titled Identity and Idolatry, the image of God and its inversion. I want

to turn and close this week, this fruitful week, with the gospel, but you mentioned busyness

earlier in the week, and I want to go back to that. How does Identity breed busyness?

I think busyness is a contemporary idol. I'm not sure it was an idol in an earlier time.

You might say sloth was an idol of an earlier age, although I don't want to deny that there

are, there's this curious contradiction in modern life between busyness and sloth called

entertainment, and yet the circumstances of our lives in the West, outside of some

smaller community. I don't want to, again, overgeneralize that all communities and all

cultural context of our time are saturated with busyness, but I would say it is the dominant

motif for most people, that we have a sense of too many things taking place in our

life, and if we could just slow down one sign of this in religious circles of all theological

traditions is the move towards what we might call spiritual formation towards remembering

Sabbath through the rest, slowing down, becoming a spiritual discipline. That kind of movement,

if you will, is at least to me just a response. Sometimes a good one, sometimes not, a response

to being overwhelmingly busy. Now, busyness, again, is both a blessing and a curse. Sometimes

when you're busy, you actually accomplish much, and we are called to do. We are called

to be creatures who accomplish tasks. We are not simply called to naval days in creation.

We are given mandates to be stewards of the created order, so we are called to do, called

to be active in that sense, but there is a sense in which busyness is different than

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