When Does it Make Sense to Work Hard?

To work hard or not to work hard? This question seems a lot less straightforward than we think.

Some people grew up with the old-school mindset that hard work is good almost by definition. You work hard because that is what decent people do. You show up early, stay late, grind through it, and there is something honorable about the suffering itself. Whether it actually leads anywhere sometimes feels secondary.

Then there are people who look around and think the whole thing is kind of a scam. You work harder, your employer gets richer, and you just get more responsibilities piled onto you. They see people grinding themselves into exhaustion and wonder what exactly the point is. While there is some truth to that criticism, it is unfortunate that this mindset seems increasingly common among younger people. #quietquitting #yolo #eattherich. Cynicism, while it may protect people from exploitation, can also squander one’s potential. It breeds detachment and distrust, which in turn dampen the spirit and outlook of society itself.

Others take a more calculated approach. They are willing to work very hard, but only when the payoff makes sense. If the rewards are there – money, opportunity, ownership, freedom, something meaningful – then they will go all in. But they are not interested in blind effort for its own sake. Everything is optimization.

My own view is a little different. I do believe in hard work, but I think definitions get muddy here. A lot of what people call “hard work” is really just mindless grinding. Repeating the same thing over and over because that is what you are “supposed” to do.

To me, stepping back and rethinking the process can be the harder thing. Thinking is hard. Admitting the current approach is not working. Questioning assumptions. Changing strategy. Trying something smarter instead of just pushing harder. That takes honesty, humility, and courage. I would advocate for that version of hard work every time.

But there is another question here: what if the world does not reward your hard work? What if we give our best and still get ignored, passed over, underpaid, or cheated? Should we then pull back and take the lowest-effort approach possible? Should we “quietly quit”?

Personally, I would not. Because I am a Christian.

In 1 Corinthians 6:7b, Paul says, “Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?” That is a difficult mindset in a world where people are constantly calculating outcomes and protecting themselves.

I also think about Joseph in the Old Testament. Whether he was in slavery, in prison, or elsewhere, he consistently gave his very best. I doubt he spent every moment mentally optimizing, calculating whether the immediate outcome justified the effort. He simply worked faithfully wherever he was placed. And Colossians 3:22–23 instructs us to work wholeheartedly, not just when people are watching, but as unto the Lord.

There is honor in giving your best even when the rewards are uncertain. Not because the world always rewards it fairly. A lot of times it does not. Sometimes the lazy person gets ahead. Sometimes the manipulative person wins. Sometimes the person who cuts corners and flatters gets promoted while the conscientious one gets ignored. We all have seen that.

But if my standard for effort becomes “only do my best when the outcome benefits me,” then eventually everything becomes transactional. Every act of effort becomes a negotiation. Every situation becomes a calculation of whether people around me “deserve” my best. I do not think that is a good way to live.
At the same time, I also do not admire blind grinding. A person can waste years exhausting themselves on a bad strategy simply because they are too stubborn or too prideful to rethink it. There are people who confuse burnout with virtue.

To me, the better approach is this: work sincerely, work intelligently, and detach our sense of honor from immediate outcomes. Give our best because it shapes us into a certain kind of person. A dependable one. A thoughtful one. A disciplined one. Even if nobody notices. And if we realize the current path is foolish, inefficient, or pointless, then changing course is not laziness. Sometimes that is the harder move. Sometimes wisdom looks less dramatic than grinding, but requires far more honesty.

I think Christians especially should understand this distinction. Faithfulness is not the same thing as mindless self-destruction. Joseph served faithfully wherever he was placed, but he was also perceptive, adaptive, and wise. He did not confuse suffering itself with righteousness.

So let’s work hard. But discerningly. And may God bless our good work.

A Matter of Silence

 

A friend of mine, Luke, was getting married. I wanted to tell him to stop.

Luke and I were both in grad school when we became good friends. We both were in our early thirties. I was already married and had a little son. Luke was alone.

Then Luke met Allurez, a new grad student from Bangladesh. It was crazy, really. Allurez told her professor that she was lonely. The professor said, “Hey, Luke is also lonely and single. Why don’t you two meet?” And so they met. Soon they started dating, and soon they were engaged. I wanted to tell Luke not to do it.

At Super Big and Famous University (SBFU), we graduate students had our own working area called the “bullpen,” where our cubicles were located. Most days it was just me. When you are the only person using a big space most of the time, your perception of the space heightens, and you can tell who else is there. A small change becomes profound and impossible to ignore. I was like that after 3 years of being the lone occupant of the bullpen. So sometimes when Allurez showed up, I would know, while she might or might not be aware that I too was there. And she was terrible.

She was frustrated by every little thing that came her way. She screamed the “F-word” nonstop. She showed disdain for other people and what they had to offer. She burped frequently and very loudly. And the perfume she wore was overwhelming. I wanted to tell Luke to stop.

I took friendship seriously and would like to let my friend know if he was pursuing a flawed woman. This would be, like Mr. Darcy to Mr. Bingley in Pride and Prejudice, my service as a friend. Being a married man myself, I was well aware of how devastating it would be to marry the wrong person. Quite possibly the worst misfortune in a man’s life. If I were any good as a friend at all, I would tell Luke. I would let him know. Don’t do it, Luke! She’s awful!

But was that the right thing to do? Luke had always been single, and at this point he felt quite lonely. Luke was the kind of man who was kind and nice and a good friend, while at the same time someone women would find unmanly and uninteresting. He was now quite happy with Allurez. His eyes were beaming with joy and hope. The two might be very compatible and meant for each other. Who was I to sabotage Luke’s happiness, and possibly his only chance of building his own family?

I did not know which was worse: not preventing my friend from making a disastrous life decision, or actively denying him a chance at a lifetime of happiness. Which action would be a greater disservice? A greater betrayal of our friendship?

I chose inaction, and wished their marriage well. Very soon after the wedding, they had a son. Luke was never happier.

A year later, Allurez had her green card. She left them. Luke and his son carried on with their life together, trying to find joy in each other’s company. Looking at the little boy’s bright face, I still did not know what I should have done.

Jesus Tricked Us

 In His final meal, Jesus said, 

“Truly, I say to you, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.” (Mark 14:25)

What does He mean by that? “I will not eat nor drink again until …” is what people in this culture say to express their utmost determination. E.g. “I will not eat nor drink again until I get back the 20 bucks from Timmy!” So by saying what He said, Jesus basically said, “I’m never gonna give you up.”

Jesus Rickrolled us.

The Doors Aren’t Locked from the Outside: My Thoughts on Universalism

 

I see my loved ones becoming universalists one after another. Universalism is one of those doctrines that keeps coming back around, partly because it offers a kind of moral relief. The idea is that in the end, God will save everyone, believers and non-believers alike, because His love will not allow anyone to be lost forever. I understand the impulse. I am tempted by it. If you care about God’s goodness, if you’ve sat with the brutal realities of human suffering and human blindness, it is not hard to see why many would want this so much to be true.

But when I try to approach this by turning to the Scripture and focusing on its narrative logic, I keep running into a different theme. The Bible does not merely portray sin as a mistake that eventually gets corrected. It portrays sin as a posture: a self-exalting refusal to worship God. And it portrays judgment, often, as God confirming what a person has chosen to become. In C.S. Lewis’s book The Problem of Pain he wrote, “the doors of hell are locked on the inside.” It isn’t a throwaway image. It is a moral diagnosis.

 

Our temptation to soften warnings

Genesis is not subtle about what disobedience means: “in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:17). Then comes the serpent, and his first move is to make God’s warning feel inflated: “You will not surely die” (Gen. 3:4). That’s the shape of temptation at the beginning of Scripture: minimizing the seriousness of rebellion, treating God’s word as rhetorical, and making autonomy look safe. Adam and Eve do not drop dead on the spot, but the entire story of Scripture unfolds under the shadow of what entered that day: the alienation from God, exile, corruption, and the slow certainty of death.

For that reason, I can’t help hearing an echo of Genesis when a theology reassures us that, ultimately, no one will finally perish. I am not claiming universalists are intentionally repeating the serpent. I am saying something more basic: the Bible teaches us to be suspicious of any message that deflates divine warnings into something temporary or illusory. If the first lie was, “God doesn’t really mean it,” then the burden is on the universalist to show that the Bible itself forces us to read its warnings that way rather than our moral discomfort doing the forcing.

Pride as the lock

If I had to name the spiritual root, I would name pride. Not pride as mere arrogance, but pride as the deeper refusal to worship. Pride says, “I will not bow; I will not be dependent; I will not repent; I will decide what good is.” That is why Scripture describes the human problem as not merely ignorance but rebellion. People “did not honor him as God” (Rom. 1:21). When pride is established, sin becomes more than isolated acts. It becomes a center of gravity. Over time, it produces a person who doesn’t merely do wrong things but who increasingly cannot stand the very conditions of repentance: humility, confession, surrender.

“Locked from the inside” doesn’t mean God is absent, or that God doesn’t judge. It means the posture of the soul is itself a refusal of the only door that leads into life with God. If heaven is worship, then pride will experience heaven as an assault. It is not a neutral preference. It is a contradiction.

 

Pharaoh’s hardened heart

Pharaoh is one of the clearest biblical portraits of how refusal can harden into something like spiritual fixedness. The story is not simply, “Pharaoh made a bad decision and then regretted it.” It is a long sequence of repeated encounters with God’s word and repeated acts of resistance. Exodus speaks in both directions: Pharaoh hardens his heart, and God hardens Pharaoh’s heart (Exo. 7-11). People debate the theology of that, but the narrative effect is difficult to avoid. Pharaoh becomes, through repeated refusal, a man who refuses more reflexively, more intensely, with less capacity to yield. The “no” becomes not merely a choice but a character.

What matters for the universalism question is this: time does not necessarily soften pride. It can do the opposite. The Bible’s language of hardening is not a minor detail but one of Scripture’s recurring warnings. Hebrews takes the Pharaoh logic and turns it directly toward ordinary people: “Do not harden your hearts” (Heb. 3:8,15). The assumption is clear: hardening is possible, progressive, and spiritually perilous. Universalism often assumes that if God continues to pursue, every person will eventually relent. Pharaoh is a cautionary counter-example: repeated exposure to truth does not guarantee surrender. Sometimes it produces deeper self-justification and deeper resistance.

 

The problem with guaranteed outcomes

I would keep coming back to the way Jesus speaks. Whatever interpretive flexibility someone wants to use in Paul, Jesus’s warnings consistently land with urgency and gravity. “People loved the darkness rather than the light” (John 3:19) isn’t mere lack of information. It is “love”. It is strong preference. It is moral orientation. And Jesus’s ministry is full of encounters where the dividing line is not intellectual ability but willingness to yield, particularly among the proud, the self-justifying, the ones who cannot bear to be exposed.

Universalism needs the final “yes” to be guaranteed. It needs the claim that grace will always cure pride, always, for every person, eventually. But at that point I start to wonder what “resistance” actually means. If the outcome is guaranteed regardless of the person’s settled refusal - a hardened heart - then the final “no” is never truly allowed to stand. And I understand the universalist answer: God heals without coercing. Yet there is a point where “inevitable healing” begins to look like either coercion (the will is overcome) or replacement (the person who says “no” is remade into someone else). The logic pushes in that direction unless we can explain, plainly, how a guaranteed “yes” preserves the moral seriousness of a “no.”

 

Judgment as “handing over”

My take is also different from the common argument that universalism is required for God’s victory. God does not lose if He judges rebellion. He does not lose if He respects a refusal. God is not running for office. He is not insecure. He offers real grace, real invitation, real warning, and He commands repentance sincerely. But love is not the same thing as compulsion, and worship cannot be manufactured without becoming something other than worship. If a person insists on self-rule (i.e. pride) then God may judge by confirming that choice. That does not make God weak. It makes God just.

Romans 1 provides likely affirmations of what C. S. Lewis wrote. The chapter describes judgment as God confirming what people insist on, including “God gave them up” and “God gave them over” (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28). Far from meaning God is defeated, this is about His judgement. And the form of the judgment is not always dramatic punishment; it is sometimes permission - in the frightening sense! - that God stops restraining and allows a person to inhabit the world his desires are building. He takes human moral agency seriously enough to allow people, eventually, to receive the end of what they have chosen.

 

A closing thought

When I read the passages that sound most sweeping, God saving “all,” Christ drawing “all,” reconciling “all things”, I keep noticing that they are are not written as unconditional guarantees detached from response. Over and over, Scripture frames the promise in terms of belonging: the “all” who are His sheep, His people, those who are in Christ, those who come to the light and receive Him. The universality is real, but it is the universality of God’s invitation and of Christ’s sufficiency, not a promise that every person is saved regardless of repentance and faith.

If universalism were plainly taught, I would submit to it. I’m not interested in keeping a harsh doctrine for its own sake. But when the “God saves all” verses are conditional salvation, and all the warnings remain warnings, letting hardening remain real, letting refusal remain refusal, I find myself unable to treat final judgment as only temporary. The Bible’s story begins with humans being lied to about minimized consequences and ends with a sober call to repentance and worship. Pride is the recurring villain in between. And pride, left unrepented, does not simply need time. It needs surrender. The tragedy is that surrender is the one thing pride most refuses to give. I pray that I am wrong.

Terrible Song, But Rejoice Anyway?

 

I went to church. The worship leader smiled and said, “Today we’ll teach you a new song!” Here we go again.

“HALLE!” A pause. “LUJAH!” What a terrible song.

Then the song continued as a remix of Amazing Grace. Now it felt insulting.

Are we, as Christians, supposed to enjoy a worship service no matter what?

The people in the front row were just jamming it out. Was that what I was supposed to do?

We hear about Christians with abundant joy in their hearts and on their faces, made possible by their strong faith in Christ. Is that what this is about – to be a strong believer is to rejoice in any worship song, Philippians 1:18 style?

I think it’s objectively true that some songs are “better” than others. To go one step further, some genres are more suitable for certain purposes than others. The most popular song at a rave is probably not going to be well received at a funeral. At what point do we decide that a worship song is “not good enough”?

Language is probably the low-hanging fruit: it’s easy to detect vulgar language. It’s a bit harder to detect unbiblical content. As a result, many contemporary worship songs feel generic, vague, and “safe.”

“God is good!”

“I am saved!”

“Praise God!”

“Hallelujah!”

Now spice them up in twenty different ways and we’re good to go.

I struggle with worship songs that I find terrible. Am I offended by the low quality, the low effort of what we are offering to God? Or am I acting like a Pharisee, gatekeeping people from worshiping with different tastes and scorning new and creative approaches?

Perhaps, when everything is said and done, there are different spaces for worship. One for modern, contemporary performances. Another for death metal rock fans. Yet another for rap and hip hop. And I’ll find my little corner of traditional, classically performed, beloved hymns. And God would see that it’s all very good.

Superman, Crashed and Burned

 

For generations, Superman stood as the cultural blueprint for the ideal man. He embodied strength paired with restraint, courage guided by conscience, confidence anchored in humility. He was the man who could lift mountains yet chose gentleness, who could rule the world yet chose to serve it. Boys looked up to him not just for his powers, but for his virtues, a model of what a man could aspire to be at his best. But that man is no more.

The new Superman (2025) movie opens with a stunning reversal of everything he once represented. The first image we see is not steadiness or strength but helplessness: Superman, bloodied and defeated, sprawled face-down in the snow, crying out for help. His dog, Krypto, arrives, not as a loyal companion, but as a chaotic, disobedient force that bounces on his injured body, worsening his wounds, then drags him for miles across the frozen ground like a captive in an old Western. Our first encounter with this new Superman is not inspiration: it is humiliation. The next major scene continues the inversion. During an interview with Lois Lane, instead of the traditionally showcased Superman’s calm moral clarity, we see he becomes frustrated, raises his voice, and loses composure. Lois herself is combative and dismissive, questioning him about breaking laws even as he tries to save people’s lives. Their exchange is tense, unpleasant, and stripped of the dignity and mutual respect that used to define them.

This new portrayal is not random. It reflects a deeper cultural rewrite of what a “good man” is supposed to be today. Traditional masculinity - assertive, steady, principled, and protective - has increasingly been reframed as dangerous and toxic. Strength is treated with suspicion. Leadership is portrayed as aggression. Emotional steadiness is dismissed as repression. In this current worldview, a man is only considered virtuous when he is softened, humbled, or broken. And so Superman, the ultimate masculine archetype, must now be remade as weak, insecure, easily overwhelmed, and constantly challenged. The modern Superman does not inspire: he apologizes. He does not lead: he second-guesses. He does not project strength: he is allowed worth only after he first collapses.

When we change Superman, we reveal what we believe about men themselves. The sad truth is that the cultural ideal of the good man has shrunk. Instead of encouraging men to be strong and responsible with their strength, society increasingly expects them to be harmless, passive, and emotionally fragile. The result is a generation of young men who no longer see a clear path toward admirable masculinity: even their greatest hero has been stripped of his virtues.

In the end, none of this really seems to matter. The movie gives us bright colors, loud explosions, fast punches, and a few slow-motion hero shots. So the crowd cheers, the theater shakes, and everyone walks out smiling. Why do we care? We got our explosive action scenes, so we clap, and we’re happy.