The Gospel of Grinding: Does Hustle culture Work with a Faithful Christian Life?

Photo by Carlynn Alarid on Unsplash

The Gospel of Grinding.  

The culture of hustle is literally all over now. Call your phone and before you can even have a cup of coffee you are being bombarded with the 5:00 am morning routines, cold plunge videos, and guys boasting of not leaving their rooms till they reach a million bucks. The essence remains the same, you will not grind and lose, and you will not rest and fall back. It was a complete generation gorged on that story whole and named it ambition.  

However, sincerely, there exist costs of grinding. We are watching people burning out at high rates. The stress is high and reports of individuals who had pursued success all they had to know that hustle had left them empty have been coming in. Consider Matt D'Avella - filmmaker, YouTuber, the guy who made a Netflix documentary about minimalism. He has worked there and he had confessed that he has acquired serious anxiety due to years of grinding, even had a thought of leaving his work. 

That is the question as Christian, is hustle culture even possible when you are attempting to live a life of faith before God? And more to the point what is the Bible saying about work, rest, ambition, and success? As far as we are going to discuss how to live it out we may as well start by examining the individual who created the entire blueprint on life.

Chapter 1: What Is Hustle Culture?  

We should first define what hustle culture is before going into the spiritual aspect of the phenomenon since it is much more than mere hard work. Hustle culture simply refers to the idolation of busyness. You are meant to be grinding always, always on the pursuit of the next goal and get the best out of your day. Unless you are generating, then you are wasting time. If you’re resting, you’re weak.  

Fundamentally what it is expressing to you is: how much you get out, is how much you are worth. The greater the number you hours, the more desirable you are meant to be. And that is associated with another risky thought, which is beat everyone around you at work and end up ahead. Success is a competition. Rest? That is the case with those who do not want it.  

This is further heated up by social media. Instagram feeds abound with the stories of people who are working around the clock and hardly sleeping and it begins to occur to you that that is the formula of success. You start feeling guilty because you are sitting, guilty because you are having a day off and the pressure is not from outside world only but also a quiet voice in your head, speaking that you will be doing more.  

Feed the narrative of hustle by catching that voice.

Chapter 2: When Work Becomes an Idol.  

This is where hustle culture enters into an area which bible considers seriously when work and productivity cease to be the means of achieving something and it is now the object of belief. Idolatry does not only remain on golden figures, and idol is simply anything which wins your heart in place where God should have been. Hustle has the potential to make ambition an idol and you were not even noticing that.  

1 Timothy 6:9-10 goes to the point directly: those who are set on getting rich become passively lured and fallen, exhausted into destruction and loss. Money is the root cause of every kind of evil and those who are pursuing it may end up losing faith and this causes a lot of misery to humans. Note- this does not imply that money is bad. The fixation on it, the addiction, the maniacal follows-up, that is the pitfall.  

There is hardly room to have God when your program is work. Prayer gets pushed aside. Daily bible reading is put off to possibly a later day. Soon, you lose the gift of your forever life over to your career and ambitions. What the Bible says in the book of exodus is that a person can not have other gods than the big God himself. Whether the idol is respectable or not is irrelevant; hard work passing off as devotion will still be idol when it takes the place of God in the center.  

Christian YouTuber Evan made it straightforward: at times when things become a hustle, prayer is the first thing that is compromised. He terms it as a guilt cycle, work 24 hrs, feel guilty, work, feeling guilty. The indicator on the cycle that work has become an idol in your life is apparent. And even where it appears fruitful on the surface, there can never be an empty hand in idol worship.

Chapter 3: The Bible on Taking Rest.  

When the hustle culture screams never stop, the bible dead beats with a completely different rule, and it is not a choice. Rest has already been incorporated into creation myth. God also took six days off and on the seventh day, he rested. It is not that He has exhausted his energy but He wants to leave a pattern and an example to us. He made it as a model before he even issued an order.

That pattern became law. Keep the Sabbath and remember it, make it holy as well- Exodus 20:8. And it is still more flatly said in words of Psalm 127:2: There is no sense in rising early and lingering long and toiling until you drop, to worry you may have of what you have. God revokes sleep to those that He loves. That is, being available twenty four hours is not the measure of commitment. In this passage it can even indicate a heart which has not learned to rely on God with the result.  

Ecclesiastes 4:6 provides an extra component of wisdom that hustlers are in dire need to listen. A single handful of calmness and quiet beats better two handfuls of hard work and running after the wind. Two handfuls do not seem like two. But when both hands are straining and:thousiasting and spiritual anhoriencing, then one of the hands full of peace is the better life. That is a bitter pill to swallow, when you have been socialized to think that the bigger the better.  

And then there is Jesus himself. The Son of God at least eleven times went out of the people to secluded spots to pray and rest. Luke 5:16 informs us this was something that He had been accustomed to. Suppose one who holds the universe together took time and sat down with the respiratory system, what then makes us believe we are so important or too busy, not to do so also? Rest is not laziness. It is trust. It is a process of realizing that we are kept alive by God and not because we are hustlers.  

Chapter 4: Ambition Is Not the Enemy.  

This is one point that must be made clear, to be against the thematic of hustles culture does not imply one is against hard-working or ambition. The bible does not challenge us to laziness. It calls us to be faithful. And trust sometimes is as grinding as trust can be.  

Proverbs 6 addresses a person that has already made bad choices and gets into the economic rut. It is not the case of prescription to decelerate and strike a balance. It is to the extreme to purge yourself. Give restless night to thy eyes, no slumber to thy eyelids. Become like a gazelle in the hand of the hunter. Hustle culture is not seasons in life-- specifically when you are young or when you are watching your way out of being in debt or making bad choices. It is stewardship.  

The actual distinction between the guy who is fleeing between 18 and 25 without any dependents and trying to create something out of nothing and the one who is already successful and is working because of the anxiety or the ego. Just by telling a young man attempting to clean up a mess in his life that the only thing he should do is to balance himself in work and to do more things to relax will actually hurt him in that very season. Context matters. Honor, which is fueled by obedience and being responsible to the life that is under your God cannot be termed as a sin. It is a calling.  

The difference between godly ambition and hustle culture does not lie in the amount of time you spend working it but the purpose and the god. Working hard when you know you are not living your own life, when you are caring about your siblings, your future, the children God has sent you, that is not the same thing as working hard to make your name and achieving your ego. In Colossians 3:23, it is said in simple terms, do whatever you do, work at that, and treat it as it were that you are working to the Lord, not to people. That shifts the whole thing.  

Chapter 5: Indications that Hustle Culture Is Managing You.  

The problematic aspect of the hustle culture lies in the fact that it does not proclaim itself. It enters through habits that appear to be fruitful on the surface. These are some of the signs one should be on the lookout.  

When life becomes busy the first thing that is sacrificed is prayer. Time is an indicator when your to-do list begins to intrude into your God time. It is not as though it is a great thing at the time, but after a time to remember when it counts your real trust.  

When you are not working you feel guilty. Taking a day off or having rest is something that causes anxiety or the feeling of a loss. The fact guilt is not the voice of God but rather the voice of hustle culture saying to you that your value exists because of what you produce.  

You have contracted time selfishly. When your work is your life priority, anything that does not promote your interests begins to look like a waste to you even during the presentation of important things in life like family and friends. The surrounding persons begin to feel the separation.  

You have always been in comparison with others. The culture of hustle is based on comparison and competition. You glance at the things that a different person is getting done and you are behind, jealous, or bitter. Their aspirations turn into yours and their schedule turns to yours.  

You are running on anger. Giving a truthful assessment to a season of high hustle, you may have noticed the sort of anger that came with it - a stinging edge, a short temper, an attitude not to be patient with anything that was not part of the mission. Many people who popularize hustle culture online appear so angry through their speech and even their thoughts. That is not a coincidence. It is a consequence.  

Burnout is not a status to be proud of. It is a warning sign. It normally manifests not only in its physical form, but also in its spiritual one, weary, unsatisfied, in need of something that all the working has never provided.

Chapter 6: A Biblical Model of Success.  

The concept of success that has been propagated by hustle culture is quite straightforward: money, fame, that influence aura, that posh life. Take a moment to consider luxury homes, high-end vehicles, and the freedom to do anything at any time. The basic premise is that your accomplishments become increasingly valuable.

Bible does not resonate well with that definition. This does not imply that money is bad, but rather, that sort of success is quite impossible. Richer people are always out there no matter how much of the cash you have. However many followers you can get always you will find someone who has more. It is true that hustle culture promises that you will feel satisfied as soon as you reach the goal, but after achieving that, they simply shift the goal. Look at the example of Elon Musk, arguably the richest in the world, who has already dominated nearly all mainstreams of wins, but according to the yardstick of the world itself there is still more to pursue. There is ever another start up, another frontier.

It all comes down to noise in Matthew 6:33. First seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness and everything will be attached. It’s an equal gang operating system. There is no Biblical success in terms of net worth or the number of followers. It is about faithfulness and doing the good things which God prepared specially to you, not things which you prepared yourself merely to PUBG to show the world that you are a good man.

Mark 8: 36 poses the question that all hustlers whether they know it or not are bound to believe in at a certain time in their lifetime, what is the sense of getting the entire world in your grip when you end up losing your self? You can accomplish all the things that the hustle culture puts in the competition and end up feeling empty. Saints of the saintliest kind that have lived in history, who on earthly standards had little or little, had sovereign tranquility in their knowing that God loved them, and they belonged to Him.

According to Evan: The end of the day, to him success was to come up before the gates of heaven and have Jesus say, I am proud of you. That is a definition of success that does not push the goal line. That is a definition you can even build your life on.

Chapter 7: The Secret to Escaping Hustle Culture.  

To overcome the hustle culture, it does not mean sleeping on the job and giving up on your goals. It is getting your life reorganized in such a way that God is first in your priorities, not merely a thing to check off but to truly how you use your days.

The point of departure is the Sabbath restoration. Not as a rite of religion, but as an actual exercise of trust. Choose a day in every week and stop working. Not half-a-day of still writing mails round, but an entire day of relax and worship. This action is the direct proceed to the idol of productivity. It boasts directly to your schedule: I do not have it on hold. God is. It won’t be easy at first. Most people around you are defined as restless hustlers and sometimes you might feel like it feels like you're missing out.  But it is precisely that emotion that you are attempting to neutralize, you don’t have to feel being left behind.

The second step is to evaluate your intentions. Why are you grinding so hard? Is it the responsibility and purpose that you are stewarding the life that God gave you? Or do it to state something, earn something, or win something which is never really the point? All of hustle culture revolves around self, self-reliance, self-advertising and self-esteem achieved through your personal success. However, to be a follower of Jesus means to know that without him, you have nothing. It has nothing to do with your strength, intelligence or your hustle. God granted you the capacities and the intellect. And whatever productive activity is taking place, it is a part of Him.

The simplest invitation can be found in the bible, the gospel written by Matthew, where Jesus invites us to come to him so that he can grant us rest. Many years ago farmers would attach a robust ox to a weaker one in order that the stronger should bear the strenuous load. It is the image which Jesus draws. He’s the strong in the yoke. We are not supposed to drag the load of life on our own. The burnout strikes and everything becomes too heavy--just because at some point of the journey we failed to allow Jesus to hold it with us.

Lastly be serious with comparison. It is the culture of hustle that thrives and is fed by social media 24/7. Attempt to truly enjoy what others do, as opposed to comparing yourself to others. The body of Christ consists of numerous parts--eyes are not supposed to be of a jealous nature with hands. Everyone has roles, seasons and callings. Once you are done with having someone run your race, you could be the one running yourself.

Finally, You Are Not a Machine.  

You were not made to maximize. You were not created so that you could make every minute count and out of every waking hour squeeze whatever you could out of it. You are a human being created in the image of God and not a machine whose parts should be upgraded and utilized.

The culture of hustle will always assure you that the next level is the one you will get satisfaction out of. But frankly, such promise keeps slipping. Anybody, who has pursued it so hard, it hurts him. The burnout is real. The emptiness hits real. And the people who ultimately have figured it out are not relieved by the quiet quitting, lightest form of minimalism or even the latest self-opt movement. It was in something that hustle culture will never provide them with the serenity of knowing that you are loved by God, your value is not negotiable, and everything in this world does not last long.  

Work hard. Do what you can with it. You should pursue the things God placed on your heart in reality. But don’t worship the grind. Alterations in the things that count most on the altar of productiveness. And in all seasons, do thou come back to him that said unto thee, Seek first my kingdom. Everything else will follow.  

We will all die one day in front of God and present him with our choices. The question will not be what we attained. It will be whether we were loyal with what He had granted us. And should you ever be in a position to get to that point and have Him tell you that he is proud of you, that is the one success story that is worth pursuing.

Written by 

Clovis Amatus Cyomoro.