Working on (read: blissfully devouring) my Latin vocabulary yesterday, I got to diligere, a verb that Wheelock defines as "to love, esteem highly; to choose." Well, that's a bit different than the derivative word in English, I thought, and the wheels started turning.
Paraphrased from Etymonline, the source that is to amateur linguists what Monergism is to amateur theologians (okay, or what the The Evangelical Outpost is to aspiring front-runners of the blogosphere):
diligence: from O.Fr. diligence "attention, care," from L. diligentia "attentiveness, carefulness," from diligentem (nom. diligens) "attentive, assiduous, careful," originally prp. of diligere "value highly, love, choose," from dis- "apart" + legere "choose, gather." Sense evolved from "love" through "attentiveness" to "carefulness" to "steady effort."
I'm going to take a risk and infer some things about human nature from the evolution of a word. (At least you can know that if my logic is flawed, the basic principles still hold true.) The word begins with yet another denotation of "love" and travels through "attentiveness" and "carefulness." This makes perfect sense connotatively, if you will: we know that all men have some ultimate goal in mind that commands their worship and directs their will. Whatever his highest end is, a man values anything that can get him there. Even a lazy man will pay close attention to the means by which he can attain his goal; some of the most evil men in history were obsessively detail-oriented.
It should be convicting to consider the ultimate end of a Christian's work. Within the context of an exhortation to servants in Colossians 3, Paul identifies it: "Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ." If the attentiveness and effort we put into our work is in accordance with the measure of our love for Christ, how can laziness, time-wasting and any form of slacking off be things to joke about? The place to begin in cultivating diligence, then, is not in driven attempts at self-discipline, but in cultivating a love for God and for his law. Unless we learn to "delight in [his] testimonies as much as in all riches," we cannot consistently uphold a work ethic that differentiates us from the world. In this way we enjoy the logical progression from loving and highly esteeming our Master to keeping up steady, careful effort in every work that he has prepared for us to do.
