Seven Deadly Sins

Sloth

Here is a sloth. You will notice that it is a slow moving plant eater. What? Wrong kind? OK, I’ll start again...

<in fake voice>Dearly Beloved, In your Bible the Children of Israel crossed the Red Sea, Moses dies and Joshua becomes the leader. Then as time goes on Joshua dies and the other old timers that had crossed the Jordan with Joshua that had seen the glory of God, the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, dies out.

Israel became content to settle down and enjoy the fruit of prosperity. All of us have prospered. 2 TV’s, 2 or 3 cars, a/c, and 2 indoor plumbing available. The Church has become comfortable, everything has prospered but souls. Israel did not know how to handle prosperity. With prosperity came a spiritual decline...

Wait a minute... that’s not me. That’s just the start of a sermon which I found on the internet and copied out... but I don’t want to do that, do I? I’ll admit that there is a certain temptation to do the whole sermon as an object lesson, but I think that there are some very interesting and helpful things that we can consider together on the whole subject of sloth.

It is the last of the “seven deadly sins” which we have been looking at, but it is by no means the least. It encompasses laziness, boredom and despair (in the days when Pope Gregory first formulated the seven deadly sins, this one was known as melancholy or sadness; despair is the closest modern English word for the expression).

I’d like to start by considering some of the words which were read for us earlier from Proverbs 24.

I went past the field of the sluggard, past the vineyard of the man who lacks judgment; thorns had come up everywhere, the ground was covered with weeds, and the stone wall was in ruins. I applied my heart to what I observed and learned a lesson from what I saw: A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest – and poverty will come on you like a bandit and scarcity like an armed man.

You can picture Solomon walking past the fields, and one of them stands out. Unlike the others, the wall here is in ruins, the ground is covered in weeds and thorns had come up everywhere. How does a field get into such a state? What kind of farmer could do this?

The Problem of Procrastination

The lesson Solomon learns is an interesting one. See how it starts: “a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands. Everyone who owns a garden knows how important it is to keep on top of the gardening. What happens if you ignore the garden for a while? Right.

When I lived in Leeds I was never able to keep on top of my small garden. I didn’t have a lawnmower. I had a sickle. Thigh-high grass seemed to spring up overnight. It didn’t of course. It came up gradually, and because I wasn’t working my garden regularly, I didn’t notice the growth until “suddenly” it was thick enough for tigers to hide in!

The issue is this – laziness is something that can creep up on us because we find it easy to put things off. There is stuff that we ought to do, but we put it off. Filing the paperwork. Sending those forms off. Doing the garden. Some people are naturally organised, and might not recognise this trait, but I’m sure that many people are like me, and all too well acquainted with the problem of procrastination.

Again, back when I lived in Leeds I found that there was a useful litmus test which helped me realise when I was putting off something unpalatable that I ought to be doing. Was I polishing my shoes. Polished shoes were always really low down on my to-do list, and I knew that if I was actually polishing my shoes it certainly meant that I was putting off something else that I ought to be doing... but didn’t fancy at the moment.

When I was a student, many of my friends used to invert the traditional proverb “don’t put off to tomorrow what you can do today”. In contrast, every essay deadline was considered to indicate “the day after the night on which you start writing the essay”. I used to go and wake my friends up at 9am and take their finished work into class for them while they fell back to bed after pulling another all-nighter!

In his bestselling book, the sixty minute father, Rob Parsons includes a ‘sixty second page’ in each section so that really hurried readers can get some of the main points quickly. For the really really hurried people, there is a one-second page. If you don’t read anything else, read this: “the slower day is not coming”.

Rob is talking about fathers relationships with their children. How much gets put off for another day because we think that “a slower day is coming”? Well, it isn’t.

Now we are meeting together as a church today, and we are not just considering behaviours which are probably not in our best interests. We are not just thinking about ‘self-help’ issues. Where does ‘deadly sin’ come into the picture? What is the spiritual side to this problem of procrastination?

Sloth is a deadly sin because it can lead us to put off our relationship with God.

Sloth is a deadly sin because it can lead us to give up on reading our Bible, give up our praying.

Not all at once, of course. But “a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands”. Bad habits are so hard to break, good habits are so hard to keep. Perhaps one morning you wake up late and put it off until the evening. Then another morning you are tired because something kept you up in the night, but you’ll catch up at the weekend, right?

Sloth is also a deadly sin because it can lead us to putting off our spiritual decisions. If you would describe yourself as interested in Jesus but you have never made the specific decision to give your life to Him, to ask him to be your Saviour and Lord, then don’t put it off as so many do, until another day. The Bible is full of talk about ‘today’. “Today is the day of salvation” as in 2 Cor 6 or Hebrews 3. There is no better time to take spiritual decisions than today.

Mike mentioned earlier about a church membership course that is being run shortly. Is that something that God is speaking to you about? In the new year there are some changes in the church housegroups, and the option of switching around a bit. Do you come along to a housegroup? Is there anything you would like prayer about but don’t want to put it right out on the prayer chain? The prayer room is manned each Sunday after the service so that you can pray with fellow believers about issues.

Week by week we all have the opportunity to take decisions relating to our spiritual walk with God, our response to sermons which are preached, our participation in church activities. The challenge which so many of us face is to take spiritual and practical church-related decisions now, rather than put it off for another time, put it off for another day, which so often risks it being forgotten.

The Deadliness of Despair

As I mentioned earlier, the original meaning of this deadly sin was despair. Despair is the opposite of hope, the potentially crippling inward spiral when faced with a grim truth. How do we react when bad things happen to good people... to our family... to us?

Viktor Frankl once explained that the reason he was able to survive several years in a Nazi concentration camp was by finding something every day which reminded him of the beauty of life, the joy of life, the goodness of life. It could be something very small like a crust of bread that he found in the morning and nursed in his pocket all day to feast on in the evening in his barracks. It could be a surprising act of kindness like a Nazi guard helping out an aged prisoner and even giving him some extra food. These were among the tiny points of light which helped him make it through hell without giving in to despair.

A contemporary story I found expresses a similar effect of hope here:

The school system in a large city had a program to help children keep up with their school work during stays in the city's hospitals. One day a teacher who was assigned to the program received a routine call asking her to visit a particular child. She took the child's name and room number and talked briefly with the child's regular class teacher. "We're studying nouns and adverbs in his class now," the regular teacher said, "and I'd be grateful if you could help him understand them so he doesn't fall too far behind."

The hospital program teacher went to see the boy that afternoon. No one had mentioned to her that the boy had been badly burned and was in great pain. Upset at the sight of the boy, she stammered as she told him, "I've been sent by your school to help you with nouns and adverbs." When she left she felt she hadn't accomplished much.
But the next day, a nurse asked her, "What did you do to that boy?" The teacher felt she must have done something wrong and began to apologize. "No, no," said the nurse. "You don't know what I mean. We've been worried about that little boy, but ever since yesterday, his whole attitude has changed. He's fighting back, responding to treatment. It's as though he's decided to live."

Two weeks later the boy explained that he had completely given up hope until the teacher arrived. Everything changed when he came to a simple realization. He expressed it this way: "They wouldn't send a teacher to work on nouns and adverbs with a dying boy, would they?"

What does it mean to Christians today?

Each month I read the newsletter of Open Doors, which ministers to the suffering church around the world. Each month I read of Christians who are bearing up under what seems like intolerable circumstances. Despite their problems, they are not giving in to despair. Why? Because they have hope for the future. They have put their trust in God who makes and keeps promises, and who promises that whatever befalls them in this world, they have a future in paradise with Jesus.

Hebrews 11 tells us that faith is being sure of what we hope for. Hebrews 6 tells us our hope is an anchor for the soul. The letters to Timothy and Titus tell us not to put our hope in wealth but in the living God and the hope, aka the certain expectation, of eternal life.

Conclusion

Sloth is a deadly sin, and whether we allow it entry through procrastination, sheer laziness or despair, it would rob us of our hope for the future and our joy right now.

I don’t know how many of you may have been fans of Pink Floyd back in the day. Perhaps you remember their haunting song titled “Time”? Here are the lyrics

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine
Staying home to watch the rain
And you are young and life is long
And there is time to kill today
And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run
You missed the starting gun

And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
And the sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter
Never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to nought
Or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone
The song is over
Thought I'd something more to say

Sloth promises an easy life, but those lyrics represent all it really delivers. It is a false ease which destroys life and eliminates our effectiveness as Christians.

Don’t let that be you.

Make your choices for God today
Set your hope on Jesus Christ,
And look, every day, for the joys and opportunities which God sends your way.

Alex White

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