Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1670
Delivered on Thursday Evening, June 8, 1882
“The slothful man says, There is a lion outside, I shall be slain in the streets.” Proverbs 22:13.
“The slothful man says, There is a lion in the way; a lion is in the streets.”
Proverbs 26:13.
THIS slothful man seems to cherish that one dread of his about lions as if it were his favorite aversion and he felt it to be too much trouble to invent another excuse. Perhaps he hugs it to his soul all the more because it is a home-born fear, conjured up by his own imagination, and as mothers are said to love their weakest children best, so is he fondest of this most imbecile of excuses! At any rate, it serves him for a passable excuse for laziness, and that is what he wants. If you can get the king of beasts to apologize for your idleness, there is a sort of royalty about your pretences! He hopes his sloth will appear the less disgraceful if he can paint a lion rampant upon its shield. I am not about to speak of slothful men in general, albeit that when a man does not diligently attend to his business, he is committing great wrong to himself and to others. When a man is slothful as a servant, he is unjust to his employers, and when he is in business on his own account, idleness is usually a wrong to his wife and family.
I know one who is the cause of poverty and need to those whom he ought to provide for—and all because honest labor and he have long since fallen out. He would not move an inch if he could help it, nor even open his eyes if he could manage to live and sleep all his life away. When a man is thoroughly eaten up with the dry rot of laziness, he generally finds some kind of excuse, though his crime is really inexcusable. “There is a lion in the way” and, therefore, the man judges it to be quite right that he should keep his bed, or that he should sit leisurely indoors and should not give himself too much trouble or run any risks! But all this is mere makeup to screen his loathsome vice.
No Christian ought to be slothful in his ordinary work—the Apostle describes the good man as “not slothful in business”—of whatever kind that business may be. If you have a right to undertake it. If you have a right to continue in it, you have no right to be a sluggard in it. There should be as wide a division as between the poles between the thought of a Christian and the idea of a sluggard! “Whatever you do, do it heartily.” An idler is a disgrace to himself and if he professes religion, he is a dishonor to it. Paul would starve him, for he says, “If any would not work, neither should he eat”—and that is as near starvation as can be.
Popery may create and foster lazzaroni, but the true faith bids every man eat his own bread. I leave worldly sluggards to the moralist—does not Nature, itself, teach us to labor diligently? Man was not made for an idle life. Labor is evidently his proper condition. Even when man was perfect, he was placed in the garden, not to admire its flowers, but to keep it and to dress it! If he needed to work when he was perfect, much more does he require the discipline of labor now that he is fallen. Lions or no lions, men must work, or find disease and death in sloth!
But we have many spiritual sluggards and it is to them that I speak. They are not skeptics; they are not confirmed infidels; they are not opposers of the Gospel. Perhaps their sluggish nature saves them from anything like energetic opposition to goodness. They claim that they are not averse to the Gospel—on the contrary, they are rather friendly to it— and one of these days they intend to be obedient to its great commands and to yield themselves as servants to Christ! But not just yet—the good time has not fully arrived. They have a very comfortable bed of sloth upon which they lie and they do not want to rise in a hurry and exert themselves too much.
They need to take this matter very leisurely and turn to Christ when it is quite convenient—when it will not require so much self-denial as at the present moment. “Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep,” is their continual cry! And although God’s watchmen disturb them terribly and cry aloud that they may wake them, yet
they sleep so heavily that they just turn over when they are most disturbed and drop into their slumbers again. I want to cry aloud under the window of such sleepers, tonight, with the hope that perhaps some of them may be awakened! What do you mean, O Sleeper? Will you sleep your soul away? Will you lose Heaven rather than bestir yourself? Will you never lift up your eyes till Hell’s torments are hopelessly about you and within you?
Our texts speak concerning the sluggard and the first thing you notice about him is that his tongue is not slothful— “The slothful man says.” The man who is lazy all over is generally very busy with his tongue! “The slothful man says, There is a lion outside.” In both texts the slothful man is represented as having something to say and I think that there are no people that have so much to say as those that have little to do. Where nothing is done, much is talked about. Their goodness begins and ends in mere lip service. They talk about repentance, but they do not repent. They are willing to hear about faith and even to speak about it, but they do not believe!