Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2766
“The sluggard will not plow because of the cold; therefore shall he beg in harvest and have nothing.” Proverbs 20:4.
LAZINESS is the crying sin of Eastern nations. I believe that the peculiar genius of the Anglo-Saxon character prevents our being, as a nation, guilty of that sin. Perhaps we have many other vices more rife in our midst than that, but, in the East, almost every man is a lazy man. If you tell a Turk in Constantinople that his street is filthy—and it certainly is, for there the offal lies and is never swept away—he says, sitting with his legs crossed, and smoking his pipe, “The Lord wills it.” If you tell him there is a fire at the bottom of the street, he does not agitate himself, but he says, “God wills it.” If you were to tell him that he was sitting on a heap of gunpowder and that he had better take heed lest a spark should blow him up, probably he would never move, or take his pipe out of his mouth, except to say, “God wills it.” Some of the most extraordinary instances of idleness are told us of those people by travelers in the East to this day. The further you go East, the less activity there is—the further you go West in the world, the more restless does the human mind become and, consequently, I suppose, the more active.
Yet, while the fact of the superabundance of idleness in the East is a great explanation of the reason why Solomon speaks so much against it in the Proverbs—and seeing that this Book was meant to be read, not only in the East, but everywhere else—I fear that there must also be some laziness in the West and, as this Book was meant to be read in England, I should imagine there must be a few sluggards in England! And this happens to be not a matter of imagination with me at all, for I know there are many such. You can brush against them at the corners of our streets. There are to be found many such who are slothful in business, who certainly are not worth their salt, who do not earn a livelihood for themselves even with regard to the things of this life. There are still far too many to whom the familiar lines of Dr. Watts may be applied—
“‘Tis the voice of the sluggard; I heard him complain, ‘You have waked me too soon, I must slumber again.”
It sometimes happens, too, that these idle people are religious people, or profess to be so, though I have no faith in that man’s religion who is lazy. He always reminds me of a certain monk who went to a monastery determined to give himself up entirely to contemplation and meditation. When he reached the place, he saw all the monks at work, tilling the ground, plowing, or trimming the vines around the monastery, so he very solemnly observed as he entered, “Labor not for the meat that perishes.” The brothers smiled and continued in their labors. He thought it his duty to reprove them a second time by saying, “Martha is cumbered with much serving, but I have chosen the good part, which shall not be taken from me.” However, it was taken from him, for the bell did not ring for him at the usual time for meals and our brother, after waiting some few hours in his cell in prayer, beginning to feel certain calls within, came out and, accosting the prior of the monastery, enquired, “Do not the brethren eat?” “Do you eat?” he asked. “I thought you were a spiritual man, for you said to the brethren, “Labor not for the meat that perishes.” “Oh, yes,” he replied, “I know I said that, but I thought the brethren ate.” “Yes,” answered the prior, “so they do, but we have a rule in our monastery that none eat but those who work. There is such a rule to be found in Scripture, too,” he reminded the monk, “Paul himself has said it, “If any man will not work, neither will he eat.” I think the master of that monastery acted and spoke wisely. A
man must work in this life. He was sent to this world that he might be diligent in his calling, in the position in life in which God has been pleased to place him.
However, I do not intend to treat now of this phase of the subject. I am about to direct your attention to spiritual things. I am no legalist—I know that the works of the Law of God can save no man, for, “by the deeds of the Law there shall no flesh be justified.” I know that the work of salvation is by Grace, alone, and that all our good works are not our own, but are worked in us by Divine Grace, yet, at the same time, I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that, although Scripture continually denies that salvation is by works, it always speaks of the work of Grace in the heart of man and of the experience of the Believer as being a hard work! For, do we not continually hear the Christian described as a pilgrim, as one who is on a long and a weary journey? He is described, not as a gentleman who is carried on other men’s backs, or who is borne along in a vehicle, but as a pilgrim who has to toil along the road—and he is told not to be weary and faint in his mind. He is warned that the road will be very rough and very long and that he will have to run with endurance the race that is set before him. The very use of such a figure as that does not look as if religion were a lazy thing!