Dennis Tuuri

Scripture is Proverbs 19:13-16. Proverbs chapter 19 verses 13-16: “A foolish son is the calamity of his father, and the contentions of a wife are a continual dropping. House and riches are the inheritance of fathers, and a prudent wife is from the Lord. Slothfulness casteth into a deep sleep, and an idle soul shall suffer hunger. He that keepeth the commandment keepeth his own soul, but he that despiseth his ways shall die.”

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Third sermon on sloth, the fourth of the seven deadly sins. We began this series on sloth by looking at the economic or vocational calling aspects of sloth. We talked about the fact that men are supposed to work. If they don’t work and they don’t eat, and their households end up not eating as well, their households fall apart. We began with the vocational area, and then in relationship to that we also addressed some civil state applications. We said that today the civil state is a large contributing factor to institutionalized sloth in our country because of the welfare programs and other factors that they’ve involved themselves in that have really reinforced sloth instead of specifically taking away the God-given disincentive to sloth, which is hunger.

Now, of course, the caveat there is that Christian charity is an important aspect of the faith. We at the end of every communion service have an alms box, and we know that we receive grace from God and we should extend that grace to others. But it isn’t grace. The tender mercies of the wicked, or the compassion of the wicked, are really evil and work harm for people when we remove the incentive to work that God has given to men in terms of hunger.

We went on to consider some aspects of sloth in relationship to the church a couple weeks ago. We made a comparison to the people of Israel in the wilderness who failed to enter the promised land in victory through sloth. And we said that today the church as well stays on the edges of society, as it were, in a sort of ghetto Christianity through sloth. The model we’ve used in this particular set of talks on sloth has to do with various parts of our body.

We said that the person who is slothful has no heart for a task. The technical term—the Greek term used in the writings of the church fathers in discussing the seven deadly sins—was acedia: not caring, not having heart for a task. We said that the slothful man does not have heart for what God has given him to do. He also doesn’t have ears for instruction. The slothful man is wiser in his own mind than seven with a discreet answer.

And the slothful people of Israel in the wilderness were wiser in their own minds. The two men filled of the Holy Ghost who came back and gave them a good report said, “We’re well able to conquer the land.” Their sloth had stopped up ears and cold hearts. As a result, they were slothful. And one other thing we’ve talked about is the belly. As a result of that—a result of failing to fear God and hear his counsel and have a heart for the task he’s given us to do—they instead are turned over to a fear of people, in the world, lions in the streets, imagined evils. They have no belly for the fight and they had no belly to take on the giants, instead contending with God himself who made those giants.

It’s interesting that to the church of Ephesus, in the book of Revelation, they are commanded to do the deeds they’d done at first. And their analysis of their problem was they’d lost their first love. They’d lost their first love. They’d lost the heart for what God had given them to do. The corrective was to do deeds, to work in terms of action.

So today we go from the vocational sphere, civil sphere, and church sphere applications. Now we’re going to talk a little closer to home, literally closer to home. We’re going to address the relationship of sloth to the family. And then next week we’ll conclude this portion on sloth by talking about the relationship of sloth to the individual and depression, despondency, and despair.

So we’ve moved from the marketplace, the civil arena, the church arena, and now into the home in our analysis of sloth.

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Now, the first point of the three points in the outline today is a bit of a brief diversion, but it does lead into the topic and the direct set of remarks that I’ve addressed in terms of the family. But first, I want us to consider a brief diversion that will tie in if you just bear with me.

Today is Earth Day, and I suppose we’d be remiss in our call to be good stewards of God’s word if we didn’t talk a little bit about the application of God’s word to what’s going on in America today. I saw TV last night. They had some people out at the Bwan water reservoir. People who look somewhat slothful in appearance. They were joining hands singing, “Let’s be like old growth,” or something like that.

Where’s John Lofton when we need him, huh? He could really have a good time with Earth Day, I suppose. We’re headed into the decade of the environment—Earth Day celebrations, Earth agenda reports, global watches, a whole host of other such affairs will mark the next decade, and hopefully not too much beyond that before people come back to their senses. It’s essential to understand the context of the world in which we live though, and the particular version that paganism is taking on today, to understand a little bit about this and then also this will help us to understand the topic of sloth and the family.

So we begin by discussing two snapshots of man. I’ve sort of brought together various aspects of both of those two snapshots in points A and B under point one: Earth Day lazy caretaker science status man as opposed to Lord’s Day diligent dominion and biblical family man. There are two visions of man in relationship to his environment that we see by contrasting these two snapshots of man. The vision of the scriptures—the scriptures give us—is that God has given us an earth that’s full of resources, full of things to be developed. He’s given us great beauty, but he’s given us all these things in a context that demands that we work diligently to realize the many blessings God has given to us.

Adam, for instance, had the task of nurturing the garden and bringing forth the beauty that was in it. And 1 Corinthians tells us to go from glory to glory in relationship to that calling as well. Gold, diamonds, and other precious stones and gems don’t simply fall out of the sky. They must be mined—acts of dominion utilizing great labor. Fruits that God has planted the earth with will not simply prosper without attention from man. Wild grapes, for instance, are quite small compared to cultivated grapes. God wants us to work diligently to develop the raw materials of his creation and to take them from beauty to greater beauty, all under his laws.

In contrast to this view—the biblical view of man is dominion, hardworking man. The environmental view—and I’m going to say here a caveat—this is the more radical environmentalists who really are behind much of the machinations of the environmental movement and certainly Earth Day. These people find the particular biblical calling of man as dominion, hardworking man absolutely repulsive and distasteful. They instead prefer to see man as a caretaker, not developing the earth’s resources, but just sort of letting it be whatever it is.

These radicals are committed to no-growth scenarios, a return to a mythical concept of a noble savage. In reality, the savages of stone age sort of cultures really are not noble, but lazy and slothful and failing to exercise dominion and to work hard to bring forth the beauty of God’s earth. The slothful environmentalist refuses to exercise his God-given calling as developer of resources, finding it more to his liking to kick back, cool out, and vegetate.

Now, the Bible and our past heritage of belief and productivity calls us to be dominion men, whereas the pagan spirit of our age and unbelief and revolution calls us to be lazy caretaker men. And that’s where the battle lines of the next decade are going to be drawn, increasingly I believe.

Now there’s two sets of ethical standards involved in these two pictures as well. There’s differences in terms of work and non-work, and there’s an eschatological difference. We think the world is going to be moving from glory to glory, more and more beautiful. Environmentalists want to keep it wherever it is right now. There’s also different sets of ethics involved.

The ethics of the environmentalists increasingly are science, and particularly the science that appeals to them and their particular political ends. And we take our ethical set of values from the word of God as opposed to what science tells us. And so there are two different ethical standards of view there. There’s two views of government as well. Increasingly, those committed to state micromanagement of every aspect of our lives use environmentalism to achieve their totalitarian agenda.

In contrast to this, biblical man is family man. Essentially, God gives most government in terms of what people do in the earth over to families and not to states. But the environmentalist movement wants a state-run world. Essentially, really at the core of these two differences—these two different snapshots of men—is really two different religions. And this is becoming more and more apparent as this environmental movement continues to progress.

There are prayers being said throughout America this day to Gaia—meaning mother earth—as a living and breathing entity. And by the way, you think about that when you read these newspaper accounts of how well the earth is doing. There’s this attribution of personality to the earth, and there is a strong religious movement afoot in America that offers up prayers to Gaia or mother earth. I saw that in this morning’s celebration. I don’t know—I wasn’t there—but Bud Clark was going to offer up some sort of prayers too. I think. I don’t know what kind of prayers those might have been. Maybe he could have ended them.

I was telling Chris W. when we drove in, maybe ending them instead of with “Amen.” Maybe he said “Whoop.” I don’t know. But there are these prayers. This is a religious setting to Earth Day today. It is a religious movement, and it is not by accident that they choose to do what they do on the Lord’s day and they want to rename it Earth Day instead. You see? So at heart we have two different religious perspectives.

Now just a few caveats. I said some strong things here, but we do believe we’re to be proper caretakers of what God has given us. Proper stewards. There is a proper role for biblical science—science that is in relationship to those who are in ethical submission to God and not those who are ethically rebellious to God. Science, true science comes out of an affirmation of God’s creation and his order. There is a place for good biblical science. We do rest in the finished work of our creator. We do enjoy him forever. We’re not always working in that sense.

We do also affirm a role for the civil state. We’re not familists. There is a particular biblical role for the civil state. It’s not to micromanage every part of our affairs. We also believe that we do have to be mindful of our calling to be proper stewards of the earth. But stewards, as we’ve been saying here for the last couple of weeks, do not simply take care of something and preserve what it is. You remember the parable of the man with the talents—the man who had the one talent and all he did was take care of it and preserve it. When the master came back, he was described as a wicked and slothful servant, cast into hell. We are supposed to hand back to God things that we have improved, working under submission to his law as it tells us how to work the earth, and we’re supposed to develop it and move it from glory to glory.

A good verse for this is found in Deuteronomy 33:18-19. We read there the blessings of Zebulun. Deuteronomy 33:18-19: “And of Zebulun he said, ‘Rejoice Zebulun in thy going out and Issachar and thy tents. They shall call the people unto the mountains. There they shall offer sacrifices of righteousness, for they shall suck of the abundance of the seas and of treasures hid in the sand.’” Zebulun was blessed. They were said they were going to be productive in their labors, that they would lead people in worshiping the true God of heaven and the God who had given them seas that had things in them that Zebulun would suck out of them and take out of the sea—seeds and treasures that were hid in the sand. God gives us an earth with treasures hid in it. And he expects us to be diligent and hardworking and ethically in submission to him to work that thing we’ve been given and as such to draw treasures out of the sea.

Now, we’re going to correlate all this to the family. The family is a place of sand as it were and seas. And God wants us to draw benefits out of the family as well and to move it in terms of submission to God and maturation in God from glory to glory.

So let’s consider now two snapshots of the family the scriptures give us, having all this as a background as by way of introduction.

We read from Proverbs 19:13 a snapshot of a family of cursing—a family of cursing with foolish offspring and contention and a contentious wife. It’s interesting that verse about contentious wife. Kuyper and Delitzsch in their commentary said that an old Arab proverb said there’s three things that make for a disastrous house: rain coming through the roof, contentious wife, and bugs. We have two of them in Proverbs 19. We don’t have the bugs though. Maybe the bugs are the foolish children. I don’t know. In any of that, foolish children are part of the family of cursing. One snapshot—a family that is not blessed of God, but instead cursed.

In Proverbs 19:13, we read that a foolish son is the calamity of his father. Now, it’s easy just to sort of read that and think, “Well, I understand foolish children aren’t bad.” But the word calamity there means particularly judgment. It means destruction. And I’ve listed some verses there from Ezekiel and Isaiah where that same word is used for destruction coming upon God’s people—from God, from the enemies of those people, God’s wrath coming upon God’s people—as being the same description of calamity, mischief, destruction coming upon them. And so the foolish son represents calamity, great destruction to the husband or to the father, rather.

And specifically, other verses tell us that destruction ultimately is coming from God. So a foolish son is the calamity of his father. This is a continual refrain in the scriptures. Of course, the foolish son is a great curse upon a family. Proverbs 10:1 is the beginning of the proverbs of Solomon. The very first one says that a wise son maketh a glad father, but a foolish son is a heaviness to his mother.

So that’s one of the pictures of a family not at peace but at great strife—they’re foolish children. Proverbs 17:21: “He that begetteth a fool doeth so to his sorrow.” Proverbs 17:25: “A foolish son is a grief to his father and bitterness to her that bare him.” This is a constant refrain in scripture, this snapshot of the cursed family with foolish sons. And then there’s the contentious wife.

Again, we have a continual refrain in the scriptures where the contentious wife is seen as absolutely unbearable to live with. The picture here is a continual dripping or dropping. It’s kind of like Chinese water torture, like slow death—a wife who continually torments her husband and is contentious toward him. Proverbs 21:9: “It is better to dwell in the corner of the housetop than with a brawling woman in a wide house.” Proverbs 21:19: “It’s better to dwell in the wilderness than with a contentious and an angry woman.” Proverbs 25:24: “It’s better to dwell in the corner of the housetop than with a brawling woman and in a wide house.”

These verses are repeated three or four times in Proverbs. Again in Proverbs 27:15: “A continual dropping in a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike.” So we have here a picture of foolish children and contentious wives.

Arnot in his commentary on some of these verses relative to wife says this very important thing: “Let a husband or wife beware here. Don’t make home miserable by gloomy looks or taunting, discontented words. Don’t deceive yourself with the plea that your complaints were never immoderate. If your moderate complaints never cease, they will eat through a man’s life at last. Love cannot be sustained by dislike administered in moderate quantities. If it does not get positive manifest gleaming love, it will die.”

The warning there is to men and wives in the context of our families. In other words, you may not strike out at your husband. You may not strike out at your wife and really give her what for, but to continually wear her down or to wear him down with words of contention and small belittlements will eventually eat up the love that is there. Love needs to have positive manifest gleaming love manifested toward it, or it will die.

So that’s a picture of the family of cursing—that contentious wife and foolish children. In contrast to this, we have a family of blessing portrayed in Psalm 128.

That psalm says that blessed is everyone that feareth the Lord, that walketh in his ways. For thou shalt eat the labor of thine hands. Happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee. Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house, thy children like olive plants round about thy table.

So first we have here, in contrast to the foolish son and the foolish children in Proverbs 19, in Psalm 128:3, the children are described as olive plants around the table. Now, one of the images that’s going on here is the image of prosperity into the future and continuance. Olive plants—you’d have an old, old rugged plant here and plants shooting up around it that would take the place when the middle one died off. And so the children, as we see them around our table, and what a blessing that is to sit around the table and look at one’s children—they’re like olive plants growing up who will succeed us.

I think it’s important that children know at some point in time that we expect them also not to be just caretaken by us. We expect our children to know more than we do long term. We expect them to be more obedient than we are. We expect them to move on and move the family on in terms of righteousness and obedience to God. We expect them to multiply our efforts, as it were, into the future in terms of work and kingdom work for Jesus Christ, our king. It’s important our children know that at one point in time, and that’s the picture here—one of prosperity in the future, future-orientedness.

But more than that, the olive was used to anoint kings. The olive plant was the important source of fat for the family’s diet. I guess one olive tree could produce roughly about a half a ton of olive oil a year—incredible. Which is essentially all the needs of the family for fat in their diet. And so we have the picture of the olive plant as being a blessing, the anointing of God, as it were, a healing influence. Olive oil was used in healing as well. So we have a picture of offspring who aren’t foolish—bringing calamity and destruction—but rather who are a picture of God’s blessing upon the family.

Olive oil was used also for lamps and to give light, and our children are to be light. The scriptures tell us that they’re supposed to shine forth as lights in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, in the midst of darkness, and our children should be lights today.

But the other part of the blessed family—the snapshot of the family of blessing—is the prosperous, joyous wife. Not only are the children like olive plants around about the table, says “Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine house.” Not just a vine. A vine is fruitful in itself, but the description is doubly made here that she is fruitful. And so we have that picture of the blessing of God and fruitfulness. And also, of course, the vineyard is a source of joy and festivity to the nation as it produces fruit that is then used to make men’s hearts glad. And so the wife is a blessing, a joyous blessing from God to the household.

Notice here, by the way, that the wife is described as being by the sides of thine house. It’s quite emphatic, I guess, in the Hebrew that the wife is within the house. You know, she’s right there in the house. And that’s in contrast—the scriptures tell us—to those wives whose feet stray from the house continually, found in the adulterous description of the adulterous wife in Proverbs 7:11. The adulterous wife is loud and wayward. Her feet do not stay at home. And here the blessed wife is one who is at the sides of thine house. So quite a contrast here between the family of cursing—contentious wife, foolish children bringing calamity and destruction and the dropping through of the house—and on this side over here the picture of the blessed family: the wife who is fruitful, bringing festivity and joy and blessing to the house, and the children also.

Olive yards and vineyards were the two things repeatedly found throughout the Old Testament as a picture of God’s blessing to his people. You’re going to have olive yards and vineyards. And so those are summed up here in the terms of the family.

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And now third, we want to look at some of the reasons for this. One basic reason we have two snapshots may not be apparent at first, but in these two pictures of blessed family and cursed family we have two pictures or snapshots of how men approach their responsibilities as father and husband.

Back to Proverbs 19:13 and following. We see here a very important aspect of the truth. And before I point this out, I want to give another caveat. What I’m going to say is no allowance for sin on the part of children or wife. The scriptures are clear that we all may have various temptations given us, but God has given us the answer—the way to avoid temptation as well. He makes that quite clear to us in the scriptures. We can never blame God for putting us in too tough a situation. I mean, in one sense, it’s not important to delve into a person’s childhood, etc. We get to know them. God says that at this point in time, you’re able to withstand temptation no matter what’s happened to you up to now, no matter what your context is.

So what I’m going to say this afternoon—I’m not making an allowance for sin on the part of a foolish child who refuses to hear the father’s instruction or a contentious wife who rips down the household of her husband. No excuses are being offered here.

In fact, in Proverbs 19, a few verses down in verses 18 and 20, we have specific references. In verse 18: “Chasten thy son while there’s hope and let not thy soul spare for his crying.” And then in verse 20, the son is told to “hear counsel, receive instruction that thou mayest be wise in the latter end.” Verse 27 says, “Cease listening, my son, to discipline and you will stray from the words of knowledge.”

So no matter how much work we do, our children can still stray from that knowledge. We cannot guarantee good offspring. I guess, as Merle Haggard says, you know—Mama can try as much as she wants, but Merle can still go astray as he did. So we’re not giving justification to children that sin or to parents or mothers that sin either. But I want us to look very closely at verses 13-16 of Proverbs 19 and see the relationship to what the husband is doing or not doing in the context of this family.

We read there that a foolish son’s a calamity to the father, contentions of a wife are a continual dropping. And then in verse 14, we have the counter picture, as it were: “Honor and riches are inheritance of fathers, and a prudent wife is from the Lord.” And so in verse 13 he’s saying, “Here’s some negative things going on in your family.” In verse 14, “These are some blessings that the family can manifest.” And then verse 15, in the immediate context here, says that slothfulness casteth into a deep sleep, and an idle soul shall suffer hunger. And then verse 16: “He that keepeth the commandment keepeth his own soul, but he that despiseth his way shall die.”

So what we have is verse 13—cursed family. Verse 14—blessings from God. Verse 15—why we end up with cursings in our hands: disobedience and slothfulness. And verse 16—a call to keep commandments diligently here, to work hard, to do what God tells us to do, to keep the commandments, and as a result of that, you’ll receive blessing. And then finally, it says, “He that despiseth God’s ways shall die.”

I guess what I’m saying is that I think that the contentious wife and the foolish child can be and frequently are much the fault of the husband who is slothful and not obeying God’s precepts. He doesn’t keep God’s commandments, and as a result he moves from blessing into cursing. He despises God’s ways. What it says is the opposite of keeping God’s commandments is to despise God’s law. Slothfulness is despising God’s way. And in the case of the family, slothfulness is despising one of the greatest gifts God has given men.

The slothful head of the household wastes a great blessing from God. The way that the environmentalists want to waste various resources that God has given to us in the sand and in the sea and doesn’t want to bring them up—they just want to take out whatever’s on the top. So the slothful head of the household wastes a great blessing from God. It’s interesting. Proverbs 18:9 tells us, “He also that is slothful in his work is brother to him that is a great waster.” And the slothful head of the household wastes the benefits that are incipient and lying in the context of his household.

We should highly value the home that God has provided to us as heads of households, and we should bring it to full maturation. Proverbs 12:27 says that the slothful man roasteth not that which he took in hunting, but the substance of a diligent man is precious. Well, it’s the same sort of picture. The slothful man may go out and get something, but then he doesn’t do anything with it. It just lays there. And the slothful husband may have obtained himself a wife. But when he fails to nourish the wife and to grow the children, to bring them into maturation under God, he has failed to bring out the value of the great gift God has given to him in the household.

Again, to quote Arnot in his commentary on the proverbs as it relates to the family, he says, “It’s the testimony of all that have probed the sores of society that unfulfilling spendthrift husbands and sullen slovenly wives are to a large extent correlatives. In a very great number of cases the two are found together in the same dwelling. In all these it is further manifest that the two act reciprocally on each other as cause and effect. A drunken husband making a sullen wife and a sullen wife making a drunken husband. How often the circulating chain of connected evils is set in motion first by the fault of the husband and how often by the fault of the wife cannot be precisely ascertained.

One may however infer that the predominance of the evil lies at the side where there is predominance of power. If we had a greater number of sober husbands, Arnot said, we would then see a greater number of smiling wives.”

We’ve talked before that marriage and family is a covenantal unit, and men are the covenantal heads of that unit. And if there is blame to be placed, the scriptures make clear to us that responsibility falls first on those who have greater privilege and greater power for change in the household. And that’s the head of the household, the men.

Other scriptures correlate this combination, showing the slothfulness of the men and then the results in cursing in his family. For instance, in Proverbs 19, we read verse 15: “A slothful man is as in the hedge of thorns, but the way of the righteous is made plain. And right on the heels of that it says, “A wise son maketh a glad father, but a foolish man despiseth his mother.” You see, the slothful man, his way is a hedge of thorns. It’s hard to go about. It’s hard to do much. And right after that, we read that a wise son makes a glad father, but a foolish man despiseth his mother. The slothful man ends up with foolish sons. His way is hedged up as with thorns, as it were, by the foolish sons, and he then reaps calamity instead of blessing.

Ecclesiastes 10:18 says that by much slothfulness the building decayeth and through idleness of hands the house droppeth through. That’s the same word there—”droppeth through”—talking about Proverbs 19:13 of the contentious wife is a continual dropping. In verse 18 of Ecclesiastes 10, that we just read, the context of that is the royal household. In verse 17, it talks about the land that’s blessed when the king is the son of nobles and the princes eat in due season for strength and not for drunkenness. That’s the context of that remark about “much slothfulness the building to chaos.”

Ecclesiastes 10:17-18 says that blessing comes to the nation whose civil rulers—whose kings and princes—are diligent and don’t eat for drunkenness but eat rather for strength and for diligence and work. And then it goes on to say that slothfulness, and by direct application in terms of the prince or the king, but through slothfulness the building decays, the house drops through. You see, it’s not just talking about the slothful man whose house decays because he doesn’t fix holes in the roof. It’s talking about the ship of state. And the ship of state that is slothful rulers ends up a destroyed ship of state. And how much more so also the family. When the husband fails to exercise his responsibilities correctly, then also the household—the ship of the house, as it were—the household itself drops through. Curses from God come upon them instead of blessings.

Again, in Proverbs 10:3-6, we have the same correlation made. We read that he becomes poor that deals with a slack hand, but the hand of the diligent maketh rich. He that gatherth in summer is a wise son, but he that sleepeth in harvest is a son that causes shame. I think what’s being told there in Proverbs 10 is there’s a relationship here between root and fruit. If the father is slothful and doesn’t work in due time and isn’t diligent, often times the children will be slothful and by definition a fool as well.

Now contrast this picture in Proverbs 19—the family of cursing, the slothful husband who because of his sloth ends up with the wife continually complaining against him and foolish children who receive no instruction from the slothful man. He is too slothful. He’s not diligent in teaching them the word of God and in maturing them and bringing out the value in them. Contrast that again with the household of blessing in Psalm 128.

We’ll notice there in Psalm 128 that just before this image of the wife as a fruitful vine, the children like olive plants, in verse 2 we are told what this man is like. We read in verse 2 of the man who is blessed in his ways. It says, “For thou shalt eat the labor of thine hands.” The assumption for the man who reaps the blessing of a fruitful wife and of olive plant sort of children around his table—the assumption in verse 2 is plainly pointed out that this is a man who labors with his hands. He’s the diligent man who is moved in obedience to God’s scriptures to nourish his family—not just with physical food but with food from the scriptures, with the food of encouragement and affection and concern and care.

So we have here the diligent father and the husband, and God’s blessing to him is diligent children and blessed children and wife as well. It’s interesting again to see another correlation in terms of this truth in Ecclesiastes 9:9-10. We read there, “Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of thy life, which she hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity, for that is thy portion in this life and in thy labor which thou takest under the sun. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do it with thy might.”

So there’s a relationship there again to living joyfully with our wives and then in terms of diligence working heartily unto God in everything that he has given us to do.

So I guess what I’m saying this afternoon is that the two snapshots of the family come forth from the two pictures of diligent or slothful husbands and fathers in those families. I told my wife this last week—I heard an old saying that fish rot from the head down, and the family I think rots from the head down as well.

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There’s lessons in this of course. Sloth is the fourth of the seven deadly sins. Sloth is too little love, as opposed to perverted love or too much love. Sloth is too little love, no heart for the task that God gives us to do. And this is important because in relationship over time with this afternoon, this puts us back in the proper way of understanding the love that a husband is supposed to have for his wife and for his children.

That love is work. That love that God calls us to is diligence. That love is action directed toward the members of that household. Love is action.

Anthony Compo in his book on the seven deadly sins, speaking of sloth, said—and I think this is a tremendously true statement—he said that the biggest cause for marriages breaking up in his long counseling ministry has been plain laziness. Laziness, slothfulness. Men know what to do to cure a family. Women know what to do to build a family up, but they just don’t do it. They don’t care enough to work hard to develop the household that God has given them to do. Laziness, slothfulness is what ruins families in our nation today. The slothful man is too lazy to nurture, and as a result not diligently.

You see, the same dichotomy we talked about in terms of Earth Day and caretaker man versus dominion man—the same dichotomy can be found in two visions of the relationship of the husband father to the family. The biblical view calls for the man to diligently lead his family into truth and obedience. The husband’s to work hard in his vocational calling of dominion, resulting in material blessings for his family. And he is also to oversee a godly education for his children. He’s to feed his wife and children the word of God, to nurture them, and to cause them to grow in godliness through feeding them with God’s word. And he is to be diligent in all these tasks.

God’s reward to such faithful dominion husbands and fathers are those blessings spelled out in Psalm 128. Family just isn’t. Family needs work.

On the other hand, there are those both in and out of the church to whom the blessings of Psalm 128 are not a reality. These are the ones who believe that family is such that it just sort of turns out okay if you avoid the major sins of life. These are the ones who, in place of diligence, are slothfully failing to actively lead their families into material and spiritual blessings. These men see their job as essentially caretakers—just kind of there, vaguely overseeing their families, bringing home some dollars occasionally. But to such slothful men, the word of God sounds not a note of triumph, but of warning.

Proverbs 19 picture identifies the slothful man as the one who ends up with a contentious wife and foolish children. And being caretaker husband and father instead of dominion husband and father, he reaps foolishness and contention and strife in place of fruitfulness and blessing.

Now this is a call for diligence this afternoon. It’s a call for diligence in our households. It’s a call to family devotions. But you know, that’s just the beginning. It’s interesting. I was going back over my notes for the workshop last Saturday on nurturing of wives, the dowry that talk I gave, and you know there’s an admonition in scripture that when a woman asks questions she’s supposed to not ask questions in church but is supposed to ask her husband at home. And that’s almost always brought up in a negative context—you know, “well, don’t get those women talking in church.” But look at it this way—it’s an admonishment, it’s an encouragement and an exhortation to the husband to be able to talk to his wife about those things at home. And it’s a blessing to the wife who obeys that admonition from scripture to go home and engage her husband in conversations about the word of God.

You see, God knows that we’re essentially slothful today. Fallen man is. And he provides this vehicle whereby he gets men to nurture their wives with the word of God by having them answer the questions of the wives at home. It’s very important that family devotions are a start, but beyond that, we’re to nourish our wives with rest, with affection. Scripture says, “Don’t be embittered against your wife.” The opposite is to be sweet toward your wife in what you say and what you do—building her up. We’re to nurture our wives with the word of God ministered to them as well, with prayer for our wives and children. How often that’s neglected in the households.

I guess essentially, rather than getting to all the details of what this means in terms of the diligence we’re to exercise in our households, men, the idea is that you have to take this concept of the shepherd and see your family as the flock that God has called you to minister to. The same way as a pastor ministers to the people—God has brought him into a shepherding position with, you know, in this church all the admonitions against the false shepherds, the lazy shepherds who wouldn’t feed the people the word of God. Well, how well do you qualify as a shepherd in your household in terms of nourishing nurturing your wife and your children?

Two weeks ago we spoke of the relationship of sloth to the church in America in the 1980s. We said that the church today is like an unfaithful servant who through lack of heart, ears, belly, and hands has failed to enter the promised land. In Jonah 1, we have a picture of Jonah aboard a ship. He is acting disobediently to God and he is sleeping in the hull of that ship, and God brings storms against that ship and the men cry out and they wake up Jonah and they say, “Do you know what’s going on here? What’s the deal here?” And Jonah says, “I worship the God who made the seas and everything in it.” And he tells them that essentially it’s his—he’s the one that God is after as the storms come against that ship.

As the storms of Earth Day blow against America today, it’s the church sleeping in the hull of the ship that is being woken up by God. And the same thing lies true of the families as well. Without excusing sin—the contentious wife, the foolish children—may just be the winds of God’s wrath and corrective judgments aimed not at them so much as against the sleeping husband in the hull of the ship, which is his family. Slumbering away, trying to escape responsibility, failing to be diligent in his calling—and it is a holy calling to raise a family, failing to be diligent to nurture his household, to bring the blessings lying in the bosom of his wife and children into full maturation and development.

Is God speaking to you through your wife and children? Are you asleep this afternoon? Have you failed to apply yourself diligently to the tasks of being husband and father and shepherd to the flock that God has brought you into leadership over? Do you find it the easiest route to simply go into retreat mode when the house becomes disordered, chaotic, and too much to handle? I do. That’s our natural bent, men—particularly today in a society that has so miserably failed to provide good biblical models for what being a man is all about and what being a father and husband is all about.

I guess this afternoon what I’m trying to give you here is a wakeup call to our responsibilities, to not be slothful, but to be diligent in our families. Is it important? You bet it’s important. God says that our relationship to our wife is like the relationship of Christ to the church. He places it at that value. Christ died for the sake of the bride. And God calls us to put aside our slothfulness and our desires for the sake of building up and maturing and growing our wives.

In terms of our children, the two testaments, as you know, in this church, hopefully the two testaments hinge on the relationship of father to children. Remember, the Old Testament ends with the book of Malachi saying that there’d be one who would come in the spirit and power of Elijah to prepare people for the Lord. And how? By turning the hearts of the fathers to the children, the children to their fathers. And then after that intertestamental period of no revelation from God, the angel comes to John the Baptist’s father and he says, “You’re going to have a son and he’s going to prepare a people for the Lord.” How? By turning the hearts of the fathers to the children, “lest I come and smite them with a curse.”

Men, the beginning place of removing the sloth in our families is to remove the coldness of our hearts that we have toward our wives and children. Sloth is acedia—failing to care, not having heart. God’s corrective measures to his people to prepare us for Jesus’s coming in judgment in time, and finally at the end of all time—God’s corrective measures is to warm our hearts toward our children and certainly toward our wives as well.

And so the corrective to move from slothfulness is to develop a concern and a care and a loving for your wife and children that’s based upon the word of God. And then we also need belly for the fight. It’s a hard thing to do what we’re called to do in terms of husbanding our households, and as I said, having so little preparation for most of our families. Not speaking against a specific family, but it’s a fact that we live in a country that long ago gave up biblical concepts of the calling of parenthood.

Well, it’s a hard fight to fight, as it were, fighting to keep order and maturing the people under our charge. But God has called us to do it. And remember, we said that belly for the fight comes from having greater fear of God than fear of our failure to do the task that God has called us to do.

William Arnot again writing on the role of the family said this. He said, “The home, the family is God’s own work. He intends that it should be a blessing to creatures. He framed it to be a boat of peace and love. He visits his handiwork to see whether it is fulfilling its destiny. Let the disturber beware. An eye is on him that cannot be deceived. A hand is over him that cannot be resisted. Whether it be husband or wife, parent or child, master or servant, the disturber of a house must answer to its almighty protector for abusing his gifts and thwarting his gracious desires.”

This afternoon, I want us men to think hard on these words and to pledge ourselves to not be slothful, but to be diligent and to reap the blessings that God has promised to those who move forward in the power of the Holy Spirit, taking on the task of shepherding the flock that God has called us to minister to.

Let’s pray to that end. Almighty God, we thank you for your scriptures. We thank you, Father, for Proverbs 19 and Psalm 128 and these two pictures. Help us, Lord God, to be encouraged, motivated, shaken by fear if necessary to move in obedience to your word to nurture those you put under our charge as men. Almighty God, we pray that you would strengthen us for the task ahead. May we go to it diligently with warm hearts for our wives and children and with hands that are ready to serve them by bringing them up and maturing them in Jesus our Savior. In his name we pray, Amen.

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On that—because like in my sort of view, sort of changed on that. I’m not a big environmentalist and all that. What I do is conservatives tend to have a view that you have to have a utilitarian nature about development, which means you have to dollar the dollar value to mining the earth, and that is true. I mean, if you look at developments going on, for instance, in Washington County, the development that’s going on out there is not really growth per se. A lot of it is by fiat money. In other words, it’s bankruptcy. Well, they’re stealing money to finance developers, and as a consequence, they take land out of production.

Yeah, there’s a lot of it out. The question has to do with the relationship of the environmental movement to—isn’t there an error on the other side as well in terms of a too utilitarian approach, et cetera? And there’s no doubt that there is. We’ve talked about that before. I think that a lot of the building that’s going on, the plowing under of farmland in Washington County, is all debt financed, like you said—fiat money financed. There’s a lot of rascals on every side of that issue. No doubt about it. Right now though the rascal