Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

The sermon scripture is found in Proverbs, the 12th chapter, verses 24 through 13:1. Proverbs 12:24-13:1.

“The hand of the diligent shall bear rule, but the slothful shall be under tribute. Heaviness in the heart of man maketh it stoop, but a good word maketh it glad. The righteous is more excellent than his neighbor, but the way of the wicked seduceth them. The slothful man roasteth not that which he took in hunting. But the substance of a diligent man is precious. In the way of righteousness is life, and in the pathway thereof there is no death. A wise son heareth his father’s instruction, but a scorner heareth not rebuke.”

At this time, the younger children may be dismissed. Go down to their Sabbath schools if the parents desire that.

Well, we conclude our four-part series on sloth, the fourth of the seven deadly sins. This afternoon, we’ve talked about sloth in the workplace. We’ve talked about sloth in the church, and then last week we talked about sloth in the family.

Keith Hansen gave me a quote by Martin Luther about sloth that I thought would be good for you to hear. Luther said, “God does not want me to sit at home to loaf, to commit matters to God and to wait till a fried chicken flies into my mouth.” That would be tempting God.

Now, this morning, we’re going to talk about sloth and take it another level down as we go into the soul of man and into the heart of each of us individually. And hopefully we’ll see from the progression of verses in Proverbs 12 going into chapter 13 what I believe is a cycle downward that the slothful man travels. And I think it’s very important we understand this, and I want to provide just a little bit of justification for why I’ve chosen these particular verses.

If you look at the Proverbs, they’re broken up into several sections. Chapter 10, verse 1 begins the Proverbs of Solomon, which are mostly a series of statements of comparison or contrast that continue through most of the rest of the book. There are several divisions, and we’ll talk about those divisions a little bit later. But one division occurs at 13:1, and we have repeated in verse one of chapter 13 essentially another repetition of the commandment or a repetition of exhortation to children to obey the fifth commandment—to honor one’s parents. That’s the way the Proverbs of Solomon start, and 13:1 starts another section.

Now, in terms of chapter 12, most of the rest of chapter 12 leading up to the verse we read, up through verse 23, speaks of the tongue and specifically verses 17 through 23 are a connected series about the tongue specifically. But in the five verses at the end of chapter 12, they’re different from those. There’s a transition made there, I think, to slothfulness, and they really speak more to the idea of the slothful man in some detail. And I’ll show more justification for that as we get to the relationship of this to the next few verses in the text.

But in any event, these are a section I believe, and I would encourage you—not just this afternoon but every Sunday—to listen hard to what’s being said. I’ll be talking a little bit later about sloth as the demon that strikes at noontime, what the monks called it. And it’s very easy when things get warm in the middle of the afternoon for the mind to get slothful and lethargic. It’s easy for that to happen in the context of a long sermon, which I normally give. I’m doing my part to try to make these things more concise, but I’d like you all to do your part to shake off any lethargy that might come upon you.

One of the things we pray for in the prayer of illumination is that we not be slothful, really, in our hearing, that I not be slothful in my speaking.

So, I guess what I’m saying is if you start to feel yourself get a little drowsy, don’t be embarrassed about that. It happens to us. Don’t be embarrassed about getting up, moving around a bit, shaking yourself to wake yourself up, maybe go and get a drink even. It’s important that you stay awake during these sermons, and this one particularly. If what I’m saying is accurate, I think it’s to be expected that there’ll be temptations to resist this message and not to even hear it necessarily.

But enough of that. Let’s get into the verses.

**Proverbs 12:24—Sloth and Servitude**

Proverbs 12:24 is the first verse. I’ve taken each verse that we’ve read and I’ll give one outline point for each verse. And verse 24 talks about the relationship of sloth to servitude.

“The hand of the diligent shall bear rule.” Remember we talked about how Jeroboam was appointed to his position by Solomon and eventually became king of the northern tribes by God because of his diligence. Pharaoh asked Joseph if he had any diligent brothers to put over matters of Pharaoh’s concern.

“The hand of the diligent shall bear rule, but the slothful man will be under tribute.” He’ll be a servant. As I said, we’ve talked about that before, but I just want to give you a little bit here to sort of chew on in terms of the relationship of master and servant in the scriptures and the slothful man as opposed to the diligent man.

We read in Proverbs 17:2 that “a wise servant shall have rule over a son that causeth shame and shall have part of the inheritance among the brethren.” The son is supposed to have the reign, but if the son is shameful or slothful, the servant ends up reigning over the son. Okay? And so that’s really part of this verse as well.

Pagans end up reigning over slothful churches. And we talked about that in relationship to the church in America a couple of weeks ago—that in terms of giving spiritual direction to the country, the church should be doing that. But instead, the church is the tail and not the head now. And so we have to go begging to some pagan candidate for governor, for instance, to try to achieve concessions from him to help us teach our own children at home. And we’re in the midst of doing that.

I don’t think it’s wrong to do that now, but it’s a situation that we should realize. This is a situation of judgment from God upon a slothful church in America and in this state. Pagans rule over the church. The church should give direction to the nation, to the civil rulers.

We mentioned last week the rule in the household. The husband should rule the castle, right? But what happens when the husband is slothful? He ends up with a contentious wife, and the Proverbs then tell us it’s better for the man to be on the roof or to go to a little corner in the house someplace. He’s driven out of his castle. Why? Because he’s got a wife that wants to rule. Sometimes that may be the case, and more often than not it’s because he’s failed to rule.

I got a great little book at home published a number of years ago called “Passive Men, Wild Women,” and that relates to the home and to the slothful man in the home. The wife ends up ruling over the husband. It’s God’s judgment. Okay. And the way to cure that judgment isn’t to beat back down the pagans or tell the pagans to get out of office. It’s not to tell the son or the servant rather to get out of ruling over the son. It’s for the people in rightful positions of authority to be less slothful and more diligent, and they will rule.

God tells us in this verse very clearly: faithful women rule over faithless and sluggish men. And so we had Deborah, for instance, taking over Barak’s job because the men were slothful. So they had a female judge to rule over them—a result of God’s judgment.

One thing I want us to realize here is that the slothful man does not like to be under tribute. It may seem like an easy characterization to think the slothful man is just not caring where he is. But that isn’t really true. The easy way to think about the slothful man is that he has no will. That’s not true. The slothful man is not weakwilled. The slothful man is self-willed. He doesn’t want to reject anything. In fact, he actively suppresses the truth of God in unrighteousness. The scriptures tell us that’s what wicked men do. And he rejects counsel because he wants to be self-willed.

And so this is not a particularly good position. The slothful man doesn’t like the fact that he ends up being a servant, but in God’s judgment, that’s what happens. Just like the husband doesn’t like the contentious wife, but in God’s judgment—to remind him of his sin—that’s what happens. So it’s a hard thing for the slothful man to take. Okay.

**Proverbs 12:25—Sloth and Despondency**

Next verse. We read in verse 25, “Bitterness in the heart of a man maketh it stoop, but a good word maketh it glad.”

Things that happen in our lives—many things that God may bring into our lives—have the capability to cause us to react in despondency and sadness. Such as the contentious wife. She may be the one bringing the heaviness in the heart of the man—the bad words as it were—that don’t make him glad but make him stoop. But again, that’s judgment from God. And as part of this process where now he’s under tribute, he’s got various things that may happen to him as a result of being under tribute to other people that he really should perhaps be reigning over himself. And as a result, he ends up with heaviness of heart and depression and despondency.

And there’s this relationship. We’ve talked about this before in this series. We’ve talked about the fact that the fourth deadly sin had the Latin term *accidia*, which we translate as sloth and think of as laziness. But it’s much more than that. The word, as we’ve said, means an absence of a warm heart for the tasks that we are to accomplish for God that he’s given us to do.

The historic church always saw laziness and despondency and sorrow linked, as these verses I think link, and as other verses do as well. It’s interesting—I got this nice little booklet a year or so ago. It’s called “The Moral Concordances of St. Anthony of Padua” from the Middle Ages of the church. And we’ve talked before about the way he links verses together, but just as an example, in his list here he has various verses listed under these various topics.

Topic 119 is “against idleness or listlessness and the effects of idleness.” Topic 120 goes on to talk about “idleness in general.” And 121 goes then to “against the sorrows of this world.” In element number 122 he talks about verses that are summarized in this way: that we are not to lament the dead or the calamities of this life beyond measure.

You see, Anthony, as many of the church fathers did—early and middle church fathers—they saw the relationship of idleness to despondency and sorrow that these verses seem to indicate as well. Despondency, discouragement, dejection, despair. We’re going to talk about despair a little bit later, but despondency, discouragement, dejection—all these things are the result of the slothful man ending up without what he really wants and instead having judgment from God. But his response to that judgment is not correct. It’s undue sorrow.

I think I mentioned before the play Hamlet, and it’s an example of how these things can happen. Hamlet in the beginning of the play suffers the grievous loss of his beloved father and he lapses then into a melancholy, a dejection, a loss of appetite, insomnia, irrational behavior, and eventually uncontrolled rage.

Hamlet, in one of his soliloquies in the play, says this: “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seems to me all the uses of this world. Fie on it, fie! This is an unweeded garden that grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.”

So Hamlet, because of his own sorrow and not dealing with that correctly—in terms of responding to it correctly in terms of God’s admonitions not to sorrow excessively—gives into it and gives into despair and despite. And as a result, idleness as well accompanies all that. He ends up not doing anything. The world, that is, as bad as Hamlet portrays it to be, a world that is that worthless, is not worthy of corrective action on the part of Hamlet. And so that play points that out to us.

Now, I’ve listed some verses there. I don’t think we’re going to go over them due to time constraints, but there are various verses there against excessive mourning. And the scriptures are clear that the people of God are not to sorrow as the pagans sorrow—not excessively. Now, we do have sadness and sorrow, but we recognize that beyond all things that we’re sad about, God is in control, and all things are working to his glory, and he’ll uphold us.

And so we are positively commanded through various points and portions of scripture not to give in to excess sorrow. And that has a relationship to idleness, sloth, and despair.

Chaucer in his “Parson’s Tale”—that particular element talking about sloth—said that bitterness is the mother of *accidia*, or sloth, and takes from the man the love of all goodness. Sloth is the failure to love what is good, and it comes about frequently through bitterness—through bad things that happen.

I believe it was Larsson in his commentary on Proverbs who said this about sloth. He said that it’s a state of dejection that gives rise to a torpor of mind and feeling and spirit, to a poisoning of the will, to despair, faintheartedness, even desirelessness—a lack of real desire for anything, even that which is good—an oppressive sorrow that so weighs upon a man’s mind that he wants not to exercise any virtue.

And this is why I think I mentioned in the very first talk how a person can be active, physically active, and yet be slothful and lethargic and despondent over various things in his life.

Dorothy Sayers wrote that one of sloth’s favorite tricks is to dissemble itself under the cover of a whiffling activity of the body. And by that, I think if she saw them today would have included in that category people that jog, involved in all kinds of sports activities, tennis, and whatnot. In an attempt really to react to the numbness and sloth.

The jogger—many of them today, a great number of joggers today—are really slothful, caring not for the tasks in the world that God has given them. And in fact, you see books that talk about how the whole point of jogging is to escape reality really. It’s to reach this high. But the spiritual high of jogging has nothing to do with an encounter with truth or the reality that God has given to us.

Instead, it’s really a disease. It’s a lightness of head. I think that probably is because they’re doing things they shouldn’t be doing. And so it’s not really a spiritual high, but rather it’s this high that is a whiffling sensation of the body and its activities. Still, sloth lies at the heart.

Theologians have defined sloth as hatred of all spiritual things which require any kind of effort. And so we have the slothful man under tribute and then responding in sadness to that tribute and the various elements that come into his life with excessive sorrow and despondency.

Now this describes our world pretty well. I think the sloth of despondency in the seven deadly sins today—I think by fairly he said this about our world. He said:

“Children are too idle to obey. Parents are too sluggish to command. Pupils are too lazy to work. Teachers are too indolent to teach. Priests are too slack to believe. Prophets are too morbid to inspire. Men are too indifferent to be men. Women are too heedless to be women. Doctors are too careless to care well. Shoemakers are too slipshod to make good shoes. Writers are too inert. Street cleaners are too bored to clean streets. Shop clerks are too uninterested to be courteous. Painters are too feckless to make pictures. Poets are too lazy to be exact. Philosophers are too faintheaded to make philosophies. Believers are too dejected to bear witness.”

That’s the world we live in. We live in a world of sloth, and particularly the despondency that verse 25 relates to, that element of sloth.

Part of this I think is the result of the atheistic communism spread by Karl Marx in his writings. While communism seems to be on the wane, atheism is not. Secularism is the predominant religion of our age. And secularism provides a world with no meaning and no hope. And it provides a world then that is very open and easily falls into the sin of sloth—a failure to care about anything because everything has no significance to it.

It’s interesting that the biological fruit of Marx, in addition to his intellectual fruit, was also akin to sloth. You see, Marx’s son-in-law, a man by the name of Paul Lafargue, wrote a book entitled “The Right to Be Lazy.” And that book was published in the very year that Marx died. And in that book, Marx’s son-in-law praises what he called “idleness, mother of the arts, and the noble virtues.” And so, I guess what’s happening here in Portland is just part of a long tradition of people, secularists, who praise the virtues of laziness.

I said before that Gregory, in his listing of the seven deadly sins, describes sloth as *accidia*. He also, in addition to this—this absence of heart for the task that God gives us to do and the result, idleness of it—he also combined with that a Latin term *tristitia*, which is translated as melancholy. Melancholy, or a sadness—not just a coldness of heart but an actual sadness or melancholy.

In fact, he actually referred to all of them under the head of melancholy. Later, a saint named Alcuin kept the two—that is, *accidia* and *tristitia*—together, but he instead changed the name to *accidia*, thinking that sadness, some degree of sadness, does have a proper place in the Christian’s life. It’s undue sadness or melancholy that is to be fought against, and that the sloth fails to fight against when bad things happen to him.

You might be interested in knowing that the term melancholy actually comes from Hippocrates’ time, when they thought that there were four humors that affected what a person was. These four humors, or liquids, were blood, phlegm, choler (which was yellow bile), and melancholy (which was black bile). And so the idea was that when your body had too much black bile being produced by the liver or whatever, you’d get melancholic and you’d get sad and despondent.

And so, you know, there’s nothing new under the sun in terms of the sin of man. The idea that man’s sins are mechanistic reactions to his body that we see today being touted all over our country and world really existed thousands of years before in this view of these four humors as being the thing that produces these diseases in our lives.

This was a change from the earlier Christian writings that held, and Jewish writings that held, that undue sadness was disobedience to God’s command not to be involved in excess sorrow. Very important, of course, for us to recognize, as people had to recognize in terms of black bile and melancholy, that today too we’re in a situation where, as I said, there’s no longer sin. There’s just various physical ailments. We don’t have drunkenness. We have instead alcoholism. We don’t have gambling. We now have probably genes. I think I’ve seen some studies that show that genes are physical things in people that lead them to be addictive gamblers, et cetera. But that just isn’t the case.

The scriptures tell us not to mourn excessively and not to give into despondency and depression in terms of when bad things come upon us. Well, the slothful man doesn’t do that, and he moves from the servitude to heaviness of heart.

**Proverbs 12:26—Sloth and Self-Deception**

And then in verse 26, we read that “the righteous is more excellent than his neighbor, but the way of the wicked seduceth them.”

Remember we talked about how Jesus in the parables in Matthew said that the slothful servant was a wicked servant. And I think that’s what’s going on here. We’re going to talk specifically about slothful in the next verse. And I think this relationship exists to this verse as well.

The slothful man is wicked. And while he is slothful, he deludes himself. That’s what’s meant by the last half of that verse: “The wicked seduceth them.” They delude themselves. And there are various verses I’ve given you on your outline there.

Once torpor and sluggishness of heart and sluggishness of actions as well sets into the slothful man, he tends then to rationalize sin. Behind the sin of sloth lies a whole series of rationalizations. As we said in terms of Hamlet, the world was so bad that nothing could help it. And today there are many people, including in the Christian church, who believe that the world is so bad that all action is pointless.

Along with this, of course, is the belief that the evil is out there somehow—it’s in the world. It’s not in the sin inside each and every one of us. Lou Davis, several weeks ago, had a radio show in which he asked “Who’s ruling the world—Satan or Jesus?” And he was referring to a quote by the New Testament professor from Dallas. These people that believe in kingdom work believe that we can actually do something to affect the world around us.

And he said, “We just can’t do that. It just won’t work.” And Lou, being a thinking man on the radio, said he just couldn’t live that way.

Well, the fact is nobody can live that way. It’s that kind of view of the world—that evil is there, there’s nothing we can do about it, the world’s going to continue to get worse or at least remain statically flat—that leads to this sin of sloth. It’s a rationalization for a failure to take action and a failure to rouse oneself out of one’s despondency instead.

Indeed, not only do people come to believe in the Christian church today that things are so bad we probably can’t help it. In fact, come to think about it, God actually wants them to be bad. He actually wants the world to go downhill here. And so, gosh, now surely I don’t have to rouse myself out of my sluggishness and go vote or do something significant like study his word as it relates to the workplace. No, I’ll just let things spiral down, and I’ll just go back into my house with my Nordic skiing machine, my VCR, and my CD.

The scriptures say that these things are sin. And one of the first ways to combat sloth in one’s life is to confess sin. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But see, that’s just the point at which the sluggard fails here. He deceives himself. Instead of confessing his sin, he makes rationalizations.

My kids know this. I hope other kids in the church do. This picture of Saul and David—you know, both sitting kings of Israel. One man, Saul, made excuses for his disobedience. Judged by God, he fell into evil communion with the witch, destruction, terrible death. The other man, David, sins, probably in greater fashion than even King Saul did, but made confessions for it, confessed it to God, and God forgives sinners.

Confession is the beginning place of rooting out sloth in our lives. Confessing it and not rationalizing it.

Now, I just want to make a quick aside here to the prayer meetings that we have once a month at the church. These are important events. When I heard Jay Grimstead last year, who’s head of the Coalition on Revival down in Placentia, speaking, he talked about how he thinks that one of the big thank-factors that happened in this country to move it toward increasing decay and judgment by God was the absence or the diminishment of cell group activity by the Methodist church.

In the 1800s, the Methodists really encouraged cell groups that would meet once a week for prayer, and not so much for prayer as it was for confession of sins one to another, trying to obey the scriptural admonition to confess our sins to one another. Well, you know, that can probably get a little different, but we found at least out on the west side—and I think the other groups have probably found this too—that the prayer group meeting once a month, we don’t tell people “confess your sins now.” But we find out that when we focus on the needs of our individual families and our own individual needs and our spiritual walk and the things that we really need prayer for, essentially that’s what you end up doing: making confession that these things are things I should be doing. I’m not doing them. Could you please help me to pray that I would do them better in terms of family devotions or whatever it is.

So confession of sins is very important. Confession of sins is simply agreeing with God that our disobedient actions are indeed sin. It’s that simple. But it’s that hard.

You know, it’s interesting to hear people confess sins with our children or with ourselves. We pray to God about our sins, and before we know it, we’re no longer just saying we sinned. We’re not even saying “this was sin. Please forgive me.” We’re saying, “Oh, this was probably not a good idea. This was probably sin, but this is why I did it this way.” And you start explaining to God all the reasons why you did this particular action. You begin to end up rationalizing it even in your prayers, excusing it to yourself.

Sin, confession of sins, begins with simply agreeing that God’s word says this is not to be done, and confessing sin to God and understanding that he does forgive us. This is the beginning place, as I said, of elimination of sloth, and the slothful man doesn’t do it. He deludes himself and continues into his own destruction.

I’ve listed some verses there. This is a much-referenced point in the scriptures about the deception of the wicked. Psalm 81:12 says God gives them up to their own heart’s lust, and they walked in their own counsels. James 1:14 says every man is tempted when he’s drawn away by his own lust and enticed. Proverbs 26:16 says “the sluggard is wiser in his own conceit than seven men that can render a reason.” Proverbs 12:15 says “the way of a fool is right in his own eyes; he that hearkeneth unto counsel is wise.”

So very important—confession of sins there.

A situation came up at our home yesterday, and I won’t tell you who did what, but frequently when we’re just now being exposed to many of these sorts of sins that we’re talking about, the seven deadly sins, we can begin to think “Well, what is sloth? Is it sloth to do this or not to do this or to do this activity and to take a nap or to rest? What is it?”

And recognizing that sloth tends to delude ourselves, one of the safest ways we can try to avoid that deception so that we can confess our sins and avoid it in the first place is to make use of the great counselor that God has given to us in terms of the marriage partner he’s given, in terms of families. We have a husband or a wife, and in this church it’s a husband or wife who’s tracking with God who wants to do what God says we should do.

And so if you’re concerned over your actions, the first place you should go is to your mate. And husbands, I mean to your wives as well. You should listen to what they have to say. You should say “What do you think about this? Is this slothful on my part to do this or that?” And the wife then, or the husband, can help you avoid that self-deception that accompanies sloth by giving you counsel. And normally it will be correct. And so that’s very important to make use of that as well.

Okay. So these first three verses show that the slothful man is under tribute. He has accompanying sorrow and heaviness of heart and becomes despondent, and that despondency even gets worse because he enters into self-deception. And as a result, this slothful thing starts to cycle on down.

Now the reverse of that, of course, is that the picture of the reverse side of that is that the diligent man ends up ruling. And even though sad things come into his life, he understands they’re from God. He receives glad words from the counselors that he has around him. And he then receives counsel as well from the people that God has put in his context to help him avoid sin.

So the righteous man who is diligent, ruling, understanding that all things come into our lives from God and that we’re to still our soul, you know, as we work through these things, and recognizing that God will bring understanding to these situations and bring them to a good end for us, and then listening to counsel of others, the righteous man avoids this descent of the slothful.

And the descent continues then in verse 27.

**Proverbs 12:27—Sloth and Despair**

We read that “the slothful man roasteth not that which he took in hunting; but the substance of a diligent man is precious.”

I’ve entitled this particular part of the outline “Sloth and Despair.”

The slothful man gives into such a point in his own self-deception and despondency that he doesn’t even roast the food that he actually ends up hunting. He works up enough energy to go out hunting, he brings it back. He doesn’t even roast it or prepare it.

Proverbs 26:15 says, “The slothful hideth his hand in his bosom; it grieveth him to bring it again to his mouth.” And repeated in Proverbs 19:24, “A slothful man hideth his hand in his bosom; will not so much as bring it to his mouth again.” And the word bosom there is translated by most modern translations as bowl.

The picture is that the slothful man actually puts his hand in his bowl to eat his food and doesn’t even bring it up to his mouth. Why is that? Well, I think it’s because he’s entered into a terrible spiral of increasingly despondency and eventually despair.

There’s this relationship that Gregory mentioned between *accidia*, carelessness as to trust, melancholy, and then finally into despair. It’s interesting that in Psalm 91:5 and 6, we read: “Thou shalt not be afraid of the terror by night, nor the arrow that flies during the day, nor of the pestilence that walketh in the darkness, nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.”

“The terror by night, the destruction that wastes at noonday.”

The scriptures tell us that the slothful man is a brother to the waster. We’ll go back to that verse in a couple of minutes here as we look at the relationship of sloth to the fifth commandment. But the slothful man is brother to the one that wastes. And I think that part of what Psalm 91:5 and 6 is talking about here is a state of mind that paralyzes oneself with fear, despondency, despair, loss of hope. It’s talking about a spiritual malaise, as it were, that moves us into incredible idleness—even to the point of not roasting the food that we have obtained for ourselves.

So the slothful man continues this cycle down. Boredom. That’s what I think is one of the things in this spiraling pattern. It’s an important thing to teach our children. It’s a word that children seem to use today a lot.

It’s interesting that it’s our leisure time that provides much of the problem for modern man and much of the groundwork for sloth and accompanying despondency and despair. And it’s leisure time that produces children who are bored over various things.

Boredom, wrote one writer, and I think it’s correct, is a charge leveled at God that his universe is not interesting. In hell, Dante, in his vision of hell, had the bored snuffling around in murky settings. The reason was that on earth, those who had been given the great gift of God’s light in the world and the sun, instead of being glad by the gladsome lighting of the sun, instead they were bored with the sun.

And so now they’re consigned to boredom and darkness forever as their punishment for refusing to accept the great gift of God of light.

Boredom is part of the spiraling down of people. And it’s something that we got to teach our kids. Not good. Not good.

If you think you’re bored, think about the world God has made. Do you find his world boring? Do you find his world uninteresting? Do you find no tasks in life to occupy yourself with? Think it through. Think it through.

Boredom is part of this cycling down. An *accidia* of boredom becomes an immobility, a stagnation of the soul which needs the strong blast of the Holy Spirit being ministered through the parents’ strong corrective words to our children and through the word of God to ourselves to shake us out of it.

I mentioned before that in a 15th century work entitled “Jacob’s Hell,” the devil spies an idle man, and then he leads this idle man into committing various other sins. Idle hands, as this 15th century work pointed out, are indeed the devil’s workshop. In the idle, Satan goes to work, and in the depiction in “Jacob’s Hell,” he goes to work inducing boredom, an enervation of the will of the idle man, and troublemaking. And so the individual goes through the same progression in “Jacob’s Hell” we’re talking about this morning—from idleness at first to enervation of will, boredom and troublemaking, and finally of course cycling on down to despair.

Despair—being despairing of the mercy or grace of God. That’s what the word means. Despair comes from two words meaning “without hope.” And specifically, for instance, Webster’s 1828 dictionary says that despair is “loss of hope in the mercy of God.”

Chaucer’s Parson, again from the Canterbury Tales, said that *accidia*, or sloth, despairs of the mercy of God, and that this comes about through too much sorrow or through too much fear. And frequently those two things come together. The slothful man sorrows, becomes fearful—”the lion in the street,” et cetera—and ends up despairing even of eating his own food according to the verse we just read from Proverbs.

We earlier spoke of the relationship of sloth to melancholy. As we said, it was Gregory who merged melancholy with sloth. And he, Gregory, also wrote that melancholy would lead then to malice, rancor, cowardness, and finally despair in the cycling down process.

From *accidia*, the withdrawal of oneself from service to others and service to God, comes increasing despair over the meaninglessness of life and finally even existence itself. And so the slothful man despairs. He can’t even bring himself to eating food to mouth.

Now, it’s interesting the waning years of the Middle Ages saw a great rise in melancholy, and so there was a lot of work put into it. And the strongest point of attack—and I think I mentioned this before—was in the monasteries. The monasteries, Psalm 91:6, which talks about the demon that wasted, or the destroyer that wastes at noonday or whatever—the specific whatever translation you have—this was, I think, the reference to the monastic writings that talked about what they called the “Daemon Meridianis,” the demon of noonday.

Again, it was particularly aimed at the monastic temptation when the sun rises and is at the highest point, and lethargy begins to take over the mind and body. They saw this as the demon of noonday come to entice them into sloth, melancholy, and eventually despair.

The demon Meridianis would attack monks to deprive them of hope, blow them down with sadness, sink them to the depths of despair, and turn them away from the prayerful obligations that they had to God.

The Middle Ages saw, in this period of time, an emphasis on attacking the sin of melancholy in the monastic life. But at the same time, the Middle Ages, because of this, split off the idea of laziness from melancholy. And the reason why is very important to catch.

The reason why is that laziness now applied not to the monk in the monastery who wasn’t doing his work. Laziness was described as the man in the secular vocation who wasn’t working as hard as he could. And because they separated these vocational callings—spiritual and secular—then the melancholy or lapse of activity was also separated. This being melancholy and this being laziness. And in terms of the secular fellow, some even looked at idleness as a good thing because it keeps one back from the temptation of greed.

See, what happened was the Protestant Reformation. The Protestant Reformation said, “No, no, there are not spiritual and secular callings. All of life is a spiritual calling before God.” And because of that emphasis on the vocational calling of every believer—priest in God—and that all work is holy work when it’s governed by God’s word, because of that, sloth, melancholy, and laziness were all linked back together by the Reformers and seen as great evils to men.

And so then you had a lot of writings in the works of Richard Baxter and other Puritans and other Reformers who wrote strongly about the sin of idleness of hands, because they knew that that was involved in this downward spiral of rejection of God’s calling.

Baxter wrote that loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary for health—six to eight hours at most being necessary—is worthy of absolute moral condemnation. Waste of time began to be seen, not just as one of the seven deadly sins by the Reformers, but at the head of the list.

And in Spencer’s “Faerie Queene,” a depiction and physical description of the seven deadly sins, sloth leads three pairs of the other six sins following sloth. Idle hands, torpor, sluggishness, melancholy, and despair give way then into all kinds of wicked evil.

In essence, remember we talked about the fact that the monastics fell into depression and melancholy because they were out of the concept of push-pull in terms of their life. Their life was provided for them. Really, there wasn’t much they were doing except praying, et cetera. There was no push of something behind them to get them to do what’s right and no pull in terms of reward or consequence.

And in terms of the secularization of the workplace, that time during the Middle Ages, the same thing was true of the secular work. There was no curse of God upon poor secular work and no blessing upon good secular work. And so it was missing.

Well, the Reformers changed all that, giving it the high holy calling. Again, vocational callings were seen as priestly callings, and as a result, governed by God’s law. And as a result, governed by the portions of blessing and cursing that attend to that law. And so idleness and work became subject to the curse of God again, realizing that the blessings of God come upon diligence of work, no matter what sphere the calling is in.

In fact, Richard Baxter wrote that Paul’s admonition—that he who will not work, neither should he eat—should be applied to all men, including those who are wealthy enough not to work. Baxter saw that the sin was inactivity, not being useful for God, not simply not providing for your own food.

The Calvinistic doctrine of faith and duty led to a moral prohibition and a social proscription against withdrawal and latitude. By the way, this idea that sloth is associated with withdrawal from service to men as well as God helps us to understand why in the New Testament writings, the sin of schism—which is defined in Greek as a failure to be part of the group or part of the covenant community—schism was treated as a very deadly evil by the New Testament writings and of course by that time as well by the Reformers who were going back to these concepts.

And that has—I bring that up because that’s part of what we’re doing here at RCC. We were over at the Kate’s house for dinner the other day, and we were talking about how in this church it’s not like there’s this clergy-laity distinction. I don’t feel it much. I was, for ten years, a purchasing agent, doing this full-time for three years. I see what we’re doing here as all of us pitching together in covenant community over a common set of doctrine to accomplish kingdom work for Jesus Christ. And we’re doing it together.

You know, we’re doing it as a covenanted community. The work that happens up here is simply stuff you take then and work through and apply to your lives and come back to me and tell me other ways it can be applied, and we jointly move together and encourage each other in the faith and maturation of growth and in kingdom work.

So it’s not this split, you know, like was before. We’re trying to be reformed in what we’re doing here. And the Reformation saw this vision of covenanted communities carrying on kingdom work in all that we do as a group of the church.

So schism is related to the sin of sloth and failure to serve and have a heart for service.

Now, getting back to this concept of despair. Stanford Lyman, in his book on the seven deadly sins, wrote that *accidia* threatens wherever a man is conceived as participating in a great chain of being—a long lineage of ancestors and successors—a linear and secular history or waiting for the end. In each of these instances, man suffers the inconveniences of time.

See, if you’re part of a great chain of being and a flat historical perspective, what are you going to do with your life? What’s the point? There is no point, because history is flat. It’s just one. I think Keith—I don’t remember who Keith said it was. Somebody said it’s just “one damn thing after another.” That’s all history is.

And that is a prescription for sloth, despair, and meaninglessness, and eventually even suicide.

And the church that believes that history is a downward spiral until Jesus comes back, they provide the same fertile ground for sloth, *accidia*, *tristitia*, melancholy, despair, and despondency that the flat evolutionist view of history does as well.

So it’s important to realize that postmillennialism, apart from being correct biblically, is the only view that gives men hope for the future that prepares and equips them not to fall into the sin of despair which is akin to the sin of sloth.

Now, Lyman believes that the best picture of the sin of sloth and its full-blown effects on individuals is a book by Anton Chekhov entitled “The Three Sisters.” Lyman provides a six-page summation of this book in his book on the seven deadly sins. This six-page summation is so depressing that probably not many who read the summation will go on to read the book.

Lyman tells us that in the book “The Three Sisters” by Chekhov, idleness and melancholy feed on one another, producing a paralysis of word and deed. The home of the three sisters is slowly overwhelmed by the personified force of darkness against which an intensified sloth offers no defense. Sloth, beginning with physical activity, moving on to despondency, has no defense left against total despair.

Ultimately, Lyman writes: “The drama posits the most terrible consequences of *accidia*, or sloth: the conversion of the world into a meaningless void full of sound and silence, smoldering feelings and affected neutrality, meaningless actions and uncertain outcomes. One can neither wait nor hope. Neither move on or give up. Life becomes pure existence at the end of the slothful cycle.”

The strongest personification of *accidia* in this particular book by Chekhov is a doctor who has long since, through inactivity, forgotten what he knew of medical practice. And by the way, the idea that it’s the sadness of heart that blows from the world around us that helps in this cycle—the doctor in this book had once loved the three sisters’ mother, a love that was unfulfilled. And that was part of his cycling down into slothfulness and despair.

So he’s forgotten what medical practice he once knew. He cares nothing for the people that he knows in the towns. His only interest in people at all is by a distant newspaper that he gets occasionally. He reads those with lazy attention. His only attention at all to people in the world. He’s become so withdrawn that he has become totally lost in his own melancholy.

He in the book espouses the nihilist theory that nothing exists and that everyone, including himself, is not really there. And even he says, if existence is real, he concludes that it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters at all.

And that’s the downward slide of the slothful man into despair.