The slothful man does not catch his game or roast it once he kills it, but the diligent man gets precious possessions. – Proverbs 12:27, AMP

I was sitting on the beach beside my bride, enjoying the ocean breeze and watching the kids play in the water. Then, all of a sudden, I heard a girl’s voice crying out, “Mom! Mom!”

At first, I wondered if the girl – maybe ten years old – was in trouble, but that wasn’t it at all. For the next five minutes, the youngster called her mother’s name at least three dozen times. Most of that time she was in the water. At one point, she actually stepped up onto the beach. But then, after calling “Mom” about ten times from the sand, she returned to the water and simply increased the volume of her calls. Finally, her mother heard her and responded.

What was so important? The girl wanted her mother to bring her a boogie board to play with in the water! I looked at my wife and asked, “How lazy do you have to be to spend five minutes calling your mother’s name for a boogie board when you could have taken 20 seconds to walk up the beach and get it yourself?” My wife knowingly smiled, and then she told me to behave.

Slothfulness is a life-dominating sin that is just as destructive as drugs, alcohol, or immorality. It can lead to the destruction of the body, to the dissolution of relationships, and to the damnation of souls. Regarding the latter, souls can remain lost when someone hearing the Gospel slothfully responds to it the same way that Felix did in Acts 24:25, putting the decision off until a more convenient time. Also, perhaps more heinously, souls can be lost when Christians respond slothfully at the Holy Spirit’s prompting to offer the Gospel to a needy life.

Merriam Webster’s Dictionary defines “sloth” as:

a: disinclination to action or labor
b: spiritual apathy and inactivity*

Whether in a spiritual sense or in an secular one, sloth equals inaction, and inaction equals destruction. God created us to work, and when we default to doing nothing, our disobedience incurs His wrath.

It’s okay to rest every now and then. If it weren’t, God would never have given us the Sabbath. But when rest becomes a way of life, we have sinned. When we discover that sloth dominates our character, we need to repent and then beg our Lord to replace our sloth with the diligence that pleases Him.

* Merriam-Webster Dictionary iPad App

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