Spurgeon: Sermons on Proverbs (53 page)

But whenever this sluggishness creeps upon you, I want you to think of One whom you love, who will be an example to you. Now, who do you suppose it is to whom I am about to direct your eye, if you begin to be weary and faint in your minds? Ah, it is not to a deacon of the church, or to a minister; it is not to some renowned preacher of the olden time;--yes it is--I have made a mistake there; it is to a renowned Preacher of the olden time--One whom you love. Whenever you feel faint and weary, will you think of One who ploughed more than you ever can plough, and deeper furrows too, and ploughed more terrible ploughing on a harder rock and a more terrible soil than you have to plough upon? Whenever you are weary and faint in your minds, consider him. "And who is that?" say you. Why, you know, it is your Lord and Master, Jesus Christ. Whenever sloth creeps on you and you begin to lean on the plough handles, and the devil whispers, "Look back," do not look back; look up and see him-- the Crucified One--and you will no longer be weary I am sure.

Myconins, the friend of Luther, had made up his mind that he would not help Luther, but that he would keep in a monastery quiet and alone. The first night he went there, he had a dream to this effect; he dreamed that the Crucified One appeared to him, with the nail-prints still in his hands, and that he led him away to a fountain into which he plunged him--a fountain of blood. He beheld himself washed completely clean, and being very rejoiced thereat he was willing to sit down; but the Crucified One said "Follow me." He took him to the top of a hill, and down beneath there was a wide-spreading harvest, he put a sickle into his hand and he said, "Go and reap." He looked round him and he replied, "But the fields are so vast, I cannot reap them." The finger of the Crucified One pointed to a spot where there was one reaper at work, and that one reaper seemed to be mowing whole acres at once. He seemed to be a very giant, taking enormous strides. It was Martin Luther. "Stand by his side," said the Crucified One, "and work." He did so, and they reaped all day. The sweat stood upon his brow, and he rested for a moment. He was about to lie down when the Crucified One came to him and said, "For the love of souls, and for my sake, go on." He snatched up the sickle again, and on he worked, and at last he grew weary once more. Then the Crucified One came to him again, and said, "For the love of souls, and for my sake, go on." And he went on. But once he dared to pause and say, "But, Master, the winter is coming, and much of this good wheat will be spoiled." "No," said he, "reap on; it will all be gathered in before the winter comes--every sheaf. I will send more laborers into the harvest, only do thou thy best." So now, methinks, the Crucified One takes me to the brow of that hill, and yourselves with me, and shows us this great London and says, "See, this great field is ripe for the harvest, take your sickles and reap it." You say, "Lord, I cannot." "Nay," says he, "but for the love of souls, and for the sake of the Crucified One, go on and reap."

Ah brethren, I beseech you, cease not from your labor! Be more diligent than ever you have been. Think more of Christ; and that will nerve you to duty and remove all sense of weariness. And if this suffice not,
remember brethren and sisters, it may be hard ploughing; it may be true that this is a frozen time, that the winter is very sharp upon Christ's
Church; but let us plough on very hard for the harvest will pay for
all. Why, I can say that the harvest I have reaped already pays me for all my labors ten thousand times told. When I have grasped the hand of some poor woman who has been saved from sin through my ministry, I have felt it were worth while to die to snatch that one soul from hell. Ah,
it is a blessed harvest that God gives us here; but what a harvest will that be when we shall see all the saved souls gathered above--when we shall see the face of Christ and lay our crowns at his feet! Then look, labor, hope. An hour with your God will make up for all you may endure here. Oh may God the Holy Ghost fill you with energy, give you fresh strength, and may you, all of you, begin to plough straighter, deeper, longer furrows than you ever made before! Never look back, never take your hand from the plough, for in due season you shall reap if you
faint not. Keep at it still, and be ye not like the sluggard who would
not plough by reason of the cold --who shall beg in harvest and have nothing.

A sermon (No. 1670) delivered on Thursday Evening, June 8th, 1882, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington, by C. H. Spurgeon.

This slothful man seems to cherish that one dread of his about the lions, as if it were his favorite aversion and he felt it to be too much trouble to invent another excuse. Perhaps he hugs it to his soul all the more because it is a home-born fear, conjured up by his own imagination; and as mothers are said to love their weakest children best, so is he fondest of this most imbecile of excuses; at any rate, it serves him for a passable excuse for laziness and that is what he wants. If you can get the king of beasts to apologize for your idleness there is a sort of royalty about your pretences: he hopes his sloth will appear the less disgraceful if he can paint a rampant lion upon its shield.

I am not about to speak of slothful men in general, albeit that when a man does not diligently attend to his business he is committing great wrong to himself and to others. When a man is slothful as a servant he is unjust to his employers, and when he is in business on his own account, idleness is usually a wrong to his wife and family. I know one who is the cause of poverty and want to those for whom he ought to provide, and all because honest labor and himself have long since fallen out. He would not move an inch if he could help it, nor even open his eyes if he could manage to live and sleep all his life away. When a man is thoroughly eaten up with the dry rot of laziness he generally finds some kind of excuse, though his crime is really inexcusable. "There is a lion in the way," and therefore the man judges it to be quite right that he should keep his bed, or that he should sit leisurely indoors and should not give himself too much trouble or run any risks: but all this is a mere make-up to screen his loathsome vice. No Christian ought to be slothful in his ordinary work: the apostle describes the good man as "not slothful in business"--of whatever kind that business may be. If you have a right to undertake it, if you have a right to continue in it, you have no right to be a sluggard in it. There should be as wide a division as between the poles, between the thought of a Christian and the idea of a sluggard. "Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily." An idler is a disgrace to himself, and if he professes religion he is a dishonor to it. Paul would starve him, for he says, "If any would not work, neither should he eat," and that is as near starvation as well can be. Popery may create and foster lazzaroni, but the true faith bids every man eat his own bread. I leave worldly sluggards to the moralist: doth not nature itself teach us to labor diligently? Man was not made for an idle life; labor is evidently his proper condition. Even when man was perfect he was placed in the garden, not to admire its flowers, but to keep it and to dress it. If he needed to work when he was perfect, much more does he require the discipline of labor now that he is fallen. Lions or no lions, men must work, or find disease and death in sloth.

But we have many spiritual sluggards, and it is to them that I speak. They are not sceptics, they are not confirmed infidels, they are not opposers of the gospel; perhaps their sluggish nature saves them from anything like energetic opposition to goodness. They claim that they are not averse to the gospel: on the contrary, they are rather friendly to it, and one of these days they intend to be obedient to its great commands and to yield themselves as servants to Christ; but not just yet, the good time has not fully arrived. They have a very comfortable bed of sloth upon which they lie, and they do not want to rise in a hurry and exert themselves too much. They want to take this matter very leisurely and turn to Christ when it is quite convenient--when it will not require so much self-denial as at the present moment. "Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep," is their continual cry; and although God's watchmen disturb them terribly, and cry aloud that they may wake them, yet they sleep so heavily that they just turn over when they are most disturbed and drop into their slumbers again. I want to cry aloud under the window of such sleepers tonight with the hope that peradventure some of them may be wakened. What meanest thou, O sleeper? Wilt thou sleep thy soul away? Wilt thou lose heaven rather than bestir thyself? Wilt thou never lift up thine eyes till hell's torments are hopelessly about thee and within thee?

Our texts speak concerning the sluggard, and you first notice about him that his tongue is not slothful:--"The slothful man saith." The man who is lazy all over is generally very busy with his tongue. "The slothful man saith, There is a lion without." In both texts the slothful man is represented as having something to say, and I think that there are no people that have so much to say as those that have little to do. Where nothing is done, much is talked about. Their goodness begins and ends in mere lip service. They talk about repentance, but they do not repent. They are willing to hear about faith and even to speak about it, but they do not believe. They extol zeal and fervor, but they like to see these active graces rather than to feel them. They will talk till midnight, but all ends in smoke. When you sit down to speak with them about the reason that they have not given their hearts to Christ, they are not at all short of reasons and apologies and excuses. Indeed, a man must be desperately hard pushed when he cannot make an excuse. If our first parents made garments of fig-leaves, there is no fear that their descendants will fail to make coverings of some kind or other; and so the slothful man with his ready tongue declares that there is a lion in the way, and he shall be slain in the streets. He is not idle with his mouth. He has a short hand, but a long tongue.

His imagination also is not idle. There were no lions in the streets. One does not expect to find lions there. They may be in the desert; they may be in the jungle; they may be in the forest; but who expects to find lions in the streets of Jerusalem or the lanes of London? Laziness is a great lion-maker. He who does little dreams much. His imagination could create not only a lion but a whole menagerie of wild beasts; and if some mighty hunter could hunt down all the lions that his imagination has let loose, he would soon distribute herds more of the terrible animals, with wolves and bears and tigers to match. An idler will never be short of difficulties as long as he has no heart for work. As they say that any stick will do to beat a dog with, so any excuse will do to ruin your soul with; for this man's objection, after all, was not to lions in the way: he objected to the way itself, and he was glad to place a lion there so that he might be excused from going into the street. He did not want to get to his work, and therefore there was a lion in the way to obstruct him. The lion was his friend. He had invented him on purpose to be the ally of his idleness. Yes, men will have their tongues busy and their imaginations busy, even though their hearts be idle and their hands are covered over with idle dirt.

This man, using both his imagination and his tongue, gives me the opportunity of saying that he took great pains to escape from pains. He had to use his inventive ability to get himself excused from doing his duty. It is an old proverb, that lazy people generally take the most trouble, and so they do; and when men are unwilling to come to Christ it is very wonderful what trouble they will take to keep away from him. Hear how they argue. Mark their ingenuity in avoiding the narrow way. Oh, if they were to argue half as well upon the question why they should be saved as they do upon the question why they should not be saved, their logic would be put to a much more useful purpose. When we have talked with them we have seen them invent all kinds of difficulties and doubts, disputes and dilemmas. They are ever ready with hard doctrines and texts that are hard to be understood. They seem as if they raked heaven and earth and hell to find reasons why they should be lost, and yet the only reason that they have for this is that they do not want to give up their sins; they do not want to give up their selfrighteousness; they do not want to come to Jesus and be washed in his blood and owe everything to the charity of God through the Redeemer. They cannot be troubled with repenting and so they leave that doleful business, as they call it. They do not like to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling, and so they invent the lions. They do not care for faith, they do not delight in Christ, and so they invent difficulties and take a world of trouble to avoid trouble; storing up for themselves hereafter a heap of misery in order to escape from the blessedness of being found in Christ both now and at the last great day.

Now in dealing with sluggishness and its vain excuse, my divisions tonight will be such that every child can take them home and recollect them. The first head will be a lion; the second will be two lions; and the third will be no lions at all. Those three headings will surely abide in everybody's memory, and they are fairly derived from the two texts.

I. The first is "a lion." "The slothful man saith, There is a lion without, I shall be slain in the streets." That is to say, it is needful for him to get to the vineyard to work, but he does not get up and he pretends that he is best in bed, for there is a lion outside the door. Would you have him risk his precious life, so valuable to himself at any rate, if to nobody else? He turns over upon his bed to sleep again; for this is far more comfortable than to be meeting a lion, and falling a prey to his teeth.

He means I think that there is a great difficulty--a terrible
difficulty, quite too much of a difficulty for him to overcome. He has heard of lion-tamers and lion-killers, but he is not one. He has not the strength and the vigor to attack this dreadful enemy; he will even confess that he has not sufficient courage for such an encounter. The terrible difficulty which he foresees is more than he can face: it is a lion, and he is neither Samson, nor David, nor Daniel, and therefore he had rather leave the monster alone. Are there not many here who say much the same? "Oh," they say to the preacher, "you do not know our position or the peculiar circumstances and special trials under which we labor. We would gladly be saved, but we cannot live as Christian men: our trade is a difficulty, our poverty is a difficulty, our want of education is a difficulty, and the whole put together make up an impossibility; there is a lion in the way."