Get Behind Me, Sluggard
In Christ, whatever we do holds spiritual significance, from secret prayer to rising at our alarm, from fellowship to doubling down on our work. We live and labor before the eyes of our good Lord Jesus. His kingdom calls us. His Spirit fills us. His promises empower us. And his strength compels us to daily lay the sluggard to rest.
If you look deep inside yourself, you may notice, to your dismay, the presence of a singularly unattractive creature. You’ll need to look carefully, because he doesn’t move quickly (or sometimes at all). He camouflages under bed covers. He prefers the mumble over the clear word. His eyelids droop half open; his mouth holds back a dribble of drool. His name is sluggard.
We may prefer to keep the sluggard at a distance, to view this lazy creature only through binoculars or zoo glass. But somehow, he finds a native habitat in every soul, even the most hardworking. When the alarm buzzes, he paws the snooze. When a work project calls for relentless focus, he quietly opens a new browser tab. When some unwelcome duty faces us, one we’ve already put off too long, he nevertheless counsels, “Tomorrow.”
We may hesitate to study the sluggard, preferring to spare ourselves such an unseemly sight. But sometimes, our lazy self dies only when we take a long and careful look at him. “I passed by the field of a sluggard, by the vineyard of a man lacking sense,” the wise man tells us. “Then I saw and considered it; I looked and received instruction” (Proverbs 24:30, 32).
As we listen to the sluggard’s mutterings and consider the outcome of his laziness, we learn, by contrast, about a life of labor under the fear of the Lord. So, what instruction might the wise receive as they consider their inner sluggard?
1. ‘A little’ adds up.
A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest . . . (Proverbs 24:33)
The candy wrappers strewn around the sluggard’s bed, nearly ankle high now, all have one thing in common: in the moment, they were each “a little.” A little snack, a little break, a little reward, a little treat. He squandered his parents’ allowance in much the same way. Just one more in-app purchase. Just a little more takeout.
The wise hear and receive instruction. “A little,” it turns out, is anything but — at least when joined to a thousand other littles. Many little raindrops make a lake. Many little chops fell a tree. And therefore, how we handle little — little temptations, little decisions, little opportunities for self-denial — matters a lot.
Solomon points us to one of God’s littlest creatures as evidence. “Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise” (Proverbs 6:6). Yes, ants are tiny, this one carrying a speck of dirt, that one a bit of leaf, a third a crumb of bread. An ant cannot accomplish much quickly, but over time, by little and little, an anthill rises from the dirt; a network of underground tunnels takes shape; a colony is warm and fed.
Too often, in fleeing from my inner sluggard, I have tripped from trying to run too fast. Reckoning with how destructive the sluggard’s littles can be, I have thought, “Much! I must do much!” I will finish ten projects this week — no, twenty! I will work out Monday through Friday without exception! I will lead thirty-minute family devotions every night!
Sometimes, indeed, the path from the sluggard’s home rises steep and takes a running start. But most of the time, we are wiser to walk, exchanging little follies for little wisdoms, developing modest, ant-like resolutions and then building upon them. Along the way, we refuse this little compromise for that little obedience; we shun this little laziness for that little labor. We lay each little difficulty before our Father in heaven. And little by little, we receive from him the strength to work more diligently.
2. Neglect grows weeds.
I passed by the field of a sluggard . . . and behold, it was all overgrown with thorns. (Proverbs 24:30–31)
As he rolls over on his bed, or goes for thirds at lunch, the sluggard hardly imagines he is doing any harm. What damage can a little more snoozing do? What’s the problem with a few more mouthfuls?
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The Abolition of Mania
This philosophical chest joins those two parts of us that, while good in themselves, have a tendency to fly apart from each other and so become bad. Our reasonings are all too apt to evaporate into abstraction, floating upward into false spirituality, as if we weren’t also embodied, feeling creatures. Our feelings are all too apt to drag us downward into the overindulgence of some specially addictive sensual pleasure, as if we didn’t also enjoy the light of reason. The chest should check these two centrifugal forces, rooting them in an integrated heart.
The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis’s classic work of philosophy, packs a punch. Although his shortest book, it has had a huge impact since it first appeared in 1943, attracting the attention of everybody from conservative Catholic cardinals such as Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) to liberal atheist philosophers such as John Gray. A powerful defense of the objectivity of value, it lays into many fashionable errors, knocking down intellectual targets, left, right, and center.
Or perhaps I should say “left and right,” for the center is what Lewis seeks to defend. And by the “center” I don’t just mean some bland neutrality between extremes. The center that Lewis defends is not arrived at by merely splitting the difference between opposites. It is not a Laodicean lukewarmness, that we might feel inclined to spit out, but something much more positive and nourishing. Let me explain.
Lewis pictures the human person—philosophically considered—as being made up of three parts: the head, the belly, and the chest. In the head we have rational thoughts. In the belly we have passionate appetites. In the chest we have the liaison officer between reason and passion. It is this middle element that is the distinctively human faculty. By our intellect we are mere spirit, and by our appetite we are mere animal, but by our chest we are truly human.
The argument that Lewis propounds could be summarized in the words of the epigraph to E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End: “Only connect.” Only connect the angel and the animal and you will have the anthropological. The human being is a synthesis of the human brain and the human belly in the human breast.
This philosophical chest joins those two parts of us that, while good in themselves, have a tendency to fly apart from each other and so become bad. Our reasonings are all too apt to evaporate into abstraction, floating upward into false spirituality, as if we weren’t also embodied, feeling creatures. Our feelings are all too apt to drag us downward into the overindulgence of some specially addictive sensual pleasure, as if we didn’t also enjoy the light of reason. The chest should check these two centrifugal forces, rooting them in an integrated heart.
Integration is the key word. Our cerebral self and our visceral self should not be chained together as a criminal is handcuffed to a cop. Rather, the head and the belly should bond like friends, even lovers. The boundaries between the two should dissolve so that we get the best of both worlds. We should be intelligently emotional and emotionally intelligent. The chest allows for the mixing and mingling of this treasure.
And what is true of reason and passion in the constitution of the human person is true in the realm of moral values, various examples of which Lewis lists in the appendix to Abolition. These, too, should go hand in hand.
I have a duty to parents and ancestors, yes. But I also have a duty to children and posterity. I need simultaneously to be looking backward and forward.
I have a duty of “special beneficence” toward those to whom I am indebted through ties of family, neighborhood, and shared citizenship. But I also have a duty of “general beneficence” toward all people, regardless of particular ties, because of common humanity. I need to look inward (to my tribe) and outward (to the world) at the same time.
Looking backward, forward, inward, and outward all at once can be dizzying, which is why people often short-circuit the process and make things easier for themselves by fixating on a single attitude, adopting it to the exclusion of that which it mirrors and balances.
For instance, it is good to practice special beneficence, but if you overemphasize it you enter the jungle of racism, nationalism, and ultimately a kind of ethno-theocracy. Likewise, it is good to practice general beneficence, but if you overemphasize it you end up in the deserts of elitism, individualism, and plutocracy (for only the rich can live permanently without local attachments).
Either way, you have erred against what Lewis calls the Tao, a term he borrows from Chinese philosophy, indicating the perennial “Way” of being human—the rich, complex tapestry of interwoven values that comprises ethical well-being. This Tao is our inheritance as morally sentient members of that primate species called homo sapiens to which we all belong. We are “sapient” insofar as we remain within this tradition of immemorial wisdom. If we try to invent a new moral code, we will fail. As Lewis writes:
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Emerging From Our Trials Unscathed
Our trials should make us better, not worse. They should strengthen our character, not diminish it. They should grow our virtues, and amplify our Godward desires, and more prominently display the fruit of the Spirit. We may emerge from them with broken bodies and broken hearts, but should never emerge from them with broken vows, broken honor, broken character.
It’s undoubtedly one of the most-told and best-loved stories in the entire Old Testament. It has all the hallmarks of a great tale—heroes and villains and peril and deliverance. It tells of faithful young men who faced unjust persecution, faithful young men who were sentenced to die a horrific death—to be consumed by flames in a fiery furnace. Yet it also tells how they were unexpectedly and miraculously delivered; how, though they were thrown into the flames bound hand and foot, they walked out of their own accord; how, though they were surrounded by a superheated fire, they emerged unscathed. Because Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego honored God in life, they were preserved from death.
One of the details never fails to fascinate. After they came out from the flames, the people nearby observed that “the fire had not had any power over the bodies of those men. The hair of their heads was not singed, their cloaks were not harmed, and no smell of fire had come upon them.” These men passed through the fire of the furnace without a single hair being singed, without a single thread being scorched, without as much as a whiff of the smell of smoke sticking to them. They came from the flames just as they had gone into the flames—without the least trace of harm.
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The Basics: The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible
Since the Bible is the very words of God (it doesn’t merely contain the word of God), it comes to us with the authority of its primary author, God himself. Those for whom the book of the Bible are named, tell us that Bible is God’s word written, and that it must be seen as divine speech given through human agency. And this speech instructs, corrects, and trains us in righteousness, because it repeatedly points us to its central character, Jesus, the Son of God who came to save us from our sin.
In Genesis 1:1 we read “in the beginning was God.” Echoing the opening declaration of the Bible, in John 1:1 we read that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” But John goes on to say “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). The fact that God chose to reveal himself in the person of Jesus Christ (the eternal word made flesh) brings us to the subject of the inspiration and authority of the Bible. This is where God primarily chooses to reveal himself and his purposes to his people—in a collection of sixty-six written books which tell the story of God’s mighty deeds and words of explanation, all of which point to Jesus, the Word made flesh.
The Bible never claims to be an “inspirational” book which grants its reader greater spiritual insight or self-enlightenment. The Bible was not given to motivate us to live better lives, or to do great things. The Bible is given to us by God as a testimony to the Word made flesh (Jesus), who came to save us from our sins. This is what the various human writers of the Bible say about the Bible itself. What kind of book is it? What do they testify about it?
Paul says in his second letter to Timothy that “all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.” Although the term “inspiration of Scripture” is often used to describe God’s revelation of himself to us in written form, modern translations of the Bible (such as the ESV) correctly note that the word which the King James Version famously translated as “inspired” (theopneustos) is better translated as “breathed out” by God.
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