The Lazy Life of the Couch Potato - Part A

Social scientists have been observing cultures and our culture included and they have noted that Americans are becoming addicted, their words, addicted to entertainment and leisure.

I don't think we have to belabor that. We understand we live in the day and age of binge watching and it seems like we increasingly find the need to have a screen ever before us, even while we drive on the roads. There's always that little screen. We've got to have that out there so we become addicted to entertainment and leisure.

Our culture is very much screen oriented, whether it's your phone, the TV or your computer. Today on Connect with Skip Heitzig, Skip sheds biblical light on the sin of laziness and how you can overcome it to live a God-sized adventure. But first, Skip wants to share about another great way you can hear these uplifting teachings. Now, real quick, I want to invite you to follow my podcast so you can get even more inspiring teaching. Just search Skip Heitzig, that's Skip, H-E-I-T-Z-I-G, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or anywhere you listen to your podcasts. And don't forget to subscribe. Thanks, Skip.

Now, we're in Proverbs chapter 6 and Romans chapter 12 as we dive into the teaching with Skip Heitzig. So we are probably all familiar with the term in our culture, couch potato, also known as sofa spud. Somebody who is unmotivated, not active, one who would spend presumably most of his or her time watching television. There's even a website I found called couch potato. And the website is an open source service to download free movies. So they will add to your couch potato experience. They're endorsing couch potatoism to its fullest degree. You can get free movies. Some of you, sadly, are actually writing that down right now.

Wow, free movies. If so, there are a few things every couch potato will understand. That is, first of all, the desperation you feel when you realize you've lost your remote. The panic that ensues when you realize your phone battery just dropped below 20%. And your charger is all the way upstairs. Contemplating using your shirt as a Kleenex in order to avoid going and getting one. That's just outright gross.

The amount of concentration that it takes to balance a plate of food on your stomach. The pure joy you feel when you first realize you could have your groceries delivered. I mean, I don't have to actually get up and go to the store. They'll bring them to me. New revelation. And finally, the absolute nightmare when your cable or internet goes out. What do you call the children of a couch potato?

Tater tots. Okay, enough of that nonsense. We do want to get serious and that is because the Bible addresses this subject head on. In fact, little known fact that one of the sins for which God judged Sodom is the sin of laziness. According to Ezekiel 1649, it is called in the New King James, the abundance of idleness, the abundance of idleness.

Laziness goes by an older term, the word sloth. And that's an intriguing word because the word sloth shows up on an ancient list of sins that predates white collar sins. And the list is called the seven deadly sins. Seven deadly sins. Before the TV show seven deadly sins, there was actually 600 AD, a list compiled by the Catholic Church called seven deadly sins.

And they were also known as capital vices. They were also known as cardinal sins. And those are the sins of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. Now the way the church posture these is these are simply excessive versions of natural desires.

Everybody has natural tendencies, temptations, desires, but when you take them to this extreme, they become capital vices. That list of seven deadly sins was first compiled by Pope Gregory the first in 600 AD. And interestingly, the church for a while taught these are sins that you could not be forgiven for. They were unforgivable sins. Of course we know that is nonsense because Jesus said every manner of sin a man can be forgiven for except for one and that is the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. Because it is sin, it is therefore forgivable. That's the whole point of Jesus coming. But we've done a series we've embarked starting last week on a series called white collar sins.

Last week was more introductory and now we're kind of getting more specific and we will for the next few weeks. White collar sins. What do we mean by that? We mean respectable sins. We mean the category that most people would say, well, they're not that bad. We really wouldn't regard them as sin, even though you can call them that. Most people in our culture, even in our Christian culture, may not see them as serious.

Things like gossip, selfishness, bitterness, anger, gluttony, prayerlessness, and envy. Today we talk about laziness. And we do so because social scientists have been observing cultures and our culture included and they have noted that Americans are becoming addicted, their words, addicted to entertainment and leisure. So I don't think we have to belabor that. We understand we live in the day and age of binge watching and it seems like we increasingly find the need to have a screen ever before us, even while we drive on the roads. There's always that little screen.

We've got to have that out there. So we've become addicted to entertainment and leisure. We're looking at the book of Proverbs and Proverbs chapter 6 and 24 deal with this, though there are many other scriptures that deal with it. But interestingly, the book of Proverbs especially, because 19 different verses in the book of Proverbs deal with the issue of sloth or laziness. A word about Proverbs, they're written by Solomon and they're put in proverbial Proverb form. I've always looked at Proverbs as short statements that take the place of long explanations.

So they are axioms, they are epigrams, they are aphorisms, they are sayings, they are short statements that take the place of long explanations or a better way to look at them is they're short sayings based on long experience. Solomon writes these based on experience, but it's more than just good advice. It's God's advice. It is part of Holy Scripture. So what I want to do is give you today four fundamentals about laziness.

What it is, what it isn't, what it does, and what it needs or how it's fixed. So let's begin with what laziness is. Let's just look at what the scripture has to say about this topic. We begin in Proverbs chapter six, look at verse six. Go to the ant, you sluggard. That's an introduction.

Consider her ways and be wise, which having no captain, overseer or ruler, provides her supplies in the summer and gathers her food in the harvest. How long will you slumber, O sluggard? When will you rise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep. So shall your poverty come on you like a prowler and your need like an armed man.

At this point, some of us are shifting a little bit, getting a little uncomfortable with the text itself. Let's look at now Proverbs 24 verse 30. I went by the field of the lazy man and by the vineyard of the man devoid of understanding. And there it was, all overgrown with thorns. Its surface was covered with nettles. Its stone wall was broken down.

When I saw it, I considered it well, and I looked on it and received instruction. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest. It's like the chorus of the same song. And so shall your poverty come on you like a prowler and your need like an armed man. Two different Proverbs, two different texts, but dealing with the same idea. In Proverbs chapter 6, Solomon is giving a direct challenge to a lazy person to go out and observe and learn. He's giving him the dispatch to go examine nature and the industriousness of creatures in God's creation.

Can I just say good luck? Good luck at having success telling a lazy person to go out and learn something like that. But he does. And the point being is that God's creation ought to be a classroom. That you and I could be able to go outside and up to a point look around and notice the order of things and the regularity with which things occur. Some of the elements in nature and that will give us lessons like David said in Psalm 19, the heavens declare the glory of God.

The firmament shows his handiwork. But in this case, Solomon is not like David saying look up. He's saying look down.

David said look up at the stars. Solomon says look down at the ants. Consider this highly industrious, very organized creature called the ant.

Now when I was a boy, I had three older brothers. We did many things with ants and two ants. I don't need to describe what those things are that boys often do, but it was amazing looking down at them. It was like looking at a little city, very busy, organized, you know, they're carrying things or doing things or going places.

It was just amazing. And did you ever have an ant farm? Did you ever have those little pieces of glass, those two panes of glass and you put sand between them and you put ants in them and you can watch them burrowing down and making their little tunnels and then making chambers and building garrisons? And what Solomon is doing is praising them for their work ethic. They don't have a ruler. Nobody tells them what to do.

They're just doing it. Now there's a little bit of humor that I picked up here. Solomon, according to chapter one, is writing the book of Proverbs for his son. And I don't know, but maybe Solomon had a lazy son who wouldn't pick up his room and mom and dad always had to say pick up your room, clean up your room. But here he goes, go to the ant, you sluggard.

Nobody tells them what to do, but they're picking up their rooms. So there's a little bit of rub that I kind of hint from that. That's Proverbs six. Now in Proverbs 24, it's Solomon's personal experience. If he's on a journey, he's going down the road and he glances over and he notices something that is very different in the landscape that is around him. There are fields around him on this journey, but here's one particular vineyard and field of a lazy man. And it's overgrown with weeds.

It is unproductive. And Solomon says that in that encounter, he himself learned something from the experience, and that is that lack of diligence leads to poverty. Why that man didn't work the field, we don't know. But one of the things we do know is that there are two seasons of rain in ancient Israel, the winter and the spring, the early rain and the latter rain.

The best time to work the fields is right after the rains when the ground is soft. But maybe the lazy man got up and said, it's too cold out there. So he misses the opportunity because of his laziness, and the ground becomes unproductive. Now in chapter six, the first passage we looked at, there's a noun given to this person, and it's used twice. And what is that word? Sluggered. Go to the ant, you sluggered.

Even the name itself sounds really bad. The Hebrew word is atsel, and it means slug-like, sluggish, unmotivated, indolent, lethargic, torpid, whatever synonym you want to attach to it. Now the Bible in basic English translates the word sluggered this way, hater of work. Go to the ant, you hater of work. But the prize goes to the New Living Translation, which says, go to the ant, you lazy bones. So either way you look at it, the words are not complimentary words.

Who is Solomon having in mind when he writes this? Not the unemployed person, the person who has a job or doesn't have a job but wants one. He's not speaking to the unemployed, he's speaking to the mal-employed. Somebody who has a job but is not motivated in that job. I read a study where 23 million Americans, this study says 23 million Americans are what are described as actively disengaged from their work.

Isn't that a nice way of saying they're lazy? They're actively disengaged from their work. They're at work. They go to work. They clock in in the building of their work but they're actively disengaged.

There's not much excitement or enthusiasm. They look at work as an unavoidable inconvenience. Now if you were to find one of these actively disengaged workers, which according to the studies you should be able to find them in spades because they're everywhere. And you say, excuse me, but why are you so actively disengaged in your work? And if that person said they were a Christian, they might say, well, you know, work is a curse. The Bible says work is a curse at which point you need to say, I think you had to read that Bible just one more time. I think that would help because you will discover work is not the curse. It's the laborious toil that came as a result of the curse that God put on the earth that is the struggle. In fact, you would tell that person work was something that came before the fall. And in fact, when God put Adam in the garden, one of the first things God did to Adam is give him a job. Genesis 2 15 tells us God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend it and to keep it. So work is not a curse.

God established it and established it to be something that is satisfying even though at times because of the curse it is toilsome. One college professor that I read, I think really explains the problem, really nails the problem. He said this, Even in engineering classes, many of the U.S. students expect to be given A's for inhaling and exhaling.

And they look at you like you have four heads if you suggest that perhaps coming to class, doing homework and studying might improve their grade. And he concludes with this remarkable statement, Our pride and over exalted self-image has made us lazy. Our pride and over exalted self-image has made us lazy. That's his viewpoint of the culture. That's what laziness is.

Now let's quickly pivot and look at what it is not. In verse 10, and that's in Proverbs 6, but also it's found in Proverbs 24, listen to what it says, A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep. Now, I just got to tell you, that sounds really good. I read that and go, nothing wrong with that. In fact, my wife tells me that when I sleep at night, that's how I sleep. She goes, it's funny, you lie down and you're on your back and you fold your hands. And she said, you look like a dead guy. I said, well, that's nice, sweetie. That's how you remember me.

The dead guy she slept next to. Now you might read this verse and you might think, so am I supposed to feel bad then if I lay down and I fold my hands and I close my eyes and I take a nap? No, you are not. The answer is a resounding no. There is a difference between laziness and leisure. Laziness is not leisure. Even Ben Franklin, the founding father, somebody who would be called very industrious, said, a life of laziness and a life of leisure are two entirely different things. Laziness does not mean leisure.

Solomon who wrote this book also wrote the book of Ecclesiastes where he wrote, to everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven. And he lists a variety of activities, but he also included a time to heal and a time to keep silence. So those are resting activities. You see, we all need time not only to work, but we need time to be free of work, to pursue other activities that provide rest and recharge the batteries. Time to spare spares the soul. It's good for your mental health.

It's good for your physical health. And even if it's not necessarily folding your hands, because I'm not really not a good napper. Some people are great nappers. I'm a bad napper because a nap for me turns into an eight-hour sleep cycle.

So then I'll mess my whole thing up. So I'll come home even after a Sunday and people who study speakers will say that, you know, you usually feel enormously tired after speaking that much. And that you, you know, you have to go rest or something. So my colleagues think I'm crazy because when I go home on a Sunday, they say I go take a nap and I say, well, I usually like mow the lawn or I pull weeds or I just do a different activity. It's restful for me not to just sit around, but to go do something else. Because when I'm doing a different activity like that, what I find is my mind goes to a different place. And some of the problems I'm trying to work out and wrestling with, I get resolved doing those kind of mundane things around the house.

And that goes to say I'm not great at resting. It is something that the Lord is constantly trying to show me. So I'm preaching to myself here. And this is the reason God gave us the fourth commandment, the Sabbath commandment. You are to keep it holy. You are to regard the Sabbath as holy.

You are to do your work for six days, but on the seventh day you are to do no ordinary work. And it's interesting that as part of the 10 commandments, so God is saying from heaven, relax, and that's an order. So it's okay to have leisure time. In fact, it is a commandment. By the way, the word Sabbath is the Hebrew word Shabbat, which means to put to an end or an intermission. In other words, it's time to unplug, it's time to veg out, it is time to chill, and that's a holy activity. And it's commanded by God. It means you stop doing what you do all the other six days, and this is a different day.

Right? Isn't that what even David had in mind? When he said the Lord is my shepherd, he makes me lie down in still water, or in green pastures, makes me lie down. Now some people who won't lie down in green pastures, sometimes they'll find the Lord makes them lie down in green pastures.

He said, well, why would God do that? Well, David said after that, because it restores my soul. Lying down for a period of time, taking a break, brings restoration to the soul.

So this, of all the 10 commandments, this one is the tender commandment. It is God wanting you to go through the long haul of life with the proper amount of energy. And this is important to us as Americans especially, I believe, because as one author put it, we have become a generation of people who worship our work, work at our play, and play at our worship. So to keep everything in proper alignment, we need to work energetically and rest as much.

That's Skip Heitzing with a message from the series White Collar Sends. Now we want to share about a special resource that will encourage you even more in your faith. Holidays and special days of celebration wake us up from the daily grind and provide a backdrop for creating memories. But beyond traditions, time off, and intentional family time, holidays can illuminate spiritual truths, as we hear from Skip Heitzig. You may not know that Valentine's Day has Christian roots, but time and secular culture have transformed what was a great celebration of those who would stay true to the Christian faith. It has turned into simply a celebration of romantic love. You can find spiritual significance with Happiness, Holiness, and Holidays, a four DVD collection of celebration messages from Pastor Skip. And it's our thanks when you give $25 or more to help keep this ministry on the air.

Here's Skip with a strong thought on another holiday on our calendar. Because God is our Father, we never have to fear. Because God is our Father, I don't have to live selfish, myopic life.

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Thank you. Tune in tomorrow as Skip Heitzig shares some encouragement from Scripture on what it takes to overcome laziness and embrace everything God is calling you to do. What Paul does in Romans 12 is take the negatives presented in the book of Proverbs, turns them into a positive. What was a contrast and the negative of a lazy person is like this and like that, sluggard in Proverbs. Now he turns it into the positive of not lagging in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never changing truth in ever changing times.