You know, we made joke around about laziness, but today on Truth for Life weekend, we'll find out why it's actually happening.

You know, we made joke around about laziness, but today on Truth for Life weekend, we'll find out why it's actually a huge problem, something that needs to be resisted in every aspect of our lives, at work, at home, in our relationships.

Alistair Begg is teaching today from the book of Proverbs.

Chapter 24, and verse 30 and following,

as view is vineyard.

I went past the field of the sluggard, verse 30 passed the vineyard of the man who liked judgment.

Thorns had come up everywhere. The ground was covered with weeds and the stone wall was in ruins.

So his approach to life has paid its dividends. We go past this house, we say either there is no one living in that house, or the person is unwell within it, or has been removed on account of illness, or the person within it is frankly lazy.

Anyone of those deductions would be valid.

Samuel Johnson has an immense quote on laziness, I'll give it to you, it's not an easy quote, but you're a very intelligent group, you'll get this with difficulty.

He says, indolence is one of the vices from which those whom it once infects are seldom reformed.

Every other species of luxury operates upon some appetite that is quickly satisfied and requires some concurrence of art or accident which every place will not supply.

In other words, if we had a craving for eating tubs of peaches, once you get a tub of peaches, you eat 14 of them,

it pretty well is satisfied. And furthermore, if you have a craving for peaches and you're somewhere where there are no peaches, then you're going to have to be involved in some skillful art or in creating some context so that you can satisfy that desire.

That's true in most of these things, but laziness doesn't need that. You can be lazy anywhere, anytime, without any help at all.

Because laziness is nothingness, laziness is defaulting to sleep and to just abject confusion, he goes on.

But the desire of ease acts equally at all hours. And the longer it is indulged, it is the more increased. To do nothing is in every man's power.

We can never want an opportunity of omitting duties. The lapse to indolence is soft and imperceptible because it is only a mere cessation of activity.

But the return to diligence is difficult because it implies a change from rest to motion, from privation to reality. Everybody who has ever engaged in an exercise program knows this is the case.

It takes no difficulty at all when the time comes around whether it's an alarm ringing or somebody coming and calling on us to say, okay, I think I'll just stay here.

It doesn't matter where here is. You can be in your house, you can be on the road, you can be in a hotel. I think I'll just stay here.

And the more that we develop patterns of, okay, I don't think I'll do this, so I don't think I'll apply myself.

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