Welcome back to a new week on the podcast. Well, last summer in episode 1500, some of you

may remember that we talked about personal productivity. And there, Pastor John, you said

it was essential that we learned the difference between sloth and rest. And you pointed

us to the poem that you wrote titled Pilgrim's Conflict with Sloth. I commend that poem

and you're reading of it all available right now at DesiringGod.org. But in APJ 1500, you

said that everyone knows that there is a place, an absolutely crucial place for rest and

for leisure because the Sabbath principle still holds. But then you warned us that we must

know the difference between sloth and rest. You didn't really explain that difference

there. You pointed us to the poem. And I hate to say it, but I think a lot of listeners

will resonate more with plainly stated principles than a poem. So can you, in principle, distinguish

for us the indulgence of sinful sloth from the virtue of true rest? Yes, I think we can.

And that's because the Bible does pretty clearly. So let me use biblical terms. Let's

use the terms sluggard and diligent because those terms are used in the Proverbs. For example,

Proverbs 13, 4, the soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing while the soul of the

diligent is richly supplied. So the question we're asking then is what's the difference between

the restfulness of the diligent and the laziness of the sluggard? Because at any given moment, restfulness

and laziness might look the same if you're just looking at somebody sitting in a chair,

lying in a bed or sleeping, but they're not the same. So what's the difference? One other

clarification before I state the difference. I'm not interested here in unbelieving diligence,

the kind of diligence I care about is the kind that sees the cross of Christ as the ground

of all grace and the Holy Spirit as the key to all holiness and the glory of God as the goal

of all reality, which would include the goal of all diligence. So I'm not just talking about

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