Whoever is slack in his work is a brother to him who destroys.
The human urge, still powerful in modernity, is to figure out how little I can do while still getting paid. Can I skip that bit? Well, I don’t have to do it… so, yes. We dress this desire up in excuses, dull it with distractions, and sometimes indulge blatantly. ‘They don’t deserve better work,’ we decide, or perhaps we just can’t be bothered. It’s a sin, laziness, and one I struggle with, one you doubtless have also your own struggles against.
Slackness destroys. A slipped detail here; a shoddy job there. For want of the nail, the horse stumbles; for want of the horse, the messenger is slow; for want of the messenger, the king is ambushed; for want of a king, the nation is lost. Small delinquencies and neglects in the wrong places can be deadly all on their own, let alone when they start interfacing and reinforcing, a network of weak-points.
Think of slackness like scratching break-lines into glass: one straight line is a problem, but the tap is still unlikely to inflict much damage and the line, placed in the corner (because slacking usually starts in the metaphorical corner), the line is nearly invisible. Add another line? Two? Tap. And suddenly the window has a hole in it, all for the few little scratches.
More, all sins are habits (even suicide- because suicidal thought and activity can be repeated even if the end-state cannot be). If I’m slack in one place, if I laze about and make excuses and cut corners in one spot, I’m teaching myself to be slack elsewhere. I start with a small laziness, one easy to excuse and forget, one hard to notice. A second joins it, I hardly know where, and a third. Something a little bigger, a little more laborious comes up; I cut corners on this too, inured to the practice and growing skilled in crafting pretexts in my head. Another, bigger; more slacking. I’ve made a habit, now, and if I looked back at the beginning, I’d see what I don’t want to see: how diligence has been eroded and laziness has taken its place.
Eventually, I’ll be slack in something manifestly important. I was already introducing weak points and stumbling blocks into my work overall, including in the minutia of big stuff. I could, perhaps, get away with that. Then, in the progress of the sin, I do what I’ve learned to do, be lazy, and the labor I’m lazy with is this time a Big Deal. The whole affair breaks, hopefully reparably, and….
Nor does laziness (slacking) stay neatly partitioned into vocation. Slacking is a habit, and it will bleed into the rest of my life. If I slack at my work, I’ll learn to slack in relationship also. I’ll be lazy about loving my father, my mother, my sister, my brother, my child. My friends? I’ll be lazy there too. Relationships require diligence. Loving another is a whole-life endeavor (Rom. 13:8-10), even just in cultivating in daily life the virtues (kindness, patience, contentment, self-control, rationality, empathy, sympathy, perspective) which are needed when actively engaging with the relationship.
Among these relationships which laziness affects, one is the most important: my relationship with God. If I slack in honoring Him with all I do (Col. 3:23), I am harming my relationship with Him. Dereliction of duty, we can call it: a sentry asleep at his post or a cook not turning the burners on below the soup pot. Sins of omission (not doing what I ought to do) are part and parcel of rebellion, just as sinful as sins of commission. We must not let ourselves slack; we must not teach ourselves unrighteousness.
I have spoken of sin as a habit, but it may also be termed an addiction. Each sin makes the next easier, and each sin is inherently self-harming, inherently harmful to our relationship with God, inherently harmful to our relationship with others (because harming the self harms part of that relationship). How then do we avoid the slippery slope? If we slack once, is it all over?
No.
Yes, sin is destruction without cease, and left to our own devices, we’d no sooner discover a sin than descend into it. One bit of laziness would proliferate immediately and unchecked. By the grace of God, however, laziness and others sins are not irremediable. The pagan fix, enabled by the common mercy of God, can get rid of it for a time (but only for a time (Matt. 12:45)). The Divine fix, the Christian answer, gets rid of it more permanently, even if the battle is often give-and-take on this earth. The Christian’s answer to laziness is repentance: abhorrence of the sin in my past and avoidance in the present, the future. By God’s grace, this course brings true healing and true change, so that one laziness becomes not another, though in time the temptation appears again, requiring diligence in virtue and repentance (Mark 1:15).
God bless
Written by Colson Potter
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
