MWUTT 53: Sloth: The Sin You Disguise as Rest

You may think sloth means doing nothing, but sloth can hide inside a busy life. It can look like answering emails, checking off small tasks, and putting off the responsibility God has actually given you. And because it feels productive or even restful, you may not see how it slowly weakens your ability to serve God and the people who depend on you. So, how do you know when rest has quietly turned into sloth? Welcome to Men Who Understood the Times.

Today we're continuing with our discussion of the seven deadly sins, and we've brought Sam in as a personal trainer and an online nutrition coach to talk to us about sloth and gluttony. So Zach, first, what is sloth? And then why is this one of the seven deadly sins?

So let's define sloth first. It's not just simply laziness, which might be how, uh, most people think about that. But we can be even, like, more specific when we talk about sloth. It, it's... Specifically, sloth is the neglect of your known responsibilities. And sometimes that can look like laziness, you're just lying on the couch instead of doing what you s- you're supposed to. It could also look like procrastination. I'm doing 100 other things and I'm looking very busy, I'm looking very, uh, efficient, like I, I'm do- like I'm doing stuff, but you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing. So that's also sloth in a way. Uh, you can be a, a busy body. You're not doing what you're supposed to do. And so sloth, it's, it's around a lot of places, uh, especially in our, our culture today, as we're gonna talk about in a little bit. There's a lot of distractions in our culture, and there's a lot of ways you can neglect your responsibilities. James says in chapter four of his epistle, "If anyone then knows the good they ought to do and doesn't do it, it is sin for them." Right? So neglecting your responsibilities. And, you know, we all have responsibilities of work, we have responsibilities of our, of our family, of, of taking care of your own body. So when you neglect those things, you're being slothful. And neglecting responsibilities is always a dangerous thing. We don't want to neglect our family. It would be a bad thing to neglect the responsibilities you have to your family. Uh, neglecting y- your own body, uh, you're gonna become unhealthy, you're gonna become unfit. And of course, neglecting your work by becoming a busy body and doing anything else. Paul writes in 2 Thessalonians, "We hear that some among you are idle and disruptive. They are not busy, they are busybodies. We command such people and urge them in Lor- the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and earn the food they eat. As for you, brothers and sisters, never tire of doing what is good." All these different ways of slothfulness, whether it's simple laziness or neglecting responsibilities by doing something else, it's, it's all sin in the end. And the title of this episode is, it's the Sin That You Disguise as Rest. The purpose of rest, physical rest, is to prepare us to obey God and to live a life of service. When your rest becomes a comfort trap that you are, are really held captive by, it's, it's not g- it's not a good rest anymore, it's a, it's a sinful rest, it's a, a slothful rest. Sloth is deadly because when it becomes habitual, we, we neglect our responsibilities, it really will weaken our love for God, our love for neighbor, and, and our ability to serve them will also be diminished.

So I was gonna quote that same passage from 2 Thessalonians 3, Zach, and, and then talk about, too, how, you know, we don't wanna be busybodies, you know, like Gladys Kravitz. And I have... I know neither one of you have any idea who that is. Your parents do, and your grandparents do, 'cause that's how old I am. She's from, a busybody from Bewitched. So it's, it's so old it was black and white. But Sam, if you wanna talk about that too, about this danger of the sin of being a slothful person.