Posted on 12/25/2021 10:32:19 PM PST by Pilgrim's Progress
“The slothful man saith, There is a lion in the way; a lion is in the streets” (Proverbs 26:13).
It's easy to be lazy. Water always takes the easiest route down the Hill, and it is just extremely easy to go through life avoiding obstacles and avoiding climbing anything or going through something, and slothfulness will always give you the excuse you need to just take the easier route.
“The slothful man roasteth not that which he took in hunting: but the substance of a diligent man is precious” (Proverbs 12:27).
One of the marks of a slothful man is that he is wasteful. The Bible says that we are to “redeem the time because the days are evil” (Ephesians 5:16). One of the things I am not looking forward to at the Judgment Seat of Christ is finding just how much time I’ve wasted.
Anything we do, whether it be pleasure reading or engaging in our favorite hobby; can turn out to be a major timewaster. Thirty minutes is not hard to blow, and an hour is not hard to blow. And, if we're not careful that hour bleeds into 2 and 3 and 4 hours, and sometimes the whole day is shot. We are called to redeem the time and one of the things, and it is the mark of a sluggard, is wastefulness of time.
One man that was a master at redeeming the time was Dr. Peter S. Ruckman. Okay, there are things about his personality that are not very palatable too many, but you know what, there are things about me that I don’t like too well. Okay, that’s out of the way. Students of his that knew him intimately say that they had never known anybody who redeemed time like he did. The guy would leave a classroom at 10 minutes to 7:00 and he would walk the 100 yards to his office, sit down at a typewriter, and start writing. He would then get up after 10 minutes and walk back up the Hill to teach another hour and do the same thing in the 8:00 o'clock hour the 8:00 o'clock hour, in the 9:00 o'clock hour, throughout the day. He truly redeemed the time.
The fact of the matter is, if left to ourselves, we can waste a lot of precious time. It would help if you keep a Bible around, so that if you have some downtime at work, or you get waylaid in traffic or some such thing where you can do something with the scripture on CD while you're sitting doing nothing, as opposed to listening to the inane talking heads on the radio. If you can, use the time to do something. First of all, with the scripture; and, second of all with prayer. Now, this just might be me, but I’m not sure if playing solitaire on your I-Phone is redeeming the time, or not. I suspect that it is not.
Now, I have to admit to having had very moderate success with praying all that I should while in the car. But when you stop and consider that you can pray with your eyes wide open, fully alert in traffic while driving. And yet I bet if most of us look back on this week most of us have not done that much praying. It takes discipline to redeem the time. It takes discipline not to be wasteful of our God-given time, but my point simply is that one of the marks of our generation, if not just corrupt mankind in general, is the proclivity to just be wasteful about stuff. I am not looking forward to the Judgment Seat of Christ in this area of my life.
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I have found that doing things that are good for me is difficult and takes effort.
It takes no effort to waste time, to not eat well, to not clean up, to not exercise., etc.
We seem to have a built in natural tendency towards self-destructive behavior.
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