The Slothful Gardener
Is day has come, his day is going, and he lets
the hours glide by to no purpose. Let me not
press too hardly upon anyone, but let me ask you all
to press as hardly as you can upon yourselves while you enquire each one of himself — ‘Am I employing the minutes as they fly?” This man had a vineyard, but he did not cultivate it; he had a field, but he did not till it. Do you use all your opportunities? I know we each one have some power to serve God; do euse it? If we are His children He has not put
one of us where we are of necessity useless. Somewhere we may shine by the light which He has given
us, though that light be only a farthing candle. Are we thus shining? Do we sow beside all waters?
/ Do we in the morning sow our seed, and in the evening still stretch out our hand? For if not, we are
e rebuked by the sweeping censure of Solomon, who x saith that the slothful is a “man void of understanding.” Having opportunities he did not use them, and next,
being bound to the performance of certain duties he did
not fulfil them. ‘When God appointed that every Israelite should have a piece of land, under that admirable system which made every Israelite a landowner, He meant that each man should possess his plot, not to let it lie waste, but to cultivate it. When God put Adam in the Garden of Eden it was not that
* Proverbs xxiv.
he should walk through the glades and watch the spontaneous luxuriance of the unfallen earth, but that he might dress it and keep it, and He had the same end in view when He allotted each Jew his piece of land; He meant that the holy soil should reach the utmost pdint-of fertility through the labour of those who owned it. ‘Fhus the possession of a field and a vineyard involved responsibilities upon the sluggard which he never fulfilled, and therefore he was void of understanding. What is your position? A father? A master? A servant? A minister? A teacher? Well, you have your farms and your vineyards in those particular spheres; but if you do not use those positions aright you will be void of understanding, because you neglect the end of your existence. You miss the high calling which your Maker has set before you.
The slothful farmer was unwise in these two respects, and in another also; for he had capacities which he did not employ. He could have tilled the field and cultivated the vineyard if he had chosen to do so. He was not a sickly man, who was forced to keep his bed, but he was a lazybones who was there of choice.
You are not asked to do in the service of God that which is utterly beyond you, for it is expected of us according to what we have, and not according to what we have not. The man of two talents is not required to bring in the interest of five, but he is expected to bring in the interest of two. Solomon’s slothful man was too idle to attempt tasks which were quite within his power. Many have a number of dormant faculties of which they are scarcely aware, and many more have abilities which they are using for themselves, and not for Him who created them. If God has given us any power to do good, pray let us do it, for this is a wicked, weary world. We should not even cover a glow-worm’s light in such a darkness as this. We should not keep back a syllable of divine truth in a world that is so full of falsehood and error. However feeble our voices, let us lift them up for the cause of truth and righteousness. Do not let us be void of understanding, because we have opportunities that we do not use, obligations that we do not fulfil, and capacities which we do not exercise.
As for a sluggard in soul matters, he is indeed void of understanding, for he trifles with matters which demand his most earnest heed. Hast thou never cultivated thy heart? Has the ploughshare never broken up the clods of thy soul? Has the seed of the Word never been sown in thee? or has it taken no root? Hast thou never watered the young plants of desire? Hast thou never sought to pull up the weeds of sin that grow in thy heart? Art thou still a piece of the bare common or wild heath? Poor soul! Thou canst trim thy body, and spend many a minute at the glass; dost thou not care for thy soul?
And yet all the while thy soul is uncombed, unwashed, unclad, a poor neglected thing! Oh, it should not be so! You take care of the worse part, and leave the better to perish through neglect. This is the height of folly! He that is a sluggard as to the vineyard of his heart is “void of understanding.” If I must be idle, let it be seen in my field and my garden, but not in my soul.
Look at the sluggard’s land: “I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the man void ‘The Slothful Gardener. TF
of understanding; and lo, it.was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof.” Land will produce something. Soil which is good enough to be made into a field and a vineyard must and will yield some fruit or other; and so you and I, in our hearts, and in the sphere God gives us to occupy, will be sure to produce something. We cannot live in this world as entire blanks; we shall either do good or do evil, as sure as we are alive. If you are idle in Christ’s work, you are active in the devil’s work. The sluggard by sleeping was doing more for the cultivation of thorns and nettles than he could have done by any other means. As a garden will either yield flowers or weeds, fruits or thistles, so something either good or evil will come out of our household, our class, or our congregation. If we do not produce a harvest of good wheat, by labouring for Christ, we shall sow tares to be bound up in bundles for the last dread burning.
If it be not farmed for God, the soul will yield its natural produce; and what is the natural produce of land if left to itself? What but thorns and nettles, or some other useless weeds? What is the natural produce of your heart and mine? What but sin and misery? What is the natural produce of your children if you leave them untrained for God? What but unholiness and vice? What is the natural produce of this great city if we leave its streets, and lanes, and alleys without the Gospel. What but crime and infamy? Some harvest there will be, and the sheaves will be the natural produce of the soil, which is sin, death, and corruption.
If we are slothful, the natural produce of our heart
and of our sphere will be most inconvenient and unpleasant to ourselves. Nobody can sleep on thorns, or make a pillow of nettles. No rest can come out of an idleness which lets ill alone, and does not by God’s Spirit strive to uproot evil. While you are sleeping, Satan will be sowing. If you withhold the seed of good, Satan will be lavish with the seed of evil, and from that evil will come anguish and regret for time, and, it may be, for eternity. The garden put into thy charge, if thou waste thy time in slumber, will reward thee with all that is noisome and painful! “Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.”
In many instances there will be a great deal of this evil produce; for a field and a vineyard will yield more thistles and nettles than a piece of ground that has never been reclaimed. If the land is good enough for a garden, it will present its owner with a fine crop of weeds if he only stays his hand. A choice bit of land fit for a vineyard of red wine will render such a profusion of nettles to the slothful that he shall rub his eyes with surprise. The man who might do most for God, if he were renewed, will bring forth most for Satan if he be let alone. The very region which would have glorified God most if the grace of God were there to convert its inhabitants, will be that out of which the vilest enemies of the Gospel will arise.
While we look upon the lazy man’s vineyard, let us also peep into the ungodly sluggard’s heart. He does not care about repentance and faith. To think about his soul, to be in earnest about eternity, is too much for him. He wants to take things easy, and have a little more folding of the arms to sleep. What is growing in his mind and character? In some of the spiritual sluggards you can see drunkenness, uncleanness, covetousness, anger, and pride, and all sorts of thistles and nettles; or where these ranker weeds do not appear, by reason of the restraint of pious connections, you find other sorts of sin. The heart cannot be altogether empty; either Christ or the devil will possess it. If you believe in Christ, I want to peep over the hedge into your heart also, if you are a sluggish Christian; for I fear that nettles and thistles are threatening you also. Did I not hear you sing the other day —
“Tis a point I long to know”?
That point will often be raised, for doubt is a seed which is sure to grow in lazy men’s minds. I do not remember reading in Wesley’s Diary a question about his own salvation. He was so busy in the harvest of the Master that it did not occur to him to distrust his God. Some Christians have little faith in consequence of their having never sown the grain of mustard-seed which they have received. If you do not sow your faith by using it, how can it grow? When a man lives by faith in Christ Jesus, and his faith exercises itself actively in the service of his Lord, it takes root, grows upward, and becomes strong, till it chokes his doubts. Some have sadly morbid forebodings; they are discontented, fretful, selfish, murmuring, and all because they are idle. These are the weeds that grow in sluggards’ gardens.
May I next ask you to look into your own house and home? It is a dreadful thing when a man does not cultivate the field of his own family. I recollect in my early days a man who used to walk out with me into the villages when I was preaching. I was glad of his company till I found out certain facts, and then I shook him off, and I believe he hooked on to somebody else, for he must needs be gadding abroad every evening of the week. He had many children, and these grew up to be wicked young men and women, and the reason was that the father, while he would be at this meeting and that, never tried to bring his own children to the Saviour. What is the use of zeal abroad if there is neglect at home? How sad to say, “My own vineyard have I not kept”! Have you never heard of one who said he did not teach his children the ways of God because he thought they were so young that it was very wrong to prejudice them, and he had rather leave them to choose their own religion when they grew older? One of his boys broke his arm, and while the surgeon was setting it the boy was swearing all the time. “Ah!” said the good doctor, “I told you what would happen. You were afraid to prejudice your boy in the right way, but the devil had no such qualms; he has prejudiced him the other way, and pretty strongly too.” It is our duty to prejudice our field in favour of corn, or it will soon be covered with thistles. Cultivate a child’s heart for good, or it will go wrong of itself, for it is already depraved by nature. Oh, that we were wise enough to think of this, and leave no little one to become a prey to the destroyer!
As it is with homes, so it is with schools. A gentleman had been an atheist for years, and in conversing with him, I found that he had been educated at one of our great public schools, and to that fact he traced his infidelity. He said that the boys
were stowed away on Sunday in a lofty gallery at the far end of a church, where they could scarcely hear a word that the clergyman said, but simply sat imprisoned in a place where it was dreadfully hot in summer and cold in winter. On Sundays there were prayers, and prayers, and prayers, but nothing that ever touched his heart; until he was so sick of prayers that he vowed if he once got out of the school he would have done with religion. This is a sad result, but a frequent one. Sunday-school teachers can make their classes so tiresome to the children that they will hate Sunday; can fritter away the time in school without bringing the lads and lasses to Christ, and so do more hurt than good. I have known Christian fathers who by their severity and want of tenderness have sown their family field with the thorns and thistles of hatred to religion instead of scattering the good seed of love to it. Look at the great field of the world. Do you see how it is overgrown with thorns and nettles? If an angel could take a survey of the whole race, what tears he would shed, if angels could weep! What a tangled mass of weeds the whole earth is! Yonder the field is scarlet with the poppy of popery, and over the hedge it is yellow with the wild mustard of Mahomedanism. Vast regions are smothered with the thistles of infidelity and idolatry. The world is full of cruelty, oppression, drunkenness, rebellion, uncleanness, misery. What the moon sees! What God’ssun sees! What scenes of horror! How far is all this to be attributed toa neglectful church? Nearly nineteen hundred years are gone, and the sluggard’s vineyard is but little improved! England has been touched with the spade, but I cannot say that it has been thoroughly weeded or ploughed yet. Across the ocean another field equally favoured knows well the ploughman, and yet the weeds are rank. Here and there a little good work has been done, but the vast mass of the world still lies a moorland never broken up, a waste, a howling wilderness. What has the church been doing all these years? She ceased after a few centuries to be a missionary church, and from that hour she almost ceased to be a living church. Whenever a church does not labour for the reclaiming of the desert, it becomes itself a waste. You shall not find on the roll of history that for a length of time any Christian community has flourished after it has become negligent of the outside world. I believe that if we are put into the Master’s vineyard, and will not take away the weeds, neither shall the vine flourish, nor shall the corn yield its increase.
We see, next, the little value of natural good intentions’; for this man, who left his field and vineyard to be overgrown, always meant to work hard one of these fine days. To do him justice, we must admit that he did not mean to sleep much longer, for he said, “Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep.” Only a little doze, and then he would tuck up his sleeves and show his muscle. Probably the worst people in the world are those who have the best intentions, but never carry them out. Unatded nature always will produce thorns and nettles, and nothing else. My soul, if it were not for grace, this is all thou wouldst have produced. Are you producing anythingelse? Then it is not nature, but the grace of God that makes you produce it. Those lips that now most charmingly sing the praises of God, would have been delighted with an idle ballad if the grace of God had not sanctified them, Your heart, that now cleaves to Christ, would have continued to cling to your idols — you know what they were — if it had not been for grace divine.
“Surely you do not object to my having a little more sleep?” says the sluggard. “You have waked me so soon. Ionlyask another little nap.’ “My dear man, it is far into the morning.” He answers, “It is rather late, I know; but it will not be much later if I take just another doze.” You wake him again, and tell him it is noon. He says, “It is the hottest part of the day; I daresay if I had been up I should have gone to the sofa and taken a little rest from the hot sun.” You knock at his door when it is almost evening, and then he cries, “It is of no use to get up now, for the day is almost over.’ You remind him of his overgrown field and weedy vineyard, and he answers, “Yes, I must get up, I know.” He shakes himself, and says, “I do not think it will matter much if I wait till the clock strikes. I will rest another minute or two.” He is glued to his bed, dead while he liveth, buried in his laziness.