Sloth & the 7 Deadly Sins | Vices & Virtues

Thanks for being here.
We, as we divided these out,
we were looking at,
with seven,
quote, unquote, deadly sins, probably doing two, two, two, and one.
And so we ended up,
I think, kind of intentionally putting sloth as the last one.
And there’s a couple of reasons for that.
But I think,
first of all,
most of the other seven deadly sins are fairly self-explanatory.
In anger,
kind of get lost,
you kind of have a sense of what those things are.
You know,
when it comes to sloth,
it is a little bit of a question mark.
I mean,
traditionally it gets translated as lazy,
but it is far more nuanced,
and I think far bigger than that.
And so we thought maybe this conversation had the most room,
both for the unexpected
and maybe a little bit the unknown and a little chance to branch off.
So this may not,
we may go quicker.
It may just be that this is a shorter session,
and then next week we offer some kind of closing ideas,
but the sin of sloth is very interesting.
In Greek,
it’s called acedia.
And acedia literally means lack of care or lack of concern.
And acedia was that term given by the monks to moments or seasons where a person lacked care.
They didn’t care.
And it sometimes manifested itself in the way they did their work.
It sometimes manifested itself in the way that they did,
you know, grooming,
or in skipping the meal or not going to Vespers or whatever.
But it was this idea that we have seasons both spiritually and therefore physically
where we find it difficult to engage our life.
And the monks put that under this heading of acedia or how we’ve translated sloth.
And I think we’ll make the case tonight that sloth is a rather unfortunate,
I think sloth is a very narrow definition of what they were trying to say.
But I think many of us as Americans,
Michael and I have had this conversation this week,
I mean, America, you know, we treasure industriousness,
busyness,
we love, you know,
pick yourself up, go to work.
That’s kind of our narrative.
We love that stuff.
And so your average person is not going to handle the idea very receptively that they’re lazy.
If you ask people, are you lazy?
Very few people are going to tell you yes.
Most people are going to say no,
not at all.
And they’d be telling the truth.
However,
I think as I hope as you’ll discover the way that we interpret sloth,
it turns out it might land on more people than they would expect.
Well, so one of the things that we talked about this week was, you know,
two quick things, one being of all of the seven deadly sins,
you know, we’ve already mentioned some of these
are more tenuously related to scripture than others,
right?
I mean, clearly,
you can make a very strong scriptural case for pride as an example.
But sloth,
you’re going to have some passages in,
say, Ecclesiastes, where you have some comments about, you know,
all things are vanity,
right?
And in the midst of those comments,
you know, maybe you could work your way towards acedia.
But realistically,
this particular sin makes the most sense if you want to look for its foundation
in the monk experience.
And they call the acedia the noon day demon.
And I think an illustration of it helps.
So the idea is midday,
it is prior to the end meal of the day,
you’re in that period of the day where your energy wanes,
and you are in a position of trying to figure out what to do with yourself for three or four hours.
And that task of praying and self-reflection and what feels like not productive spiritual work
goes from being a gift to being a chore.
Your cell goes from being a place of freedom to a prison,
a place of restriction.
And the idea was that the monks noticed this pattern where the mind began to turn with better solutions.
Like, why would I sit here and pray?
I mean, I should go and start working in the garden so that we’ve got food tonight.
Or, you know, I should go visit some people who are sick at home.
At least then someone would see someone from the church,
right?
I mean, maybe I can make some good this afternoon.
And that the monk would follow down this line of thought until finally they became so restless
that they couldn’t stay anymore and continue with the spiritual work.
And they would be so busy that they would be no spiritually good for anyone.
And, you know, that is where I think the Acedia starts to make sense,
is when you realize that folks who were applying all of their physical and spiritual energy
towards this idea of connecting with God found that there were moments in the day,
and I think that’s extrapolated,
Clint, to your point, moments in life,
seasons of life, where that became unbearably difficult.
And for them,
the idea of maturing was that a monk was able to live beyond that noonday demon,
that you could learn,
you could habituate yourself to trust God to be with you,
even in the midst and through that restlessness.
Yeah, we might think of something like laziness or sloth as somewhat trivial.
I want to just read you.
We mentioned this man of Agris who is, we think,
the originator of the idea of the seven deadly sins.
So this is something he writes,
and this is from the fourth century,
which I think is fascinating.
The demon of Acedia, the noonday demon,
is the most oppressive of all the demons.
He attacks the monk about the fourth hour, 10 a.m.,
and besieges his soul until about the eighth hour,
2 p.m.
First of all, he makes it appear as the sun moves slowly,
or not at all,
and the day seems to be 50 hours long.
Then he compels the monk to look constantly toward the window,
to move from his cell,
to watch the sun,
to see how far it is from the ninth hour,
this way and that way.
And further,
he instills in him a dislike for the state of his life, for his labor,
for the idea that love has disappeared from his brothers,
that the place he’s in is the wrong place.
He leads him on to a desire for other places where he can easily
find wherewithal to meet his needs and purpose,
a trade that is easier,
more productive.
No other demon follows immediately after this one.
A state of peace and joy ensues the soul who gives in
to sloth.
So I think when we understand it that way,
when we get that this is describing not just
I don’t feel like doing my work,
but a sense of listlessness,
a sense of melancholy,
a sort of zinedness,
a kind of bitterness,
everything.
One of the authors points out that the monks who
struggled with this always loved the idea of some other monastery.
Oh, at the other monastery,
the food is better,
the work is better,
the teachers are better,
they have a better this.
So it is that thing that simultaneously withdraws from my own reality while I fantasize about a reality.
And it is that is the the core of a cedia is that it removes from us a contentedness
and an engagement with where we are and to some extent with who we are and replaces it with a kind of emptiness,
a kind of longing.
And that I think is a very modern experience.
I mean this is an ancient idea.
But I can’t imagine that most of us haven’t had moments of wanting to just disconnect
and being literally what you know,
what are the phrases sick and tired of our day to day routine.
There’s a interesting book called the noon day demon.
Some of you may know the name Kathleen
Norris.
She writes about her sort of lifelong battle with a cedia and it’s really interesting
book.
But if you have struggled with this,
then I think this quote will mean something to you.
This is from Norris.
The most difficult thing about our days is that they must be repeated.
And if that hits you,
if that makes sense to you,
you likely have bumped in to a cedia.
You likely have been
tempted by this idea of melancholy,
this sort of resignedness and a kind of desire to just
disconnect from everything, but not in a healthy way.
There are healthy ways to disconnect.
A cedia is not one of them.
A cedia leads us away from everything that would lead us to fullness and
lead us to life.
I find I’ve been really engaged in this stuff.
I find this amazingly contemporary
yes,
lust,
anger, pride, those are all with us.
This is in some ways, I think,
very, very familiar to most of us in American society.
I think this is where,
Quinn, we begin to see the divergence
from that word sloth.
And I wonder if you’ve seen it,
right?
Because when we think of sloth,
I do think we think of the person who’s laying on the couch eating Lay’s potato chips that we get
this idea of slobbery almost.
But a cedia can be a busy person.
You know that person who’s
flitting around doing stuff all the time so that they never engage with the deeper thing.
In other words,
a cedia is a kind of soul restlessness,
which exists for the sake of protecting the soul
from dealing with its deeper subject.
And so if you’re willing to frame it that way,
now we move away from this idea of the person laying on the couch that we’re all kind of disgusted at the idea of.
And we realize that we all process our own kinds of restlessness in our own ways.
And if we’re willing to find that as an entry point to the conversation of a cedia,
then we discover along that journey that there may be far more impact in our life than what we would first think.
Right. The core of that is avoidance.
The common denominator in both busyness and listlessness is avoidance.
It’s a desire to get away from our life,
our experience, our feelings.
And so
a couple of interesting quotes here.
Sloth often hides behind busyness.
It is not mere laziness.
It is indifference.
Acedia’s great temptations are escapism and despair.
And again, this is from an ancient author, Pascal.
It is a monstrous thing to see one in the same heart at once so sensitive
to minor things and so strangely insensitive to greater ones.
And then the author follows
that up by saying sloth is often expressed not as a lazy attitude,
but zeal over petty matters.
So again, the lazy person who can’t engage with important things becomes obsessed with little
trivial ones because they hide from themselves in that.
And one of the key indicators of sloth
is a sort of incessant complaining.
When we are always picking about little stuff,
it can be a sign that we are trying to hide from weightier matters internally.
And, you know, I just think you imagine this community of monks that are studying and living together and you
think to yourself, well, they don’t have,
I mean, laziness isn’t probably a problem.
Well,
maybe or maybe not.
I’m sure there were lazy monks,
but the idea of being forlorn,
the idea of giving up, the idea of being numb to your life,
I think they probably bumped into that fairly often.
And I think that’s the core of this experience.
Apathy is a word that comes up a lot.
The idea that I know I should care about this,
but I just don’t want.
So in Kierkegaard said summa samarum
is the theme of the CDF and that translates.
I do not care at all.
And one of Norris’s quote,
and a little bit of language here, sorry, but said,
you know, the pain is there.
You know what you should do and you can’t rouse yourself to give a damn.
And again, that’s the acedia experience.
It’s not an unawareness.
It’s not ignorance.
It’s unwillingness.
I don’t want to deal with that.
I just,
I’m too tired.
I don’t care.
I’m going to disconnect and ignore it.
And ignore ourselves as well.
Yeah. And so we’ve said this before,
and I think other conversations,
we’ve tried to tease out how some of these sins play into each other or how one might lead to
another, how they become this intermeshed kind of network.
I think acedia is particularly
well-placed for us to see that interconnectedness.
So bear with me for a second.
Let’s say that your starting place is anger and you begin with anger and you find that fire burning and you need
to find a way beyond it,
but you’re unable to face it.
You’re unable to find reconciliation.
You’re unable to find the kind of forgiveness from it.
So one sole strategy that we may not be aware that
we use is to compartmentalize it,
to sort of put it in a little container and lock it and throw the
key and try to forget it.
And what does that result in?
That results in us beginning to lose
care for that part of our soul.
And then acedia has this kind of viral growth where it slowly
takes ground until we find ourselves not just numb in that relationship with the person that
inspired the anger, but now we find that numbness to exist in any other area of our life.
And I think I find that to be particularly compelling with anger.
I think it’s also true of envy.
If you’ve ever been in a position where just over time envy eats away,
there comes a point where we just become
numb to that experience.
And when someone asks,
“Well, how do you feel?” I don’t know.
There’s nothing there.
That’s a sign that acedia has very much taken root,
and it’s now starting to rule the
day.
I think there are,
there is some helpful analogies that will occasionally have folks come
in who very much feel caught in a rut and are trying to find the way out of that.
There’s a and every challenge seems insurmountable,
no matter the size.
And if you’ve ever known someone
who finds themselves far down that journey,
that becomes physical.
I can’t shower.
I can’t feed myself.
That soul heaviness has a kind of physical toll that can be seen if allowed for it to grow.
And I think that there’s clearly interplays there with mental health,
which would be a step even
beyond this conversation.
But I think acedia does live in a really kind of human way.
When we no longer have agency because of this kind of numbness,
I think it is an advanced form of what we’re talking about.
Yeah.
Norris calls that a refusal of repetition.
And it’s very interesting.
I heard this.
Clearly, the COVID experience stressed us.
It was new, it was different, it was unknown.
I don’t know how many people I had conversations with who said things like,
I realized I hadn’t
showered in four days.
You know, I didn’t have to get up and go to work.
I didn’t, I forget, I was forgetting to brush my teeth.
I would just that,
that sort of lack of self-care from the midst of that,
where Norris talks about the idea that the thing you always do,
you don’t want to do.
You can’t bring yourself to do it.
There is a, and I think Michael used the right word,
there is a numbness to acedia.
And if you’ve ever been through it,
or know somebody closely who’s gone through depression,
that’s what they describe as the worst part.
It’s not feeling bad that depressed people fear,
it’s feeling nothing.
It’s the idea of,
there’s, I don’t have a feeling, you know,
this is the explanation for,
that’s given for things like the people who cut themselves.
Because at least it is destructive,
but at least it’s a feeling.
At least it causes some feeling
that breaks them temporarily from the numbness,
which is the thing they fear the most.
The thing that is most frightening is to feel nothing.
So, acedia is that kind of temptation toward nothingness.
And it’s really interesting, you know,
a couple of the authors talk about it being a middle,
Willamond talks about it being a middle sin,
you know, the middle of the day,
and then the middle of life.
And there’s, I can’t remember which author,
it might be the,
it might be DeYoung,
Michael, maybe you remember, had this fascinating section about in our youth,
our sins are sort of over-connecting.
We are too outward.
But as we age,
our sins tend to be withdrawal.
We cut people out.
We limit people.
We break relationships.
We don’t engage.
And very interesting that
this idea of acedia has not only a season during our day,
but it may have a sort of seasonality in
our life cycle as well,
which I thought was a very interesting idea.
And as a guy who hopefully somewhere around middle,
I think I can appreciate what they’re saying.
You know, it is a time where withdrawal becomes a temptation.
Yeah, we talked about this this week.
I think that’s true, this idea of middle life and some of those seasons.
I do think we live in a culture
that has in some ways, systematized restlessness.
Let me explain what I mean by that.
The consumer experience,
you know, one of my hobbies is electronics,
is built around restlessness.
I mean, my processor is not the newest one,
right?
There’s a new one every 12 months.
And so you get a new phone every year so that you can stay up with that trend.
There’s a kind of
constant nature to that.
I know we’ve mentioned this too in some of the other conversations,
but I think it is easy to numb ourselves with lots of tools.
That may look like your hobby,
a way in which you’ve told yourself,
“Well, I do this because I enjoy it.” But while you’re doing
it, you have no joy.
Well,
that thing now stands in a way to create this kind of constancy in your
life.
But when we’re numb to our experience in life,
we’ve now used a thing to try to settle
this restlessness.
I know many people in a younger generation,
I think, you know, especially that millennial generation that’s sort of coming into a moment where they have some resources.
And you know how often millennials move?
I mean, and not just like move to the next town.
I mean, like move states.
You know, where have you lived?
And I’m not talking military families.
I’m just talking about, you know, “Oh, yeah, I got this camper and for three years I drove around the
country and I took cool pictures.” I’m not down on that.
There’s nothing wrong with it.
But when you keep seeking new experiences to try to quell that sense of listlessness,
one finds oneself in a position of trying to solve a problem with the wrong tool.
Because one doesn’t find an
answer by accumulation of any kind,
the accumulation of experience or consumer good.
One’s going to find the process forward by settling back in to the restlessness and finding that in the midst of
the storm is God.
That the one who promised to not leave us is the one who remains there.
Now, that is easily said.
But to anyone who has made that choice to look restlessness full in the face,
that is a, I think demon is the right word.
It’s a terrifying visage because it calls us to reach
for a kind of courage that I’m not sure that we take,
that we have an awareness of how deep it goes.
That’s a substantial stand.
Yeah.
Remember the,
I don’t know how many of you are interested
in the book of revelation,
but you might remember there’s a part in the book of revelation where
Jesus is writing to the churches and to one of the churches, he writes,
I’m going to spit you
out of my mouth.
You remember why Luke warm,
right?
He criticized them.
They’re not cold.
They’re not refreshing.
They’re not warm.
They’re not medicinal and, and, you know,
cleansing.
They’re not, they’re, they’re lukewarm.
Anybody ever probably on accident had a drink lukewarm water,
right?
There’s nothing in it.
There’s, there’s not, it is, this is, this is acedia.
And so the, the balance for acedia is to some extent what you would think the word is diligence.
And that’s a word that translates work effort.
And it’s not busyness.
It is to do real work.
It is the other side of the coin to faith.
You know, we in the reform church,
we’ve had lots of battles historically about faith and works,
but what we’ve always said is that they both matter.
We’ve argued about which one is primary and we’ve come down on the side of faith,
but we’ve never said, at least we’ve never intended to say that work doesn’t matter,
that engaging with life,
which is a better way to talk about work is important.
And so the opposite or the antidote
of sloth is to be engaged.
And in moments where that’s difficult,
obviously that takes discipline
in a moment where all you want to do is nothing because everything is overwhelming.
The idea of even the smallest task,
but to put oneself forward,
particularly in tasks of service.
This was one of the things the monks did in those moments of acedia,
to serve a neighbor,
to care for a hurting person,
to give your energy to someone in need of it was to engage and to push
back on that numbness,
to push back on that lethargy.
There’s a wonderful quote.
And I think if you were a monk and you were feeling slothful,
I don’t know that you would love to hear this,
but there was a guy named Abba Moses,
or it probably wasn’t named Abba Moses.
He was called Abba Moses.
And what he would counsel young monks who were battling acedia,
go sit in your cell,
which is what they call their room,
and your cell will teach you everything you need to know.
Which, again,
if the last thing in the world you can think of is being trapped in that place and
all you want to do is escape,
that probably doesn’t sound like good advice.
But what he meant was stay the course,
listen,
work through your prayers,
do your tasks,
stay engaged with your daily life,
and your cell,
your ritual, your pattern, your routine will teach you what you need to know.
It will show you your restlessness and it will show you a way through your restlessness.
And it’s one of those answers that there’s tremendous wisdom in and also sounds not very helpful.
I would love to have listened in to some of those conversations because I’m sure
they went back there and thought,
boy,
Abba Moses, he doesn’t know anything.
But the way through
lethargy does involve effort.
It is to engage because the pull,
the weight of acedia is toward disengagement.
So to engage even with something small,
even with something that seems trivial.
I’m going to write a card.
I’m going to mail a postcard to my neighbor.
If that’s all one
could bring themselves to,
it would still be a step of trying to stay connected with a deeper spiritual life.
And that is not an easy path.
Acedia, in some ways,
is I think the monks were
most fearful of it in many ways.
Lots of lust,
pride.
But the idea of this is a long dark valley.
And I think it was feared for a reason.
So two quick things that connect to that.
The first, and I want to be clear that this is really illustrative.
I don’t mean it to be a
one-to-one relationship,
but I once read a book that was on the topic of willpower.
But it was from a psychologist perspective.
So they weren’t thinking spiritually.
But this psychologist was looking at
different historical examples where people essentially survived remarkable events for no discernible human reason.
And one of them was a story of a British explorer who was going through sub-Saharan Africa.
And nearly everyone in the troop died of some version of fever or some
illness that they caught,
except for this particular explorer.
And when I say nearly everyone,
that includes all of their guides who were well traveled in that region.
And the psychologist noted that in this person’s memoir,
they noted that to their dying day,
they believed that the
things that saved them on that adventure was the fact that every day they shaved.
They shaved their face.
And they said that sounds ridiculous,
but there is some research that suggests the mere
action of doing a thing consistently,
regardless of how easy or difficult it is,
has a way of
building into the human the next step,
the next path forward.
And once again, not suggesting that that’s a one-to-one example.
I am suggesting that that’s a good illustration,
I think, of the spiritual life.
Because there are some days when the prayer you offer or the service you do
has far less to do with an overflowing abundant heart or eloquent words than it does simply
showing up and being present to a God that you trust is with you,
even in the midst of that
sense of numbness or distance.
And that’s the next thing I wanted to share to your point here, Clint,
I think one of the reasons why it was so feared is it’s like water and limestone,
right?
It’s not what happens today that you’re worried about.
But what about in a hundred years or a
thousand years?
Obviously, that’s not a human lifetime.
But what happens when acedia wreaks
its damage in a quarter of one’s life?
What happens when that numbness affects your relationships?
It affects the people closest to you.
It affects the choices that you make.
As it goes,
it has a kind of power to not only destabilize our souls,
but it has a building momentum that one day we
might wake up and truly be apathetic.
That we could stare both great goodness and great evil
in the face and our soul and our souls be still.
That’s terrifying,
obviously.
But the problem with
acedia is that one doesn’t discernibly see the journey leading there.
Nobody willingly gets on that train,
but it’s the choice today and tomorrow and the next day it’s those choices that ultimately result in that.
The monks lived a kind of controlled life that may be hard for us to imagine,
right?
There were lots of things that were handled.
They weren’t paying for a mortgage and
they weren’t trying to figure out how many of their kids they could fit in the house for Christmas.
That wasn’t their problem.
And because of their special vocation,
they were able to see,
I think, this sin in a particularly poignant way to be dangerous because they had a view to the long term.
And if we’re wise enough to hear it,
I think it is incredibly convicting.
Yeah, I think to try and move to some place of closure,
the interesting thing, again, historically about acedia is that you can take two of those people and what is a way forward
for one of them,
which is to engage in their tasks and stay connected to their schedule and
their responsibilities,
is for the other one,
the very thing they’re hiding behind.
They’re using the gardening as a way not to
face what’s going on internally.
They’re going through prayers.
They’re doing,
it looks like they’re the furthest thing from slothful,
but they’re not caring for themselves internally.
And, you know, Mother Teresa said there are no great tasks.
There are only small tasks done with great love.
And when we find ourselves in those moments of acedia,
I think,
you know, when we find ourselves wanting to shrink back from what we need to do,
I think there is a path forward in that to say,
okay, I need to make dinner tonight.
Instead of that being the chore that takes energy from me,
it’s an opportunity to serve.
I can,
I get to,
if my girls watch this,
they’ll laugh because in our house,
nobody had to do anything.
We, we got to,
right?
You don’t have to clean your room.
You get to clean your room because you have a room.
So that’s a privilege.
And when you reframe something,
even that simply, I have to make dinner.
No, I get to make dinner for my family
with food that I have in my cupboard in a home that has a kitchen in it.
Right?
Even, even something as small as that begins to allow you the opportunity to find meaning
in what you’re doing,
to find a measure of service in what you’re doing.
Now, if on the other hand,
you are very busy,
but that busyness rarely brings you joy.
It may be a sign that acedia is working from the other end in your own heart,
that it’s distracting you so that you don’t face what may be happening internally.
And I think the,
both the tricky and fascinating thing about this thing called acedia is the range
of which it can find us on both ends of our life.
I think more commonly experience is withdrawal.
I think most of us have probably battled those moments where we just didn’t care.
We just had enough.
But surprisingly, acedia can take that other form of saying,
I know if I stay busy enough,
I won’t have to stop long enough to think about the thing I’m not trying to think about,
or I’m trying not to think about.
And, you know,
again,
we probably not a few heads there as well.
So very fascinating.
And I think very helpful look at something that seems ancient,
but is surprisingly contemporary in my own experience and in my observation of others.
And I think those who have taken their time to wrestle with it have done us a great service
and given us opportunity to really think through a thing that turns out is still around.
One last comment.
I think reflecting back on the arc of this conversation,
we began with this idea.
Here’s another great sin.
And if at any point,
as you’ve reflected on this sin,
it struck you that this sin is it you may have asked,
is this really a sin or is this just lost potential?
Right?
Is this just someone not achieving the best that they could be?
That doesn’t really if we despair and we allow despair to become the note that our soul plays,
then we fundamentally
are unable to receive the good news that God has provided all that we need in Jesus Christ.
A Christian cannot despair forever,
because then we have not heard the good news.
A Christian cannot live only in the grave.
We believe in Easter and resurrection.
So it becomes a sin against the almighty God when we settle for soul weariness.
This is where it gets incredibly challenging.
It’s not just a sin against one’s potentiality.
It’s actually a sin against the one who makes it possible for you in Christ to be a new creation,
to use Paul’s language.
And so I think the way forward there is actually positive and not
negative.
This isn’t just all about,
you know, don’t be soul weary.
It’s if we practice diligence,
we can one day experience what it looks like and feels like to live in the soul confidence
that God is enough.
Isn’t that a beautiful vision?
Can we imagine waking up every day full,
like the triune God is full.
Father, Son, Spirit, they don’t need to add to their
relationship to be full.
But what if we woke up with that kind of confidence in the one who made us?
That is a thing that most of us could only dream of.
And that’s, I think, the fruit of diligence.
That’s the benefit of tilling the soul and rooting out acedia because it enables us to
see God as God is, as provider,
as caregiver, as mother, as lover, as all these things that we would love to
appreciate the promises of scripture,
but that we can’t receive because we flatlined our
experience of God.
In other words, I just wanted to end my part by saying,
I think that this is not chiefly a conversation of what ails us.
I think it’s an invitation to the kind of life
that God desires for us.
And if we can hear that,
I think it moves us forward in a helpful way.
I think of all the seven deadly sins,
this is the one that seems most like we are victims of it
and not perpetrators of it.
I mean,
you know, the other sins seem like things we do.
This seems like a thing that happens to us.
And so to Michael’s point,
it may seem like a stretch
to call this a sin,
but if one gives in to acedia,
it delivers us to a place where we simply don’t
care if something is good or bad.
Even if we know the difference,
we just don’t care.
And that
is essentially the definition of evil.
I don’t mean the person who is struggling with acedia
is evil.
I mean, to look upon what God wants for the world and to look upon brokenness in the world
and say, it makes no difference to me.
It just doesn’t matter.
That is sinful.
That is broken.
And that is to embrace exactly the wrong path rather than the path of Christ.
And I think it’s
in that that we see this language of being a sin and are able to take it seriously.
It’s less
that we commit this thing.
It’s more that this thing leads us to a place that is
ungodly and therefore leads us deeper into sin.
Thanks for your time.
Next week we’ll be together again, our last session,
we will be looking at, it’s poem Sunday,
we’ll kind of be looking at an
overview, some thoughts about the role of the seven deadly sins in the life of the modern Christian,
particularly the Reformed Christian and how it fits, what we learn.
It’ll be kind of a
wrap-up session.
Hope you can be with us.
Thanks again to those who brought food and appreciate
you being here tonight.
Thanks everyone