The Sluggard's Spiritual Sleep: Awakening to God's Call

Solomon possessed keen insight into human nature, and among the defective habits he condemns stands indolence—excessive fondness for ease and personal indulgence. The text, "How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? when wilt thou arise out of thy sleep?" speaks directly to the affairs of religion and the soul.

The deprecated state is one of spiritual "sleep"—a moral condition wherein the soul exhibits forgetfulness, ignorance, and insensibility. What a man becomes to the material world in corporeal sleep, he becomes to the spiritual world when governed by his natural depravity. Scripture testifies uniformly that human corruption operates through forgetfulness, ignorance, and insensibility, preserving an empire of abominable foulness over our species.

Crucially, these characteristics are not involuntary—they are willful. Not unfortunate, but guilty. They constitute heinous transgressions against God's law and authority, exposing the soul to dispensations of divine displeasure and wrath.

Yet the change desired is awakening and arising from sleep. Spiritual awakening reverses this condition entirely: forgetfulness yields to remembrance, ignorance to illumination, insensibility to sensitiveness and tenderness. Spiritual truth becomes discerned, contemplated, believed, and felt. This produces repentance, prayerfulness, love toward God, zeal for His glory, obedience to His commands, and diligent working out of salvation—constant aspirings toward eternal glory in God's presence.