The Devil Makes Us Lazy

I had some of the most outstanding experiences of my early Christian life in this realm when I was in business. I often found myself laboring under a peculiar lethargy that made work difficult. Though I fought it first as laziness, and then as heaviness, due perhaps to unsuitable diet, still I did not get the relief that I thought I should. It was a puzzle and a burden to myself, for when I most needed to be awake, I was often sleepy; and when I needed rest and tried to get it, the activity of my brain was abnormal. At other times I was neither tired nor spiritless, but there would come upon me a sense of awful pressure—a stifling atmospherical something that depressed me, confused me, and slowed up activity. “Ah! the weather!” Yes, the weather is blamed for a lot that the devil does (Ephesians 2:2; Mark 4:39). I hoped that the morrow would bring relief, but if it did, it was only temporary. Slowly but surely the oppression would come, and the heaviness would gather over me. I knew a certain amount of truth about the devil, but it never occurred to me that he had touched me without my knowing it.

Think of it! I could generally see where he had someone else in his toils, gaining on them and deceiving them; but as for me, I was safe enough, for did I not often mention him in my prayer? One day, however, after a spell of this sluggishness and oppression, I read somewhere about a spirit of sloth and slumber. “Then,” said I to myself, “there are spirits that lull us to sleep, that dull our senses, arrest our activities, and oppose the normal operations of life!” I jumped to my feet as one awakened from a half-dazed state and cried, “I am having no more of this! This is of the devil, and in the name of the Lord Jesus, Who conquered him at Calvary, I resist these spirits and their power over me.” The effect was most striking. Immediately I was different. The deception had been unveiled, the needed resistance had been given me from the Lord, and through Him, through faith in His name, the spell of wicked spirits upon me was broken.

I remember how wonderfully clear my mind became. I did better work and in less time, so that my foreman commented on it. Hundreds of times since then I have done the same thing in meeting new assaults. I have also witnessed striking deliverances in the lives of some of God’s people who have been subjected to the most desperate and distressing cases of Christian conflict imaginable.