Manufacturing Excuses

A man was reading the Bible. A friend came in and said, "What in the world are you doing?" The man did not ordinarily read the bible. He said, "I am looking for loopholes."

If half the ingenuity spent in finding excuses for not doing what we ought to do were exercised in finding means to do what ought to be done, the world would be a different place. As someone has said, "We are all manufacturers: making goods, making trouble, or making excuses.

One excuse is that the Ten Commandments are too negative, full of "dos and don'ts". But we forget that the basic thrust of the commandments is to lead us to life in abundance. The person who really wants to do something finds it easy, the other kind finds an excuse! An excuse is worse than a lie; for an excuse is often a guarded lie.

A sluggard says, “There’s a lion in the road, a fierce lion roaming the streets!” —Proverbs 26:13

This verse critiques laziness masked as fear, using the metaphor of a "lion in the streets" to illustrate how people exaggerate obstacles to avoid action.

Pastor Selvaraj Periannan