The Broken Fence

“I passed by the field of a sluggard… and behold, it was all overgrown with thorns; the ground was covered with nettles, and its stone wall was broken down. Then I saw and considered it; I looked and received instruction.” — Proverbs 24:30–32 (ESV)

Solomon goes for a walk in the countryside and stops at a run-down little farm. Weeds everywhere. Thistles up to your knee. And the thing he keeps staring at is the wall — a good stone wall, once, now collapsed into gaps a sheep could stroll through.

Here’s the part that should get your attention: the guy who owned it wasn’t a villain. He didn’t wreck the wall. He never did anything to it at all. That was the whole problem. He wasn’t lazy in a dramatic way; he was lazy in the quiet way — “I’ll fix it later,” “one more episode,” “it’s basically fine.” He always meant to get to it. He meant to pray. He meant to sort himself out. He meant to get serious about God. He just… never did. And a wall doesn’t need you to attack it to fall down. It only needs you to ignore it.

So let’s do what Solomon did — stand at the gap and actually look.

What was the wall made of? In your life, it’s built out of real, ordinary stones:

• What you were taught. Somebody — a parent, a grandparent, a youth leader — showed you what’s right, prayed with you, put the Bible in front of you. That training is a wall. And the first stone teens usually pull out is that one: you start by rolling your eyes at “the old-fashioned way,” and pretty soon it’s not just the style you’ve dropped, it’s the thing itself.
• Knowing what you actually believe. Not vibes — knowledge. “These are just my views and everyone’s got theirs” works fine for pizza toppings. It doesn’t work for truth. A faith that’s all feelings and no foundation holds up for a while, then folds the first time it’s pushed.
• Your habits. Praying at set times — morning and night, not just “whenever.” Spurgeon is blunt here: the people who say “I can pray anytime” are usually the people who pray at no time. Reading the Bible. Actually showing up to church midweek, not just Sunday. Fence off Sunday and leave the other six days wide open, and guess which days trouble walks in.
• Being openly a Christian. Not a secret one. The moment people know where you stand, that knowledge itself starts guarding you — you behave differently when you’re not hiding.
• The ability to say no. Spurgeon literally lists the stones: “No. No. No.” When friends push, a person with no wall just… can’t refuse. Firmness is a wall you build one refusal at a time.

Now walk through the gap and see what a broken wall costs.

First, you lose the line. When the wall’s up, you know exactly what’s yours and what belongs to the world. When it’s down, you genuinely can’t tell anymore — am I actually a Christian, or am I just no-man’s-land? The fence is what let you answer that with your eyes shut.

Second, you lose the protection. An open field is an open invitation. Every stray thought, every bad influence, every “why not” just wanders in and helps itself, because nothing’s stopping it. It’s pointless to pray “lead me not into temptation” and then walk straight toward it — God won’t lead you there, but you’re perfectly capable of leading yourself.

Third — and this is the scary one — you can lose the field itself. In hilly country the walls did more than mark a border; they held the soil in place, terrace by terrace. Wall goes, and the next hard rain washes the ground away until there’s nothing left but bare rock. Drift long enough and it’s not just your habits that go — it’s your appetite for any of it. You end up unable to care.

So Solomon’s last move is to shake the sleeper awake, and that’s mine too. You don’t have to burn anything down to lose everything. You just have to keep meaning to fix it later. If a stone’s already out of your wall — a prayer habit you dropped, a line you used to hold — you don’t need a dramatic comeback. You need to pick the stone up and put it back. Today.

Notice what God said about a man he was protecting: “Have you not put a hedge around him?” (Job 1:10). Even the devil could see the wall. Build yours high enough that he notices.

One thing to do this week: find the one stone that’s out — the prayer you stopped praying, the “no” you stopped saying, the church night you stopped going to — and put it back. Just that one. That’s how a wall gets rebuilt: not all at once, one stone at a time.