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Is your life wise and sensible...making the very most of time? Spent in a good and godly purpose? Or is it vague and thoughtless and foolish? A life of godless purpose – think about that.
The Bible tells it like it is for Proverbs doesn’t beat around the bush. It challenges, “Whoever practices discipline is on the way to life.” So what is the undisciplined life on the way to?
In
Hebrews 12:1 NLT we read, “Let us strip off every weight that slows us
down especially the sin that so easily hinders our progress.”
One of the strongest words used in the Bible for sin is shachath, meaning loathsomeness, a condition of rot.
It is found in Genesis 6:12, and translated says, Sin blinds, deludes, deceives, defiles and then destroys.
Anyone who played football for Coach Erk Russell of Georgia Southern College has never forgotten the experience. This was a coach of firm, impeccable moral courage and willing to do just about anything to make his point.
One
day, both disgusted and discouraged by drug use among athletes he
arranged for a couple of good ole country boys to burst into a routine
team meeting and throw a writhing, hissing, six-foot-long rattlesnake
onto a table in front of the squad.
"Everyone
screamed and scattered," Russell recalls. "I told them, 'When cocaine
comes into a room, you're not nearly as apt to leave as when that
rattlesnake comes in. But they'll both kill you!'"
And sin is like that. When
it comes into your life it quite often comes to stay and grows bigger
and stronger and bites you and poisons you and destroys you over and
over again.
St. Augustine says there are three stages to sin:
1. Lord make me good, but not yet.
2. Lord make me good, but not entirely.
2. Lord make me good, but not entirely.
And finally...hopefully words prayed that have the shine of heaven in them.
3. Lord make me good.
My grandfather had a 500 acre farm in southwest Virginia. And every once in awhile the number of cows he had would be reduced by one.
How did it happen? Well, not by cattle rustlers; no one was stealing his cows. No, the culprit was the cow itself.
Every
once in awhile a very hungry cow would be tempted by the grass on the
other side of the fence. And if it came across a hole big enough to get
through, it would start nibbling on a tuft of green grass on the other
side. And slowly but surely it would eat its way along until it had gotten completely bewildered and lost.
And
that's what sin is like - one tuft of temptation after the other
leading us astray until we have nibbled our way into some real trouble.
You know about football's Super Bowl and baseball's World Series, but have you ever heard of The World Series of Weeds?
To
this competition come the top agricultural students in the United
States and Canada and there they compete to see who can identify weeds
when they are very tiny.
"When they get big anyone can identify them." says James Worthington of Western Kentucky University, president of the North Central Weed Science Society. "But when they get big enough that anybody can recognize them, it's too late to do anything about them."
So it is with some of the sins that can overwhelm any of us during our lives.
We
fail to identify them properly, either because we were unable or
unwilling, and by the time we wake up they are too big to easily do
anything about them. They are ingrained – we are addicted.
We often like to play word games to try to ameliorate the true meaning of sin.
what we might prefer to call an accident, God calls an abomination.
what we might prefer to call a defect, God calls a disease.
what we might prefer to call an error, God calls an enmity.
what we might prefer to call a liberty, God calls lawlessness
what we might prefer to call a trifle, God calls a tragedy. what we might prefer to call a mistake, God calls a madness.
what we might prefer to call a weakness, God calls willfulness.
what we might prefer to call a defect, God calls a disease.
what we might prefer to call an error, God calls an enmity.
what we might prefer to call a liberty, God calls lawlessness
what we might prefer to call a trifle, God calls a tragedy. what we might prefer to call a mistake, God calls a madness.
what we might prefer to call a weakness, God calls willfulness.
- Moody Monthly.
Remember
the words of James that I quoted in the beginning - To him therefore
who knows to do good, and doesn’t do it, to him it is sin. (James 4:17)
So call SIN what you will...it still calls you and me on a regular basis. And it behooves the best in us not to answer the call.
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