A man purchased a white mouse to use as food for his pet
snake. He dropped the unsuspecting mouse into the snake's glass
cage, where the snake was sleeping in a bed of sawdust. The tiny
mouse had a serious problem on his hands. At any moment he could
be swallowed alive. Obviously, the mouse needed to come up with a
brilliant plan.
What
did the terrified creature do? He quickly set up work covering the
snake with sawdust chips until it was completely buried. With
that, the mouse apparently thought he had solved his problem.
The
solution, however, came from outside. The man took pity on the
silly little mouse and removed him from the cage. No matter how
hard we try to cover or deny our sinful nature, it's fool's work.
Sin will eventually awake from sleep and shake off its cover. Were
it not for the saving
grace of the Master's hand, sin would eat us alive.
Sin
comes when we take a perfectly natural desire or longing or
ambition and try desperately to fulfill it without God. Not only
is it sin, it is a perverse distortion of the image of the Creator
in us. All these good things, and all our security, are rightly
found only and completely in him.
For
a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting
distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the
man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to
whom I had been doing this all my life--namely myself. . . In
fact, the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the
man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was
the sort of man who did those things. Consequently Christianity
does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for
cruelty and treachery. . . But it does want us to hate them in the
same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that
the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is in
anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be
cured and made human again.
Few
college football coaches have made a point against drugs as
effectively as Erk Russell of Georgia Southern College. He
arranged for a couple of good ol' 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 roon, you're not nearly as apt to leave
as when that rattlesnake comes in. But they'll both kill
you!"
Ah!
If our likeness to God does not show itself in trifles, what is
there left for it to show itself in? For our lives are all made up
of trifles. The great things come three or four of them in the
seventy years; the little ones every time the clock ticks.
Dr.
Ralph Sockman writes about an experience he had while standing on
the edge of Niagra Falls one
clear, cold March day. Wrapped in white winter garments, the falls
glistened in the bright sun. As some birds swooped down to snatch
a drink from the clear water, Sockman's companion told how he had
seen birds carried over the edge of the precipice. As they dipped
down for a drink, tiny droplets of ice would form on their wings.
As they returned for additional drinks more ice would weigh down
their bodies until they couldn't rise above the cascading waters.
Flapping their wings, the birds would suddenly drop over the
falls.
Augustine's
stages with sin:
1.
Lord make me good, but not yet.
2. Lord make me good, but not entirely.
3. Lord make me good.
This
was how Susannah Wesley defined "sin" to her young son,
John Wesley: "If you would judge of the lawfulness or the
unlawfulness of pleasure, then take this simple rule: Whatever
weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience,
obscures your sense of God, and
takes off the relish of spiritual things--that to you is
sin."
Time-lapse
photography compresses a series of events into one picture. Such a
photo appeared in an issue of National Geographic. Taken
from a Rocky Mountain peak during a heavy thunderstorm, the
picture captured the brilliant lightning display that had taken
place throughout the storm's duration. The time-lapse technique
created a fascinating, spaghetti-like web out of the individual
bolts. In such a way, our sin presents itself before the eyes of
God. Where we see only isolated or individual acts, God sees the
overall web of our sinning. What may seem insignificant -- even
sporadic -- to us and passes with hardly a notice creates a much
more dramatic display from God's panoramic viewpoint. The psalmist
was right when he wrote, "Who can discern his errors? Acquit
me of hidden faults. Keep back your servant from presumptuous
sins" (Psalm 19:12-13).
Once
we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary
evil," it begins to look more and more necessary and less and
less evil.
I
live in a small, rural community. There are lots of cattle ranches
around here, and, every once in a while, a cow wanders off and
gets lost . . . Ask a rancher how a cow gets lost, and chances
are he will reply, 'Well,
the cow starts nibbling on a tuft of green grass, and when it
finishes, it looks ahead to the next tuft of green grass and
starts nibbling on that one, and then it nibbles on a tuft of
grass right next to a hole in the fence. It then sees another tuft
of green grass on the other side of the fence, so it nibbles on
that one and then goes on to the next tuft. The next thing you
know, the cow has nibbled itself into being lost."
Americans
are in the process of nibbling their way to being lost. . . We
keep moving from one tuft of activity to another, never noticing
how far we have gone from home or how far away from the truth we
have managed to end up.
STOP.
I know you're thinking about crossing this gate. What you should
know is that if the Coyotes, Cactus, Mesquite, Heat, Dust or
Rattlers don't get you, I will.
A
man purchased a white mouse to use as food for his pet snake. He
dropped the unsuspecting mouse
into the snake's glass cage, where the snake was sleeping in a bed
of sawdust. The tiny mouse had a serious problem on his hands. At
any moment he could be swallowed alive. Obviously, the mouse
needed to come up with a brilliant plan.
What
did the terrified creature do? He quickly set up work covering the
snake with sawdust chips until it was completely buried. With
that, the mouse apparently thought he had solved his problem.
The
solution, however, came from outside. The man took pity on the
silly little mouse and removed him from the cage. No matter how
hard we try to cover or deny our sinful nature, it's fool's work.
Sin will eventually awake from sleep and shake off its cover. Were
it not for the saving grace of the Master's hand, sin would eat us
alive.
It's
like a World Series of weeds, a Hula Bowl of herbicides, with
agriculture students from U.S. and Canadian universities competing
to identify problems in farm fields. This year, Iowa State took
top honors in the Collegiate Weed Science Contest, which tests
students' abilities to identify weeds and the right chemical to
kill them and diagnose herbicide failure. "They need to be
able to recognize weeds when they are tiny," said James
Worthington of Western Kentucky University, president of the North
Central Weed Science Society. "When they get big enough that
anybody can recognize them, it's too late to do anything about
them."
When
John Belushi died in the spring of 1983 of an overdose of cocaine
and heroin, a variety of articles appeared, including one in U.S.
News and World Report, on the seductive dangers of cocaine:
"It can do you no harm and it can drive you insane; it can
give you status in society and it can wreck your career; it can
make you the life of the party and it can turn you into a loner;
it can be an elixir for high living and a potion for death."
Like
all sin, there's a difference between the appearance and the
reality, between the momentary feeling and the lasting effect.
Sin
arises when things that are a minor good are pursued as though
they were the most important goals in life. If money or affection
or power are sought in disproportionate, obsessive ways, then sin
occurs. And that sin is magnified when, for these lesser goals, we
fail to pursue the highest good
and the finest goals. So when we ask ourselves why, in a given
situation, we committed a sin, the answer is usually one of two
things. Either we wanted to obtain something we didn't have, or we
feared losing something we had.
We
never see sin aright until we see it as against God...All sin is
against God in this sense: that it is His law that is broken, His
authority that is despised, His government that is set at
naught...Pharaoh and Balaam, Saul and Judas each said, "I
have sinned;" but the returning prodigal said, "I have
sinned against heaven and before thee;" and David said,
"Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned."
Sin
is a blasting presence, and every fine power shrinks and withers
in the destructive heat. Every spiritual delicacy succumbs to its
malignant touch...
Sin impairs the sight, and works toward blindness.
Sin benumbs the hearing and tends to make men deaf.
Sin perverts the taste, causing men to confound the sweet with the
bitter, and the bitter with the sweet.
Sin hardens the touch, and eventually renders a man "past
feeling."
All these are Scriptural analogies, and their common significance
appears to be this--sin blocks and
chokes the fine senses of the spirit; by sin we are desensitized,
rendered imperceptive, and the range of our correspondence is
diminished. Sin creates callosity. It hoofs the spirit, and so
reduces the area of our exposure to pain.
There
is something terribly right about...realizing that our struggle
with sin is in many ways similar to an alcoholic's struggle with
drinking. It's never over. How often I find myself talking about
sin in the past tense as if being a sinner is something I'm
beyond--a page turned in the book of my life. But sin is like
alcoholism. Sinners are never cured; they simply decide to stop
sinning...and it's a daily decision.
A
recent survey of Discipleship Journal readers ranked areas
of greatest spiritual challenge to them:
1.
Materialism.
2. Pride.
3. Self-centeredness.
4. Laziness.
5. (Tie) Anger/Bitterness.
5. (Tie) Sexual lust.
7. Envy.
8. Gluttony.
9. Lying.
Survey
respondents noted temptations were more potent when they had
neglected their time with God (81 percent) and when they were
physically tired (57 percent). Resisting temptation was
accomplished by prayer (84 percent), avoiding compromising
situations (76 percent), Bible study (66 percent), and being
accountable to someone (52 percent).
In
the 1950s a psychologist, Stanton Samenow, and a psychiatrist,
Samuel Yochelson, sharing the conventional wisdom that crime is
caused by environment, set out to prove their point. They began a
17-year study involving thousands of hours of clinical testing of
250 inmates here in the District of Columbia. To their
astonishment, they discovered that the cause of crime cannot be
traced to environment, poverty, or oppression. Instead, crime is
the result of individuals making, as they put it, wrong moral
choices. In their 1977 work The Criminal Personality, they
concluded that the answer to crime is a "conversion of the
wrong-doer to a more responsible lifestyle." In 1987, Harvard
professors James Q. Wilson and Richard J.Herrnstein came to
similar conclusions in their book Crime andHuman Nature.
They determined that the cause of crime is a lack of proper moral
training among young people during the morally formative years,
particularly ages one to six.
US Senator Daniel
Patrick Moynihan recently published a disturbing essay entitled
"Defining Deviancy
Down." In the Nov 22 issue of The New Republic,
Commentator Charles Krauthammer writes that "Moynihan's
powerful point is that with the moral deregulation of the 1960s,
we have had an explosion of deviancy in family life, criminal
behavior and public displays of psychosis. And we have dealt with
it in the only way possible by redefining
deviancy down so as to explain. God
will severely discipline disobedient believers.
Some have said that Christians who consciously sin have lost their
focus on the future. These Christians have forgotten that God will
reward in heaven only those who have lived faithfully for Him here
on earth (1 Cor 9:24). Christians who fail to keep eternity in
mind often sin in the here and now.
What
is sin?
Man calls it an accident, God calls it abomination.
Man calls it a defect, God calls it a disease.
Man calls it an error, God calls it an enmity.
Man calls it a liberty, God calls it lawlessness.
Man calls it a trifle, God calls it a tragedy.
Man calls it a mistake, God calls it a madness.
Man calls it a weakness, God calls it willfulness.
