Matthew 5:29 “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out.”
Two American women were returning from their vacation across the Mexican border when they saw a sick animal in the ditch beside their car. They had a soft spot for the poor little Chihuahua, so they risked smuggling it under a blanket in the back seat. Arriving home, one of them nursed it tenderly and even allowed it to sleep in bed with her so she could stroke and reassure it intermittently. The following morning, she took it to the vet, only to be told that it wasn’t a cute little dog but a Mexican water rat dying of rabies!
That’s a great urban legend! Maybe it didn’t literally happen, but it illustrates an important truth. It’s tragic how often we don’t treat sin for what it is. We fool around, compromise, self-justify, treating sin as if it is a puppy to be played with, when in fact we’ve allowed ourselves to get in bed with a deadly rat. Sin can appear to be fun, but actually it’s a sugar-coated venom.
Our relativist culture has redefined sin so as to justify almost anything – so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. How affected have you been by that lie? How sensitive are you to the Holy Spirit? What compromise are you justifying? I remember hating a friend who quoted the following verse to me, because I knew I was heading off to have sex with my girlfriend: “But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people” (Ephesians 5:3).
I’ve been very honest there. Will you be too? We’re not talking only sex, as the verse says. And it’s very exacting. It talks about there not being even a ‘hint’ of those things. God’s grace for us is free, but it’s not cheap. Let’s be ruthless with sin. Time for heart-surgery?
God, forgive me for where I’ve tolerated sin in my life. I choose today to deal ruthlessly with it. Amen!
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