Early Friday morning I woke up, turned over and tried to go back to sleep. In that half awake state I had a vision. I saw myself lying there looking up at the ceiling. There I saw a bunch of tiny black caterpillars making a nest in one corner. Each was less than a half an inch long, but they were busily working away at their spider-web like nest, about a foot in diameter. As I lay there, I thought in my mind, should I clean those things out now, or try to get back to sleep and do it later.
Then, I had the awareness that if I did not do it now, the nest would get larger and larger, the caterpillars would multiply in number and size, and the task would become more and more difficult. I was suddenly awake and aware that God had just revealed Himself to me. The lesson was clear. If we Christians don’t act now to clean areas of our lives up, the task only increases and gets more difficult. Those caterpillars were making a home, not just visiting. It was a lesson on sin and holiness.
Tags: dreams, holiness, sin
Aaron Wilburn said that one of the main differences between men and women is that if you want to know if a shirt is dirty or clean, a woman will look it over, but a man will smell it. A boy was dressing to go out for the evening. He called to his mother who was in the adjoining room. “Mom, is this shirt dirty?” Without so much as looking she replied, “Yes, it’s dirty. Get a clean one.”
When he had dressed he entered his mother’s room and inquired how she knew the shirt was dirty when she had not even looked at it. “If it had been clean,” she replied, “you would have known it and would not have asked me. Remember, son, if it’s doubtful, it’s dirty.”
There a sermon in this little story. If it’s doubtful, it’s dirty.
Tags: holiness, sin
The headline in the Grand Rapids Press wasn’t good news. Fifteen million gallons of partially treated waste water suddenly disappeared from a storage lagoon in a water treatment facility. Just outside the small town of Sand Lake, Michigan, a 500-by-500-foot pond disappeared into a sinkhole. The problem was that nobody knew where the wastewater went. According to a county spokesperson, “It will depend on where it went before we can say what happened.”
Imagine all the wrongs of your life being like that missing filthy lagoon. It was certainly there, yet its now gone. Where did that sin go? Its a mystery, but it’s gone!
Where did it go? Buried in the deepest sea (Micah 7:19), as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12), erased from the eternal books of heaven’s justice (Colossians 2:13-15). Think about that sinkhole and your sins today.
Tags: forgiveness, sin, sinkhole
James Garfield was a lay preacher and principal of his denominational college. They say he was ambidextrious and could simultaneously write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other.
In 1880, he was elected president of the United States, but after only six months in office, he was shot in the back with a revolver. He never lost consciousness. At the hopital, the doctor probed the wound with his little finger to seek the bullet. He couldn’t find it, so he tried a silver tipped probe. Still he couldn’t locate the bullet.
They took Garfield back to Washington, D.C. Despite the summer heat, they tried to keep him comfortable. he was growing very weak. Teams of doctors tried to locate the bullet, probing the wound over and over. In desperation they asked Alexander Graham Bell, who was working on a little device called the telephone, to see if he could locate the metal inside the president’s body. He came, he sought, and he too failed.
The president hung on through July, through August, but in September he finally died – not from the woulnd, but from infection. The repeated probing, which the physicians thought would help the man, eventually killed.
Do you think its possible for Christians to spend too long dwelling on their sin and refuse to release it to God?
Tags: forgiveness, Garfield, probing, sin
Everyone wants a great bargain. Pay close attention to the real deal you get in this national donut store chain ad:
“FREE! 3 Muffins when you buy 3 at the Regular Half-Dozen price.”
Unless there’s a typo in that, it sounds like you can buy 6 donuts at the price of 6 donuts. But the double-talk makes it seem like another deal altogether.
Its kind of like that with Satan’s deceptions. He makes it sound like its a special deal to do this or that. Then in the end, we pay much more than we thought, and the bargain ceases to become a bargain. The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23) and there is no way around it except to repent.
Tags: bargain, deception, repentence, sin
The newspaper reported that a Utah businessman had filed for bankruptcy and declared his debts to be $613,000,000,000. What’s more, the man claimed assets of only $7,310. If all debts were honored, his creditors would receive about one-millionth of a cent on the dollar. There was no way he could begin to pay his debts.
That reminds me of my situation before I came to Christ. I had violated the Lord’s desires for me so many times that the mountain of offenses was overwhelming. But when I came to Christ all that was washed away. My debt was forgiven. Today I stand before Him with a clean slate. Thank God for forgiing my debt.
Tags: debt, forgiveness, sin
We finally got all the drywall completed at our house. Since we had everything tore apart, we decided to move a wall to enlarge our family room and make better access to another room. We had to wait until the heat run was moved and the electrician moved some wires in the ceiling before we could finish patching the drywall in the ceiling where the wall had been.
Because the ceilings of both rooms that are now one had Spanish Lace texture, I wasn’t sure what the patch job would look like. But we had a professional repair it. When he was finished only the color difference was evident. I believe after the paint job we will be totally unable to tell where the wall had been.
That’s a great illustration of the work the Lord does in our lives. It starts with a major renovation, then gradually gets better as the Lord deals with various areas of our lives, until finally, in the end, His love covers a multitude of sins.
Where are you in that transformational process?
Tags: sin, transformation