I Almost Swore.

How do you get air out of a bottle? You fill it with water. How do you get the dark out of a room? You turn on the light. How do you get sin out of your life? The answer is obvious; whatever gets your attention gets you. Unfortunately, we are like the moon, we wax and wane but at our best we are still full holes. Like the moon we shine brightest when we are facing the Son.

A group of executives were in a lecture, when the speaker took out a of jar rocks and asked the question, “Is the jar full?” they agreed it was. Then he proceeded to put gravel in it. “Is the jar full now?” to which many answered, “not sure.” At this response he took out some sand and proceeded to poor it in. “Is it full now?” “No” they cried, “poor in some water.”  They had cottoned on!

But then the speaker asked, “What is the application?” to which one executive replied, “No matter how full your schedule is, you can always squeeze something else in!”

No, the illustration is that if the sand is in first, there is no room for anything else. Steven Covey in his book “7 Habits of Highly effective people” reiterates that one great fault in many lives is that they spend time sweeting over the small stuff and there is no time for the big things, like God, eternity, prayer and Bible study.

The Scriptures admonish us to “grow in Grace “(2Pet 3:18). Unfortunately, the battle front to many people is that they battle where the battle isn’t. The battle is not in reforming our behaviour. Salvation is not based on our performance. If we grow in grace all other things will come in its wake. The Christian life is a battle and a march. There is no release. If you are not having a battle, you are probably not having a Christian experience.

The Christian life can be likened to an evergreen bush. If you are born again you are always a bush, but there will be seasons of growth and no growth like in the winter. Sometimes we get pruned back, this is negative growth. But even the purpose of this is growth. Then in the summer of our lives we burst into flower. Flowers are like feelings or mountain top experiences. Any honest Christian acknowledges we experience all these seasons in varying proportions. We are always waxing and waning like the moon. To us it may not seem normal, but it is reality.

As part of my exercise program, I walk most mornings. When I lived in Wollongong my walk would take me onto a busy freeway for a short time. I would be wearing headphones and listening to something devotional. On one particular day as I walked in the stopping lane a front-end loader came up from behind and due to the noisy traffic and my head phones I did not hear it. It passed about 2cm from my right arm. I got such a fright I blurted out all but the last ‘k’ of a word I had not used for 30 years. Now I was shocked by both events.

The experience got me thinking about how sin is like riding a bicycle. If there was a verse in the Bible that said, “riding a bike is a sin,” I could say then, “ OK I will never ride a bike again.” But unfortunately, I will never forget how. Swearing is like that. I know the words I learnt for the first 20 years of my life are still in my head but by the grace of God you will not hear them on the outside. Sin will always be resident, but it does not need to be president. Fortunately, we are saved by a relationship with God and an isolated ‘sin” does not break that relationship. Had I Been run over at that moment it would not have affected my eternal destiny.

We should be like the builder walking down the road to buy some lunch, when a great big dog  came bounding across the lawn and sunk his teeth into his leg. In one cool move the builder whipped out his hammer from its holster and whacked the dog on the head and it fell down dead.  The owner came running outside loudly crying, “What have you done, you have killed my dog, couldn’t you have just hit it with the handle?”

“Lady” the builder said,“If your dog had bitten me with his tail then maybe I would have hit him with the handle. But that is what we need to do with sin , “Hit on the head and hit it dead”