"Stupid Thing Keeps Popping Up!"

Sorry I haven't posted anything in the past couple days. It's been a hectic weekend full of baseball and trying to get work done for Monday's return to the norm of classes. I'm still riddled with this question about SIN! Sometimes it seems like such a simple thing. Davey, just don't SIN anymore! Ha! I've figured it out! Not hardly . . .

A guy from the team confronted me about the topic of SIN today. (You may wonder why I'm capitalizing SIN everytime I write it. I don't know to be honest with you. It's a heavy word and a heavy topic, and while it certainly doesn't deserve capitalization on paper, it seems like I need to as a signpost, a warning. Kind of like a flashing light. Beware! Don't come any farther! SIN is beyond this line!) This guy is a brand new Christian of about two weeks, and he made a commitment to God when he got saved not to dabble in a particular SIN that he knew he had been having trouble with. He called me up telling me he had something to confess and he just needed to talk. He came over and told me about how he was confronted with the temptation and fell again! Right after he gave it away to God! I FEEL YA BRO!! Isn't that all our plights? The Bible talks about how we are like dogs returning to our vomit. Have you ever seen a dog eat its own vomit? Disgusting!!

We're no smarter than dogs when it comes to SIN, though. We dabble in it because it feels GOOD for the moment. But when it's all over, we're left feeling empty and then guilt-ridden. Satan lures us in, makes SIN appealing, ensnares us, and then beats us over the head about it afterwards. What a rotten guy!! When I return to the same SIN I feel like a dog that has just vomitted, gone back and eaten the vomit, vomitted again, and then repeated the process with no relief!

I remember when I was little, the cool thing to do was to have your birthday party at Chucky-Cheese! That was such a cool place. Blow all your money on pizza and coins, play games, and hope you win enough tickets to trade in for a worthless prize that would break within the next few days. That was the life! One game I HATED, I mean absolutely DESPISED with a passion, was that game where the alligators pop out and you beat them over the head with that padded mallet. I hated it!! I never felt like I was winning or accomplishing anything. Whenever I pounded an alligator, it would cower away for a little while and then poke its little annoying head out again! To make matters worse, three of four of those stupid things would pop up at the same time and I only had one mallet! Aaaah! I get frustrated just thinking about it. Most of the time I wanted to go unplug the machine and then jump up and down declaring that I had just won; I had killed all the alligators! But I never did unplug it, because if I had, the tickets would have stopped spitting out of the machine.

Isn't that how SIN is though? You beat it back and beat it back until you're blue in the face, but no matter how much you try to ward it off it still comes back, rearing its ugly head! The problem is, we're too scared to pull the plug, cause if we do that no more tickets will come out and then we wouldn't be able to get our cheap prize (keep in mind those prizes only last a little while and are worth next to nothing)! Man those Chucky-Cheese prizes are sooo fulfilling too. I know I still have all of them to this day and they are all sooo useful to me (sarcasm in case you didn't pick up on it). It's so true though. We're too wussey to go pull the plug on Satan, and so he keeps us in this bondage of SIN that God wants us to be free of!

Okay, Davey, we understand this SIN thing now. So how do we pull the plug? How do we get rid of the SIN that continues to plague us? How do we let Jesus be the LORD of our lives and find fulfillment in Him ONLY!? I'll write more about that tomorrow.

B.T.W. Jesus' GRACE is enough!