Sep 3, 2013
Why do you look at the speck of sawdust
in your brother’s eye and pay no attention
to the plank in your own eye? Matthew 7:3
This past week my two brothers, two sisters, and I had lunch with our father! It was the first time we had all been together at the same time with him since Mother’s funeral six years ago. All of us treasured the rare moments of fellowship and conversation, not knowing when we would have the opportunity again.
Cain had been created by God. He had been created with life from God. He had been created for God. And now he was separated from God. Unconfessed sin and rebellion makes a person so miserable in the presence of a holy, righteous God that the sin must either be confessed and cleansed or the sinner must leave God’s presence.
Cain’s tragic life illustrates the hard lesson that guilt is our friend if it drives us to God. However, if we refuse to turn to God in repentance and confession, guilt will drive us away from God to our own destruction. Cain’s bitterness that was rooted in resentment and rebellion bore wicked fruit in his family for generations to follow. Cain’s sin, left to take its own natural course, intensified with each generation until the entire civilization of the world in his day was ravaged by it.
What sin in your life – if left unchecked – will ravage the life of your children?
God created you and me to live with Him in His heavenly home, enjoying fellowship with Him and glorifying Him forever! Death was not part of His plan. It was through Adam’s sin that death – temporal and eternal – entered humanity. And death entered creation as well.
Flowers fade. Grass withers. Birds sing in minor key. Trees lose their leaves because “creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom. 8:20-21, NIV). Because of man’s sin, creation has been in a cycle of death and decay. The greatest threat to our environment is not fluorocarbon or nuclear testing or the burning of tropical forests in the Amazon River region or toxic waste. The greatest threat to our environment has been and is sin! So . . . help to clean up the environment by repenting of your sin!
In our pleasure-seeking, anything-goes, feel-good society, guilt is anathema. We run from it through frantic activity, drown it in alcohol, escape it through entertainment, talk about it to a therapist, blame it on someone else, suppress it through mental gymnastics, but we can’t rid ourselves of it! It’s like a stain that won’t come out of our clothes no matter how many wash cycles we put it through or what kind of detergent we use because the stain has become part of the fabric! The only thing that can “wash away” our sin and guilt before God is the blood of Jesus Christ. So God has given us a conscience with a guilt alarm that goes off when sin enters so that we might go to Jesus Christ for cleansing.
Once, as I prepared my house for a visit by my father, I began to clean and straighten my house. I even bought fresh flowers and plants to place around the rooms to make them seem more lovely. I wanted my home to look as inviting, comfortable, and pleasing to his eyes as I could make it. Then it struck me – if I felt this way about my earthly father’s brief visit, how much more care I should give my home every day since my heavenly Father lives here.
I am not a good housekeeper. But motivated by the thought that my house is His home also, I try hard to keep my house clean and neat. It is not professionally decorated with all the latest gadgets, but it is as pleasing to the eyes as my time, energy, and budget will allow. I want those who walk through my door to know that the Lord God lives here. And I hope the reality of His Presence is evident to all by the beauty of the outward appearance and the quality of the inner atmosphere of warmth and love they find here.
