**yahumm..cough cough...(insert clearing of the throat sound effects)** Dudes and dudettes of the United States of The Better Half of Me, it is my honor and privilege to bestow upon you the heartiest welcome a man can give to YOU! Thanks for checking out The Better Half of Me, and for those of you extra special people who are my followers..I go beyond the heartiest welcome I just gave and welcome you back to this wonderful place of blog..world..fantasy..land. If you're jealous that you're not in that extra special super duper spectacular cool group, then that can easily be fixed by subscribing if you like reading the thoughts of a poor college kid. Ok, moving on, Gummy bears rock.
I hope this past month has treated you all magically because I know it has certainly treated me in some pretty magical ways. God has been out and about and working in my life and hopefully in yours as well. The past couple weeks i've really been thinking and observing something over and over in my head and have finally came to a conclusion that I would love to share with you savvy friends of mine. It is the seriousness of sin, and how not-so serious some of us take it.
Now, before you decide to stop reading, just hear me out. I was throwing some thoughts around in the ole dome piece of mine about the seriousness of sin. I started thinking about different types of sin such as stealing, murder, lying, lust...the list goes on. Then I started to think about how society views sin and how God views sin. Let me explain. Our society views sin in different degrees. For example, we see murder as being worse than lying, or lusting, or even stealing. That is just the way our minds work. We even give out different punishments for different levels of these crimes. For example, a man who steals a car usually receives more time in prison than a man who steals a lolly pop from a grocery store; nonetheless, the man who stole the lolly pop is just as guilty as the man who stole the car.
On the other hand, unlike us, God sees all sin as the same; bad. A sin is a sin in his eyes no matter what you or someone has done. I don't believe God looks down more on Jimmy (sorry for you Jimmy's out there...just look at it as you are at the "cool" level to be used as an example) who has just lied to his best friend than Jill (All you Jill's out there...refer to what I said about Jimmy) who has just stolen a sweet pair of 9 inch hot red stilettos from the mall. It is all the same to God; sin is sin, and sin is bad. So, then the question is really how serious is sin? By using the logic that I just described, that means that stealing a cookie from the cookie jar is just as bad as murdering somebody, or that murdering someone is just as bad as stealing a cookie from the cookie jar (I know that is an extreme example..most of you i'm sure do not kill people in your spare time).
In our earthly mindset, we would agree that stealing a cookie from the cookie jar is way less harmless and not as bad as killing a person...yet they are both sins. Now listen closely, if you are a follower of Christ, then you have inherited salvation and you are saved by grace, which means no matter what you do, you will always be forgiven. However, Paul says, "who are you to keep sinning that grace may abound?" The way I see it, you can look at sin in two ways: 1. Sin is not a very serious thing and I can keep on indulging in it even though God commands me to not to (I can keep stealing from the cookie jar), or 2. Sin is very serious and I need to not continue sinning so freely (holy crap, I should stop stealing from the cookie jar because God says "you shall not steal"). You have the option to choose which road to take, however, when you steal that cookie from the cookie jar, you are sinning, and although we see it as a itsy bitsy little harmless sin, it only took one little sin in the Garden of Eden to separate us from God for ETERNITY. Luckily Jesus (being THE man) saved us from that sin by putting it on himself on the cross. However, just think..if there were no Jesus in the picture to save us..it would only take one sin, no matter the degree of it, to separate us from God forever, and THAT is pretty serious to me.
Dudes, thank you for stopping by and listening to my thoughts! Feel free to comment or subscribe, I hope this encouraged you a bit and DON'T STEAL FROM THE COOKIE JAR! Don't you know mom's know everything..you're only fooling yourself! Peace.
- R
