Poison

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 6:23, NLT)

The longer I live, the more convinced I am that the Word of God is true and is worthy of my attention and deliberate compliance.  It’s like many of the things our parents warned us about that. At the time. they didn’t seem to make sense or just seemed irrelevant to our situation.  However, we later experienced remorse for not paying attention. How many times have we remembered the decisions we made early on  like quitting our music lessons, not continuing our education, or not staying away from people or activities that we later regretted and wound up reaping undesirable consequences.

I think that many of the issues I was given information about, I just didn’t believe that it was true or accurate. It was like looking at a bottle of poison and thinking that someone had mislabeled it or was mistaken.  If I had sincerely trusted the warning on the label, there was no way I would have eaten or drunk the contents of the container.  Most of us use our personal experiences to help us make decisions we face everyday; but when it comes to poison, your experience may be the last thing you want to depend on.  Many of us have had experiences that help to guide us but wish never to repeat or see others get involved with.  Some things we encounter have immediate consequences, delayed results, and some no effects at all. Therefore, in order to safely navigate life’s choices and challenges we need to deliberately investigate, learn from our – and other’s – experiences, and determine what we hold as true and sacred.

The scripture quoted above indicates that the wages or consequences of sin is death.  Sin is one of those things that always produces the consequence of separating us spiritually from God immediately but also has its progressive and final remunerations that may appear more slowly over a lifetime or even eternally.  I am personally thankful for the Word of God because it allows me to take advantage of other’s experiences, and the wisdom and warnings of God, Himself.  I don’t have to touch a scorching stove to know it will burn me or drink poison to know that it kills.  I have learned to equate both sin and poison as activities to be avoided or eliminated from my life. 

Sin will always yield the consequence of death unless, having sinned, we take God’s antidote.  The same scripture quoted above also provides humanity with the God- given-sin antidote for life through receiving Jesus Christ as our Savior.   Jesus has provided a remedy for our personal sins by taking the penalty for us. 

I challenge you to investigate and pursue Christ as the true antidote for sin that will not only work in this lifetime but throughout eternity.   (Adrian)