Category Archives: Sin

Honestly….

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In recent weeks, Louisa, Birgitta, Emerald, and I have made friends with a friendly critter who lives on our front porch, a handsome toad we named Terrence.

TerrenceEvery evening at about 9:00, Terrence appears in the same corner of the porch, only a few inches from where we step in and out of the house. As we’ve passed, time after time, he’s never flinched, even at Jack’s dangerously close paws that are as big as he is. And in the morning, Terrence is always gone.

Late one night as we stepped past Terrence to walk Jack, I asked Louisa, “What is it about the corner of our porch that brings him back night after night?”

“The bug-buffet, Mom.”

Of course she was right. Frogs and toads love bugs, and our porch light brought an ongoing, yummy supply for Terrence. Though we never saw him nab one, we knew he was.

Ready to depart.As much as we enjoyed our tenacious toad, we had reason to believe his days at the buffet were numbered. After our encounter with a brown recluse spider last week, we enlisted the help of a pest control service scheduled to arrive with potent chemicals soon, though Terrence didn’t know it.

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All of us are familiar with the old adage, “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.” It’s ready justification for withholding information from, say, an accident report, or an information resource, or a courtroom testimony. Another example might be a good cook who’s asked to share a recipe. She purposely leaves out one ingredient so another cook’s finished product won’t taste as good as hers.

But the old adage isn’t really true; what someone doesn’t know can hurt him. Even in the case of withholding an ingredient, which seems silly, two people get hurt: the first cook who compromises her integrity for selfish gain, and the second, whose recipe fails, making her doubt the first cook’s honesty.

God has a strong opinion about people who wink at lying. For instance, lying is referred to twice in a list of seven things that are “detestable” to him. (Proverbs 6:17,19) He also pits lying against truth, saying those who lie are choosing the devil over him. Satan has no truth in him (John 8:44), and Jesus is the truth (John 14:6).

He challenges us to behave more like him than the devil, choosing a high standard of telling “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” The reason is important: to reflect the Creator in whose image we’re made. Secondly, he wants to spare us and others from unnecessary hurt.

Porch lightAs for Terrence, the honest, whole-truth thing to do was let him know harsh chemicals were coming, and his best option was to relocate. So we scooped Terrence into a box and drove him to the far corner of our subdivision, gently placing him in a bush near another lighted porch with another delectable bug buffet.

Bon appétit, Terrence!

“Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue lasts only a moment.”  (Proverbs 12:19)

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BaldyThis afternoon we celebrated my brother-in-law Bervin’s birthday with a lunchtime party. Between plates of pot roast and birthday cake, Klaus posed an interesting question to Bervin’s grandchildren Ruby (4) and Beck (6). They’d been focusing on Emerald, who is close-to-bald at 9 months, wondering when she would get a decent head of hair.

Klaus said, “Ruby, you were a bald baby like that, too. What’s your favorite memory from that time?”

Ruby looked at him with a blank stare and couldn’t respond. But when Birgitta said, “Probably that you didn’t have to comb your hair every day,” she smiled. “All I did was ride around in a car seat,” she said.

Beck and Ruby

Beck, answering the same question said, “I remember that I didn’t have to do anything.” Of course their answers were fabricated, since neither one of them could remember being a baby.

Most peoples’ earliest memories are from the time they were 2 or 3 years old, but God doesn’t let us remember all the way back to zero. Maybe he doesn’t want us recalling the misery of birth, and every woman who’s ever delivered a baby would call that wisdom.

Baby brain

More likely we can’t recollect babyhood because the memory parts of our brains aren’t fully developed then. Babies don’t have language, either, to describe their experiences. Nevertheless God endowed each one with a complicated brain, all set to go. On most days we take this incredible gift for granted.

What about the brain(s) of the Trinity? Since Jesus was fully human, surely he had a brain much like ours. But what about his divine brain?

Although we forget nearly everything that happens in our first two years and tend to forget even adult memories if we live long enough, God never forgets a thing. Putting him into a memory grid of forgetting and remembering, though, is humanizing the divine. He knows everything about everything, and we believe that. But then what are we to do with the Scripture that says he “forgets our sins” once they’re confessed?

He actually says it 3 times (in both Old and New Testaments). Does this simply mean he voluntarily decides not to remind us or nag us about our past sins after we’ve repented of them?

Maybe it’s something even better than that.

Maybe he literally wills himself to forgetfulness and “remembers our sins no more” (as the Bible says) to make our forgiveness absolutely thorough. And then if Satan should come before him to accuse us, he can honestly say, “No…. I don’t have any memory of Margaret committing that sin. She’s clean on that one” (because of Jesus).

This possibility gives me goose bumps and inspires me to keep short accounts with God. And maybe his forgetting our sins isn’t that much different than Ruby and Beck forgetting what it was like to be babies…

…none of them have any memory of it.

“I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.” (Hebrews 8:12)

The Tough Truth

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Tiger golfsSome babies are born into sporty families and begin their careers with pint-sized golf clubs, tennis rackets, or baseball bats. Others arrive to parents who love horses, and their children are taught to ride before they can sit up. Still others come into musical homes and learn to read music before reading words, developing into prodigies.

Babies born into our family have it easy. All they have to do is love the beach.

Later this week Emerald will turn 9 months, and in her short life she’s already become a water baby. She never gets enough of Lake Michigan and today had us all spellbound with her antics.

Water baby.

While she was sitting in our beach creek, her mommy slowly poured a bucket of water out in front of her from 2 feet in the air. At first Emerald did what most babies do, grabbing at the stream. Then suddenly she surprised us all by leaning forward and going full-face into the water, soaking her eyes and nose, and filling her mouth.

She did it again and again, after which she would pull back and laugh with gusto. Birgitta poured bucket after bucket in front of her, and she never stopped ducking into the water and laughing afterwards. Getting dunked was her her passion of the moment.

Maybe it’s possible to develop spiritual passions in our children the same way families develop passions for sports, horses, music, or water, by starting young.

My parents began spiritual training with my sister, brother and I early in our lives, just as Nate and I did with our children: Sunday school from infancy, youth groups, summer camp, service projects, and mission trips. Most importantly, we tried to practice what we preached at home. But that last one, living out an example of Christ-like-ness, is the toughest.

Some youngsters, when taught something from the get-go, develop a natural proclivity for it and get good at it because it comes naturally. But righteous living? That doesn’t come naturally to any of us.

Billy Graham

I think of Billy Graham, one of the most prominent preachers of all time. His life has been scrutinized from every angle  without finding any skeletons in his closets, and most of us would call him a “righteous person.” Yet he told an interviewer he struggles daily with the temptation to sin, resisting only with God’s supernatural help.

Those of us who think we have a passion to follow God will never succeed at it unless we enlist his ongoing partnership. We can start early with our training, practice like Olympic athletes, and insist our passion will carry us, but all of us are (as one God-fearing missionary put it) “…only two steps away from disaster.”

Good thing God understands that. Although he appreciates our efforts toward righteousness (and expects us to try), he lets us off the hook on perfection. And we can be forever grateful for his reason:

“Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” (1 Timothy 1:15)