matthew 5:29-30
"if your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. it is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. and if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. it is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell."
i don't know about you but i feel better now after reading that!
i think if we all followed this literally, we would all be walking around mamed... i know i would. so what's Jesus getting at here?
i think, if i can offer my thoughts (and i can because it's my blog and there is nobody here to stop me), he is speaking metaphorically of the severity in which we need to deal with the sin in our life. there comes a point when we keep falling into the same sin traps that we need to say, "enough is enough" and not put ourselves in those situations anymore.
if the internet is causing you to sin, limit, filter and/or cut off your access to the internet. if the television is causing you to sin, turn off the cable. if there are certain places you go that lead to sin, don't go to those places anymore. if there are certain relationships that lead to sin, cut off those relationships. it is better to hurt a little and to be inconvenienced than to spend eternity in hell.
and it isn't about just making it difficult for us to access the things that lead us to sin, it's about making it impossible. because if we only make it difficult, we will find a way around the difficulties when temptation comes. but if we make it impossible then when temptation comes we cannot and will not fall to it.
i heard the story recently of a guy who used to travel a lot for work. spending the night in hotels frequently with no one around, gave him easy access to pornography on the hotel movie channels. he would certainly feel remorse and guilt after participating in the sin and would convince himself that next time it would be different. but next time would come and temptation would hit and he would inevitably fall again. after doing this over and over again for years and years, he finally learned about the concept of radical amputation from matthew 5. now when he went to stay at a hotel, the first thing he would do is literally unplug the tv and remove it from his hotel room. now when temptation came it was no longer an option for him to fall to that sin.
find the patterns of sin in your life and radically amputate them. it might hurt a little bit, and it might inconvenience you a bit but the rewards will far outway the challenges.
sounds like a sermon waiting to happen. did you copywrite this?
i might use it!
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I read the exact story you wrote about earlier this week, on the website it came from.
Thank you for this!!!
-from both of us