Have you ever enjoyed a glass of gasoline? Do you pound back a few bottles of paint thinner every now and then? Do you occasionally fall off the wagon and sip some weed killer? Of course not. It’s absurd. Sane people don’t drink poison because we understand the effect it has on us. It’s not hard. It’s not like we have to work at it. We simply understand that poison is …poison.

Sin is poison. It’s like drinking gasoline. In his love for us, God gave a simple list of poisons to avoid. They are commonly known as the Ten Commandments. G.K. Chesterton remarked on the simplicity of the Ten Commandments; “The reason they are so short and simple,” he said, “is because God forbids so little and permits so much.”

It’s true. But lots of people don’t believe it and suffer the consequences. The Bible says, “Dear friends, I urge you to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul” (1 Peter 2:11). To put it another way, sin rots your heart and mind. It makes you deaf to grace, blind to joy and numb to love. The damage inflicted by physical poison can be seen with an X-ray or a microscope and the damage inflicted by sin is just as obvious. People who drink sin find that it inevitably colors the way they talk, the way they think and the way they see the world. The more poison you ingest, the more it eats away at your soul until you become a hollow person in a sad haze of despair. So God warns against it.

The question is, are you going to believe the labels he puts on a few dangerous behaviors, or not? It’s worth thinking about.

I’ll see you on Sunday. Be true!

By Greg Daulton, Mount Rainier Christian Center