PERSPECTIVE ON SIN #2
From "Swindoll's Ultimate Book of Illustrations and Quotes"
SIN
The late president Galvin Coolidge returned home from attending church early one Sunday afternoon. His wife had been unable to attend, but she was interested in what the minister spoke on in the service. Coolidge responded, "Sin." She pressed him for a few words of explanation. And being a man of few words with his wife, he responded, '"Well, I think he was against it."
—Paul Lee Tan, Encyclopedia of 7,700 Illustrations
A certain man wanted to sell his house in Haiti for $2,000. Another man wanted to buy it, but because he was poor, he couldn't afford the full price. After much bargaining, the owner agreed to sell the house for half the original price with, just one stipulation: he would retain ownership of one small nail protruding from just over the door.
After several years, the original owner wanted the house back, but the new owner was unwilling to sell. So the first owner went out, found the carcass of a dead dog, and hung it from the single nail he still owned. Soon the house became unlivable, and the family was forced to sell the house to the owner of the nail.
The moral of the parable is, "If we leave the devil with even one small peg in our life, he will return to hang his rotting garbage on it, making it unfit for Christ's habitation."
—Leadership, Spring 1983
Sin does not serve well as a gardener of the soul. It landscapes the contour of the soul until all that is beautiful has been made ugly; until all that is high is made low; until all that is promising is wasted. Then life is like the desert—parched and barren. It is drained of purpose. It is bleached of happiness. Sin, then, is not wise, but wasteful. It is not a gate, but only a grave.
—C. Neil Strait, quoted in Lloyd Cory Quote Unquote
The greater the man, the dearer price he pays for a short season of sinful pleasure.
—F. B. Meyer, David
Believers throughout church history—the early church fathers, the Reformers, the Puritans—have been inspired by Scripture to reduce spirituality to two lists known as "the seven deadly sins and the seven virtues" of saintliness. The former includes pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust. The latter includes wisdom, justice, courage, temperance, faith, love, and hope. Even though it finds its origin in one whose life was not centered on Christ our Lord, Mahatma Gandhi's own list of "seven deadly sins" in the form of contrasts deserves our attention: Wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principle.
—Max DePree, Leadership is an Art
The grass on the other side is often not greener and often not even edible.
—James Dobson
The first and worst of all fraud is to cheat oneself. All sin is easy after that.
—-Philip Bailey, nineteenth-century poet
Let's say we were to get twenty of the best broad jump or long jump athletes in the world and take them to Huntington Beach pier and line them up. And let's say they were instructed, "We want you to jump as far as you can out into the water." Some could jump twenty-five feet. Some would come near the record and jump twenty-seven. Perhaps one could set a new record and jump twenty-nine or thirty feet. But nobody could jump to Catalina Island. It is humanly impossible. Every person would miss the mark because Catalina Island is twenty-six miles away. In Romans 3:23 there is the universal statement that God gives to all men when He says, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."
All have missed the mark. All may have tried, but not one of them even came close to a spiritual Catalina, if you please. They all jump, they all tried all sorts of things, but by birth, by choice, by action, by nature, man constantly misses the mark, no matter how good his intentions may be.
—J. Vernon McGee, quoted in Paul Lee Tan, Encyclopedia of 7,700 Illustrations
During my hitch in the marines back in 1958, I was stationed on Okinawa where there was a leprosarium. At that time I was playing in the third division band in the Marine Corps and we were to do a performance on that north part of the island of Okinawa.
I had read about leprosy, but I had never seen a leper and I wasn't really prepared for what I saw. We went over a bridge or two and got into the interior of this compound. I saw stumps instead of hands. I saw clumps instead of fingers. I saw half faces. I saw one ear instead of two. I saw the dregs of humanity unable even to applaud our performances. I saw in the faces of men, women, and even some teenagers an anguish crying out. We could play music for them, but we could not cleanse them of their disease.
In Scripture leprosy is a picture of sin. And we see that it is cleansed rather than healed. Only Jesus' blood has the power to cleanse us of our condition of sinful corruption. Now I understand when Scripture says, "He was moved with compassion."
Because of sin, man has taken the deity out of religion, the supernatural out of Christianity, the authority from the Bible, God out of education, morality and virtue out of literature, beauty and truth out of art, ethics out of business, fidelity out of marriage.
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Fom the book: "1001 Quotes, Illustrations and Humorous Stories"
Quotes
Sin
Many Christians define sin as the sum total of acts which they themselves do not commit.
Carlyle Marney (Self-evaluation, Pride)
I have more trouble with D. L. Moody than any other man I know.
D. L. Moody (Self-awareness, Character)
You can't repent of confusion of psychological flaws inflicted by your parents—you're stuck with them. But you can repent of sin. Sin and repentance are the only grounds for hope and joy. The grounds for reconciled, joyful relationships. John Alexander (Repentance, Confession)
Contrary to popular opinion, sin is not what you want to do but can't; it is what you should not do because it wall hurt you—and hurt you bad. . . . God is not a policeman; he is a Father concerned about his children. When a child picks up a snake and the father says, "Put that down right this minute!" the child thinks he's losing a toy. The fact is, he is not losing a toy; he is losing a snake.
Steve Brown (Discipline, Correction)
People in general, Christian people in particular, tend to divide sins into two categories: their sins and our sins. The Bible, of course, knows no such distinction. Sin is sin, without partiality shown to the sins of God's people—our sins.
Joe Bayly (Judgment, Guilt)
Whenever God touches sin it is independence that is touched, and that awakens resentment in the human heart. Independence must be blasted clean out, there must be no such thing left, only freedom, which is very different. Freedom is the ability not to insist on my rights, but to see that God gets his.
Oswald Chambers (Independence, Freedom)
Illustrations
In his book Fuzzy Memories, Jack Handey writes: There used to be this bully who would demand my lunch money every day. Since I was smaller, I would give it to him. Then I decided to fight back. I started taking karate lessons. But then the karate lesson guy said I had to start paying him five dollars a lesson. So I just went back to paying the bully.
Too many people feel it is easier just to pay the bully than it is to learn how to defeat him.
Humor
After telling a class of four to seven-year-olds the story of Adam and Eve, I began to quiz them. "What was Eve's punishment for disobeying God?" I asked. A bright-eyed girl raised her hand. "She had to crawl on her belly and eat dirt for the rest of her life."
Ellen Cowan (Disobedience, Women)
I had just finished a lesson on Christian behavior. "Now, Billy" I asked, "tell me what we must do before we can expect to be forgiven for our sins."
Without hesitation, Billy replied, "First we gotta sin."
Clara Null (Forgiveness, Repentance)
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THOUGH WE HAVE FINISHED ON A HUMOURS NOTE, SIN IS VERY REAL; THE BIBLE TELLS US ABOUT SIN IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS. YET WHERE SIN ABOUNDS, GOD'S LOVE IN GRACE AND MERCY THROUGH REPENTANCE AND ACCEPTING JESUS AS OUR PERSONAL SAVIOR [HIS SACRIFICIAL DEATH BY SHEDDING HIS BLOOD TO WASH AWAY OUR SINS] CONQUERS SIN AND DEATH, AND GIVES US ETERNAL LIFE.
Keith Hunt
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