Saturday, September 28, 2013

Innocent Sin

A husband and wife approach the express checkout lane at their local department store. The sign states “20 items or less” and they look to their cart and see they have 24 items. They are almost to the counter and a line is forming behind them. How do you solve this problem?

Rather than get out of line, or even attempt to check out all 24 items, they choose instead to split it. She checks out 20 items, then he checks out the remaining 4. Seems clever, even a bit humorous. But what just really happened?

We can list off numerous examples like this, where we run into a rule that we don’t want to break out of desire of being “honest” or a person of “integrity”, so instead we show a little creativity and “bend” the rule or find some loop hole through which we can jump. But I wonder, is this truly a route to take. Sure technically we are not breaking the rule, but we are cheating the system, and by doing that we are breaking from a life of integrity.

But this is all too often how we operate, and the motivating force is not the desire for integrity or honesty or any other honorable motivation. More often the motivation is the desire for convenience, and especially in our American culture, speed. We look for the quick, easy way out of a situation, but yet want to be “good Christians” so we get creative and bend the rules just a little bit.

The writer of Psalm 1 was concerned with this problem. When we flirt with sin, when we participate in what are innocent sins, we are opening ourselves, allowing our minds to begin to rationalize small infractions, and those small infractions always seem to lead to larger and more significant sins. Some time ago I posted about a song called Pebble in the Shoe which directly relates to this danger. Casting Crowns also has sang a song about this, called Slow Fade. I suggest we all take to heart the words of this song, and maybe think twice next time before we rationalize some innocent sin.

 

Casting Crowns – Slow Fade

No comments: