SIN,
CONTAMINATION BY

ONE day my granddaughter decided to fix me breakfast. It really wasn’t that hard for her to do because she was fixing me cold cereal. She was fixing one of her favorite cereals, Lucky Charms. When the bowl was placed in front of me, I saw that there was a problem. Lucky Charms is full of marshmallows and I don’t like marshmallows. The cereal part is fine with me. It is the marshmallows that cause me great concern because I really don’t like marshmallows. But, marshmallows were everywhere. They were spread throughout the cereal. So I got a paper towel, laid it beside the bowl, and began the tedious process of removing marshmallows from my cereal. One after another, I began moving marshmallows out of my cereal so I could eat. The marshmallows looked like they were multiplying. It seemed like the more I removed, the more there were to remove. It got so that after awhile, I didn’t even want to eat cereal anymore. I got tired of trying to fix the good by getting rid of the bad.

Our physical frames have been absolutely and completely contaminated by sin. It is a task with no end to try to get rid of the stuff that is keeping us from being the kind of people God wants us to be.849

[Grace, Need for; Salvation, Need for; Sin, Dealing with; Sin Nature, Residue]

Rom. 3:23; Eph. 2:8–9; 1 John 1:8