rightymo
06-26-2009, 02:03 PM
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. (1 Cor. 13:11)
Every time I read this verse, my mind is jogged back to when my oldest daughter was a child. She used to play in her room for hours with her dolls, lining them up along the wall, and scolding them, or whatever little girls do with their dolls. One time though, I peeked in and she was just lying on her bed reading a book. I asked her why she wasn’t playing with her dolls, and had them all put away in the toy box. She was getting too big for them now, and decided that they were for “little” girls. After a week or so went by, as I checked on her one day, I saw her with the dolls all lined up against the wall again, but this time she was whispering so that no one would hear her. She had gotten them out and was playing with them again! She did not give them away when she made the decision that she was too old to play with dolls, but just set them aside, “just in case” she wasn’t really ready to let them go.
We are a lot like that with our “pet” sins, we simply put them away, so that they are still available “just in case” we want them again. We need to crucify them with the flesh, and not merely put them into the toy box of life. With our “toy box” available we can take them out, secretly of course, and play with them whenever we want, then put them back as if nothing had happened. I never told my daughter that I saw her do that, I decided to let it be her “secret” but I chuckled at the incident, and never forgot it. We need to totally destroy our toys of sin so that we cannot reclaim them whenever the mood hits us. As Paul did in this verse we need to “put them away” only permanently, and “burn the bridges” behind us, and only then will we find real joy in the Lord. Let’s “mortify the deeds of the body” (Rom. 8:13), and quit “playing with sin”. Our toys of sin will become weapons of destruction, and we will rue the day that we did not destroy those toys, but merely put them away in the toy box of life.
What about it? Are you ready to completely destroy any possibility of retrieving those old sins, and making sure they are not available again? Let’s not put them in a toy box, but in a furnace, and burn them with the old nature.
Every time I read this verse, my mind is jogged back to when my oldest daughter was a child. She used to play in her room for hours with her dolls, lining them up along the wall, and scolding them, or whatever little girls do with their dolls. One time though, I peeked in and she was just lying on her bed reading a book. I asked her why she wasn’t playing with her dolls, and had them all put away in the toy box. She was getting too big for them now, and decided that they were for “little” girls. After a week or so went by, as I checked on her one day, I saw her with the dolls all lined up against the wall again, but this time she was whispering so that no one would hear her. She had gotten them out and was playing with them again! She did not give them away when she made the decision that she was too old to play with dolls, but just set them aside, “just in case” she wasn’t really ready to let them go.
We are a lot like that with our “pet” sins, we simply put them away, so that they are still available “just in case” we want them again. We need to crucify them with the flesh, and not merely put them into the toy box of life. With our “toy box” available we can take them out, secretly of course, and play with them whenever we want, then put them back as if nothing had happened. I never told my daughter that I saw her do that, I decided to let it be her “secret” but I chuckled at the incident, and never forgot it. We need to totally destroy our toys of sin so that we cannot reclaim them whenever the mood hits us. As Paul did in this verse we need to “put them away” only permanently, and “burn the bridges” behind us, and only then will we find real joy in the Lord. Let’s “mortify the deeds of the body” (Rom. 8:13), and quit “playing with sin”. Our toys of sin will become weapons of destruction, and we will rue the day that we did not destroy those toys, but merely put them away in the toy box of life.
What about it? Are you ready to completely destroy any possibility of retrieving those old sins, and making sure they are not available again? Let’s not put them in a toy box, but in a furnace, and burn them with the old nature.