Sunday, April 17, 2011

Sin hardens hearts

“Be careful then, dear brothers and sisters.  Make sure that your own hearts are not evil and unbelieving, turning you away from the living God.  You must warn each other every day, while it is still “today,” so that none of you will be deceived by sin and hardened against God”.   Heb. 3:12-13 NLT

This Bible passage in Hebrews three reveals some disturbing characteristics of sin.  Sin is seductive, enticing, deceitful and destructive.
The deceitfulness of sin is that it cannot deliver what it promises.   It deceives a person into believing they can ‘have it all’ or they can ‘take it or leave it’.  It promises pleasure, contentment, fulfillment and excitement but what it really delivers in these areas is only momentary which opens the door to its addictive quality.  The pleasure is never quite enough to produce satisfaction whereby forcing the person into greater perversions until it kills them.
A person with hidden/secret sins always offers justification and rationalization for their actions.  They can put on a convincing appearance and even seem to be moral.
However, sin’s ‘drug-like’ grip always demands more because what use to satisfy them no longer does.   They reach a point where they are never satisfied and lose control of their ‘addiction’.   They become slaves to their flesh and along the way their heart has become hardened.
A hardened attitude is not something that happens over night, but rather a habitual state of mind that results in itself as inflexibility of thinking and insensitivity of conscience.   A hard heart and attitude can eventually make repentance impossible because they do not want to change.
A hidden/secret sin works insidiously, but with quiet power.
Judas, one of the twelve disciples is a good example of a man unsuspected with secret sins.  Until the final revelation was made most likely no one suspected anything of the hidden ‘presence’ within.   They over looked the obvious signs of rudeness, jealousy, control, lust and greed because he was one of the “disciples”.
No matter how clean we are on the outside, if the heart remains unchanged we will return to what we came from.
“If people escape the moral filth of this world through the knowledge of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ, then get tangled up in it again and are overcome by it, they are worse off than they were before.”     II Peter 2:20   CEB

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