dailywordofdestiny

“Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us: Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Corinthians 5: 6-8). “Ye did run well; who did hinder you that ye should not obey the truth? This persuasion cometh NOT of Him who calleth you. A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump” (Galatians 5: 7-9).

I have been actively seeking God for His direction and guidance in the writing of the upcoming weekly articles. He is faithful. Holy Spirit has quickened my spirit to look more closely at my “soul state” and to see how healthy it really is when it’s held up to the standard of His Word. It is not an easy thing to do; especially when you BELIEVE you are saved and ready to enter into heaven at any given moment. I KNOW I am saved by His grace, but He has been showing me that according to my life-style choices, I am NOT as “disease free” as I believed I was (Matthew 10: 26-28; Ephesians 5: 26, 27; 2 Peter 3: 14). In the not too distant past I would have covered this critical examination with my “fig-leaf excuse” labeled: “I’m a work in process.” That is true for all of us, but there are some things that just don’t change in God’s Word (from the beginning to the end: Leviticus 13: 1-3; Numbers 28: 1 – 29: 40; Song of Songs 4: 7; 1 Timothy 6: 13-16; Hebrews 9: 13, 14; 1 Peter 1: 17-19; Revelation 3: 4) and it has a way of revealing the holes in our leaf.

The Lord desires that all of us have a “disease free” body, soul, and spirit. For that to happen; He wrote clear guidelines that we are to follow each day. The more we compromise with the guidelines; the worse our health becomes. With most physical illness (an example is CANCER) body deterioration can take a few years to “show up.” In many cases, by the time the illness is recognized as a problem, it has already caused not just one organ system to fail, but it has also involved other organs as well (metastases). The key Scripture verses above speak to the issue of “leaven” in our spiritual lives. Think of leaven (sin) as a “cancer”; just a little dab of it can infect your WHOLE life and conduct. My “infected state” is like a MUTANT sin cell and wherever I go, the people my life touches will become infected by my disease. You may think I am stretching it; I am not! The enemy uses our individual compromise with sin to infect us. We carry it with us into the whole body (Luke 17: 1-3; 1 Corinthians 12: 21- 26) and it doesn’t take long before sin is so widespread it can become untreatable.

LEPROSY is a disease process all of us should study in depth. The Hebrew meaning is to scourge/ be stricken with leprosy and the Greek meaning is scaliness; to peel, a flake. Oxford’s dictionary defines it as a chronic, infectious disease of skin (flesh) and nerves causing mutilation and deformities. A LEPER is a person with leprosy; shunned on moral grounds. In the Old Testament lepers were to stand afar off remaining separated from society (Leviticus 13: 21, 45, 46; 14: 2). They were confined “outside the camp.”

The Hebrew meaning of SIN is HABITUAL sinfulness. The Oxford dictionary meaning is the CONSCIOUS ACT of breaking divine or moral law. I suggest that sin is like leprosy. As sin takes its grip in the BODY (of Christ) and it becomes a conscious habit of concession to immorality, you will see things like division and deformity in our “spiritual thinking and actions.” This disease called “compromise with sin” makes the Church as a WHOLE powerless and weak, and it then decays in the darkness of its own choices (Luke 11: 34, 35; John 1: 5; 3: 19, 20; 1 John 1: 5, 6). What clever deception; to fool even the elect (Matthew 24: 23-25).

A couple years ago, I was able to view the Grand Canyon for the first time. At the entrance to one of the points of interest, a lone coyote stood at the side of the road. As each car approached the coyote slowly walked to the edge of the road, out of the cover of the surrounding trees. When he heard a window roll down; he would continue to approach the car. I noticed that as the person in the car ahead of us opened their car door the coyote turned and ran back into the woods, but only a short distance away. As that car drove off and we approached, he came back into the open; waiting for a “tasty morsel” he hoped to get. I thought about sin and how it takes us out from under the protective cover of God and away from the protection that the greater “body/pack” can provide for us in times of trouble.

The more we choose NOT to follow God’s guidelines to a healthy spiritual, moral, and physical life (allowing compromise in our daily walk) the easier it becomes (a habit) to think we can live any way we want to. Like the coyote we begin seeking after a “tasty morsel” and we become fat and lazy (Isaiah 6: 9-11). We don’t see the danger ahead until one day; BANG, a heart attack or a bullet hits and we can’t escape death’s trap (Matthew 27: 3-5; Luke 22: 1-6).

God did not want His people absorbed into the world’s culture and environment. Society may pressure us, as believers, to conform to its way of life and thought, but yielding to that pressure will create confusion as to which side we should be on and also eliminate our effectiveness in serving God. I encourage you to be a “doer of the word, and not a hearer only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straight-way forgetteth what manner of man he was” (James 1: 22-24).