Sin-Ripples

1 Corinthians 5:6-8 (ESV) ⁶ Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? ⁷ Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. ⁸ Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

I am no electrician or handy man. My wife can, without hesitation, attest to this. I do my best to do small projects around our home. Replace a light fixture. Perhaps swap out a toilet? (The toilet was a flawless install just so you know.) Maybe paint a wall. Yet if you asked me to swap out a box in a ceiling to run wires through for a light fixture…you’re asking for trouble.So let me just say, I watched a few Youtube videos and thought it was an easy enough task. I confidently went into our basement, removed the old light fixture and got everything ready for the repair. My wife came down and held the ladder for me for a moment as my balance is less than optimal. The metal ladder. Let that simmer in your mind for a moment as you see the obvious outcome.I SWORE I shut the breaker off. I am 200% confident I had certainly not done something so stupid as to leave a breaker wide open while handling highly dangerous electrical wiring. I was wrong. I got hit with the full brunt of all that power. The biggest issue is that my wife…holding the metal ladder…also took the full brunt of it.This is EXACTLY how our sin works. It doesn’t merely impact just us. It spreads and ripples to others around us. Your families, friends, coworkers, neighbors, brothers and sisters in your church family…it has no bias. Sin will happily impact as many as it possibly can.

Look at the Scripture for today. Paul writing to the church in Corinth in a very serious yet loving tone on the topic of unaddressed sin. He uses the imagery of leavening in bread dough. When you leave that old leavening (sin), it ruins the entire lump of dough. You cannot have good bread from bad dough. Once it is in that dough, it is too late. You must remove it BEFORE you start working it in.This is quite literally the perfect illustration for battling our temptation to sin. Sin that takes many forms. It can be sexual sin as Paul is addressing in the scripture for today. It could be arrogance and pride as in my example of electrocuting myself and my wife (we were okay). It could be in gluttony, and keeping too much of a snack or beverage in your home that you struggle with self-control on.

This is where the root of the ripples begin. In our weakness. There is no potential for a ripple effect, if there is no stone that ever hits the placid lake. If we remove the temptation and/or ability to commit the sin in the first place…we remove the ability for that sin to spread and impact others.

Had my pride been in check, and I had listened to my wife to double check the breaker, we wouldn’t have been electrocuted. Yet we also wouldn’t have this hilarious illustration that we tend to use for dinner conversations and apparently devotional and sermon illustrations.

Seek God for wisdom in such scenarios. Seek for Him to show you where He desires you to remove temptation…and remove it. Kill it. Destroy it. It will only cause you misery in the long run. And it won’t stop with you. It will impact everyone around you. Soli Deo Gloria!!!!