To Uinta County Herald

Guest column – Standing Strong

For January 20, 2009 issue

From Pastor Doug Cox

679-9909

Crossroads Newlife Fellowship

Sin, Who Cares?

I’m sure you’ve been there. Sitting in one of your favorite restaurants with a close friend ready to engage in some catch up conversation while partaking of one of America’s favorite past times, eating your favorite food, and then it happens. You hear that annoying ring from a couple of booths away and the person answering starts talking to the person on the cell phone like they are yelling at someone across a canyon. So much for an enjoyable time out on the town!

When the hostess seated their party you didn’t recognize anything peculiar about them. They spoke in a cordial, normal tone of voice. When the waiter came and took their order they didn’t sound like the loud TV commercial guy who is always shouting at you. But then the invasion starts and now everyone in the restaurant knows who is on the phone and at least half of their conversation. Your own privacy has been invaded and you have to fight off those loud incoming words while trying to hear what your dinner partner is trying to say. Is this sin?

A few minutes pass and the conversation continues, (the phone conversation) and you begin to hear some things said that start to draw you in. Now you wish you could hear both sides of what first seemed like bothersome banter, but now you have become interested. Now instead of hearing what your own companion is saying you only see their lips move. You nod your head as though engaged, but the truth is you have exited your own conversation for the sake of being a snoop, to the other half sided exchange. You are having fun making up in your mind what is being said from the other end of the line. Is this sin?

Did you know many people have knowledge of God similar to an overheard cell phone conversation? They have heard a lot of what others have said about God, but not what God has said Himself. If asked what sin is they really don’t know because they have only heard a one sided interpretation of it. The reason is they have never read their Bible. They have accepted hearsay about what the Bible says. They have made up for themselves what they think God is saying and they have been told that the Bible is irrelevant, outdated, polluted and unreliable, but never given any careful, prayerful study to it on their own.

The truth is God does have something to say to us today about a lot of subjects including sin. His Word can be trusted as fulfillment of hundreds of prophecies concerning Jesus Christ indicates. Prophecies concerning His virgin birth as Seed of the woman, His lineage through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were all made ages before His birth. Where and when He would be born were no problem for the Holy Prophets, as they simply said what God told them to, often at the cost of their own life. We are told He would be despised and rejected by His own people, betrayed by a close friend and then sold for 30 pieces of silver, He was. It was told He would give rest to the weary, heal the broken hearted and cause the blind to see and the deaf to hear centuries before He ever became flesh and He did. Everything including the details of His awful death on the cross can be found in the pages of God’s written Word not just as an account of what did happen, but as prophecy of what would happen. The Bible is a reliable way to know God.

I want to encourage you today that you don’t have to have a one sided understanding or misunderstanding of Who God is. You can open a Bible and read for yourself the Words of Jesus, the Acts, the Epistles and the Prophets and find out that God speaks today. Open your Bible and read carefully that God loves you (John 3:16-17,36). Read that sin is real and deadly (John 8:24), and that God does care (Romans 6:32). Ringgggggg, ringgggggg.