122 HOW MUCH?
122 HOW MUCH?
Gal 5:9 A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.
How much is a bold question and can be placed almost anywhere in our lives. How much money is enough? How much pleasure is enough? How much control do you really have? Huh?
Why, we control our country by elected government. We control our home, our finances, our children, our neighbourhood, what we eat, what we wear, what we do, what we are and what we think. Do we?
I’ve often said that we are in control but how much do we control?
We have the ability to control everything that starts within us. Once it leaves us, we are no longer in control of it; we can only control how we will react to what we have started.
Until a thought leaves our mouth or before we start an action, we have the ability to stop it and think about what we are doing but even our thought process is controlled, by a large degree, by our heritage, parentage and environment.
Sin started with Adam and has spread down through the ages to present day man. [There I go again; picking on the men but the man was given the responsibility of leadership and can allow or resist any thoughts or actions that he comes in contact with; whether it starts with a man or a woman.]
Once Adam allowed Eve to take him to the forbidden tree, he gave up control of the situation to her; she gave up her control of the situation to the suggestions of the reptile that the devil used to talk to her. Neither of them realized that they were doing it for all of God’s creation. They were just satisfying their own curiosity and desire with no thoughts about anyone or anything else.
But, you say, they couldn’t know what would happen because it hadn’t happened yet and they couldn’t see the future. God could and did; and told them not to eat that fruit. That gave them all the knowledge that they needed to make an informed decision.
God has said that this leaven of sinful thinking will get worse and worse with the passing of time because we will live it and teach it to the next generation after us and they will live it and teach it to the next generation after them and so on and so on. This will go on until somewhere in the near future, God will see that sin has taken full control of His creation and He will become angry and stop the process with a Christian exodus and a return of His son, Jesus, as the ruler of this earth. [I know, there is more to this story but that is off the topic here.]
Sin can only be stopped by a change of heart from our selfish thoughts to His loving ones and has to be done one heart at a time because it is a personal thing that God cannot force. It has to be done from within and even then will not stop the actions that we have already started before the change; but, like the leaven, that heart change will start a new thought process that will start a chain of new actions that can grow into a healthy, happy Christian environment around that one person who has accepted God’s warnings as true.
How much control do you really have? You control your whole future but it has to be decided by your next thought and your next action otherwise there will be no change in your life.
