But I Thought These Were Rice Cakes

Today’s application is drawn from Leviticus 1-4.

“Now if the whole congregation of Israel sins unintentionally, and the thing is hidden from the eyes of the assembly, and they have done something against any of the commandments of the Lord in anything which should not be done, and are guilty:” – Leviticus 4:13

God is laying down the law. His point: I’m perfect and you’re not. If we want to hang with God, we’re going to need Jesus. Case-in-point: The law forgave accidents, but if you knew you were sinning when you did the deed, you were toast.

Makes a guy pine for the good ol’ days when we were still under the Law, huh?

How often have we consoled ourselves by claiming that we fell into a sin by accident. It just snuck up on me. I never saw it coming. I swear.

Are you kidding me?

That’s like a kid getting caught shoving her face full of Oreos and claiming that she thought she was eating rice cakes. I mean, what kind of a defense is that? Little Suzy knows when she is chomping down Oreos just like we know when we’re getting into sin. You can tell because we jump when we get caught.

The problem is that we want to sin. It’s our nature and honestly, it makes a lot of sense. Sin is really fun. And convenient. And profitable. That’s why we’ll do almost anything to justify it. But we if we believe that sin leads to misery, destruction, death and really gross breath and if we want to do what’s best for our eternal souls then we have to start being honest about the intentions behind our choices. Having a heart-to-heart with our… heart is the first step towards becoming like Jesus.

Lord, thank you for giving me the ability to choose holiness over sin. Help me to make the right choice no matter how much fun sin is or how much I feel I stand to lose by choosing Your path. Give me the strength to remember that sin is not fun in the end and how much I ultimately stand to gain by choosing your path.

Please leave comments with your thoughts on the following questions or feel free to respond to anything else that comes to mind. You can leave comments by clicking the tweet button at the top of this article or you can start typing under “Leave a Reply” below. Whatever you tweet will be added to the discussion of this post.

Can we unintentionally sin?

How does having the Holy Spirit inside of us make our choices concerning sin different from the Israelites?

How do we practice holiness when we’re stuck in a rut of sinfulness?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 19th, 2010 at 9:05 pm. It is filed under Bible Studies and tagged with choices, compromise, consequences, following god, happiness, sin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.