There's this guy online, I don't know his name, who runs a landscaping company. He has posted a bunch of videos where he goes up to a random house in the neighborhood with an overgrown yard and offers to clean it up for free. A good deed, and also, free advertising, right? Many times when he cleans up these yards, he finds sidewalks or driveways underneath all the dirt and the weeds and the overgrown grass and bushes. The path to the home was there, but no longer visible or usable until he cleaned things up.
Where I live, it's a desert. It’s a green desert, but it’s still a desert. Most of the year, we struggle to get anything non-native to the area to grow. The thing, however, which isn’t much of a struggle to grow? Weeds. They seem to just sprout up anytime we get any kind of rain. And if we get a lot of rain? They are everywhere.
Funny thing about weeds. When you first notice you have weeds, they’re usually just tiny things. Barely an inch high, with only a few leaves. They seem rather harmless. So harmless, in fact, that you might make the mistake of thinking you don't have to pull them right away.
When you go back out, however, even just a week later, they might already be up to your knees. Weeds grow so fast you start to wonder why you can't actually see them growing when you’re standing there looking at them. Seemingly overnight, they've grown an additional 10 inches! How does that happen? Also, they multiply. Instead of only one or two, now you have dozens or even hundreds merely because you delayed a week in pulling them.
Weeds are insidious. Invasive. And if left unchecked, they will cancel out the vegetation you actually want and take over everything.
It could be said that sin works the same way. We allow little sprouts of sin in our life because we think they don’t really matter. We think we can wait to address them. They're merely "little" sins, after all. No big deal. God loves us and He's forgiven us of everything, right? His mercy knows no bounds? So, surely, He doesn't care about these small things.
Or does He? After all, those little tiny sprouts of sin can quickly blossom into much bigger things. Sin has a way of snowballing. Much like weeds, sin can grow overnight and within even a few days or a week, suddenly be incredibly difficult to manage.
Sin is insidious. Invasive. And if left unchecked, sin will cancel out what you actually want in your life and take over everything.
John, the disciple Jesus loved, writes in 1 John 3:9, 10, "No one who is born of God will continue to sin... This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not God's child, nor is anyone who does not love their brother and sister."
We have often brushed this verse off, saying, well, it’s not possible for anyone but Jesus to be sinless. But maybe that’s not entirely with John saying, because he also emphasizes that when we do mess up, there is grace for those who turn back to God. I think it’s that turning back bit that is important. It’s the recognizing that this thought, this word, this action, this habit, this addiction, this distraction - is not honoring to God. It is not following His command to love Him and to love others. Then it is submitting that to God, asking for his forgiveness, and having the intention of turning away from sin and back to God.
That’s what repentance is. Turning away from and turning back to. No one in sinless. But that is not an excuse to stay in our sin. We still need to continuously repent and submit to God all our ways.
I tell my boys sometimes that saying sorry doesn’t mean anything if you keep doing the wrong thing. It’s just a word. I think repentance is like that as well. It’s easy to say yeah, yeah, I’m sorry for my sins, but if we keep doing them, are we really sorry? Do we truly understand the gravity of our sin and how it separates us from our Creator?
Or, bigger question, if we continue in sin, are we really saved? Because John has some pretty strong words to say about that, too. Also, note these verses in Hebrews 10:26-27, "If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God."
When we start to see weeds in our garden, it’s important to pull them right away and not let them grow. It’s also important to pay attention to what kind of seeds are being planted in our garden. Seeds can come from many different places: the people we hang out with, the things we watch online, social media, binge-watching, reading, the news... Weeds, after all, don’t grow out of good soil - they grow from seeds.
Be careful what seeds you allow to be planted in your garden.
Be careful what you allow to grow.
Don't let it get so bad that you lose the path entirely.
In closing, hold onto the words of John, "The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever" (1 John 2:17).
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