Cherries Choices & Sin
And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it
out. It is better for you to enter
the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell,
where
Their
worm
does not die,
And
the fire is not quenched.
Everyone will be salted with fire.
Salt is good,
but if it loses its saltiness, how
can you make it salty again? Have
salt in yourselves, and be at peace with each other.
(Mark
9:47-50)
What do cherries have to
do with choices and sin you ask? Let me tell
you a story about our cherry trees:
We have 3 very large
cherry trees in our garden. They were
loaded with cherries and for weeks I had been eyeing them, waiting, anticipating when these beautiful,
sweet, ripe cherries would be ready to eat.
The day finally arrived and my husband announced we could eat them. Of course we
all began eating them immediately and being the sharing type we also wanted to share some with our
neighbors and friends. This went on for a few weeks until my
husband took a baggie full of these beautiful cherries to work to share. He was
extremely proud that he had grown these cherries this year and wanted to share them
with his horticulture buddies at work.
Chris packaged them up in a plastic baggie, kept them in the fridge
overnight and took them to work the next day.
A co-worker, knowledgeable in pests took one look at the
baggies of cherries and pointed out to my husband that these cherries were no
good they were full of WORMS.....aaaagggghhhh.
Of course Chris called me
immediately and sent a note to all we had shared the cherries with to let us
know the cherries were full of worms and to stop eating them. I was disgusted by this to say the
least.....we had been eating what looked and tasted like delicious cherries for
weeks but in actuality we were eating worms! As it turns out Chris’ co-worker explained a fruit fly had
gotten into the fruit and this is where the worms came from. The remedy to remove the worms……put
them in salt water…..
Immediately I thought of
the verse above…. and how interesting it is that when Jesus spoke of sin and the worms
of hell he also spoke of salt.
The choices of sin are like this.....we
can miss them so easily because they are wrapped up in such a pretty package, sweet,
juicy, good for food and pleasing to the eye yet full of worms.
I see how Adam and Eve may
have been so easily deceived and ate from the one tree they were commanded not
to eat from.... particularly since the fruit was:
…good for
food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom,.…- Gen 3:6
NIV
Our cherries certainly looked like this....
Oswald Chambers says in
his devotional My Utmost for His Highest that we must “reconcile
ourselves to the fact of sin. Not
recognizing it and refusing to deal with it produces disasters in life.”
Recognizing our sinful
nature and choosing to believe Jesus is the first and most important choice we must make. This choice saves us from hell
where the worm never dies.
However, there are many
other choices in life that we see before us that may have us eating worms…..
How often I have made
choices based on what looks good, is pleasing to my eyes and yet is something
as disgusting as being filled with worms from God’s perspective for my life and creates a disaster.
An example of this was my
choice to go back to school to become a physical therapist. When thinking about and looking at this
choice it looked pleasing and beautiful.
I would be helping people, expanding my mind and preventing us from
having to depend on my husbands income in case he lost his job again as well as
to help pay for college and weddings.
My husband was fully behind me with this choice. So I pursued this dream. I also felt God was
allowing this for me and since the doors opened for me to go back to school I was off and
running. As I continued in school I began to anticipate the fruit of my harvest.....the prestige of having the title Physical Therapist and that most coveted reward...the paycheck.
Looking back now I think
God sometimes allows us to make choices to teach us lessons….
He says if your eye causes
you to sin pluck it out….and in order to pluck out the eye that is causing you to sin you must first recognize it.
What I was “seeing” when I
made this decision was not sin at all but a beautiful thing. I had been a stay at home mom for years which was wasting my talents or so I had been told by the world, my brain was turning to mush and I could stimulate my mind again and I could fulfill my dreams and desires of helping people and my family.
What I could not "see" was
my heart motive behind this choice.
In truth my attitude was one of superiority over my husband since he
lost his job and I thought he was no longer able to sufficiently support his
family, pride in wanting to be “known” as a physical therapist, a professional
with a high degree, and arrogance in taking my destiny and dreams in my own
hand and fulfilling my wants and desires.
All full of worms….I did
end up with a masters in Physical Therapy which turned out to be....the hardest 5
years of my life…5 people in my family died in that time including my dad and my brother. And even though I graduated Magna Cum Laude I was failed in my last
clinical rotation for political reasons, which threatened to put me back in
school for another year. I did end
up finishing on time after having to challenge the committee for academic
revue, which was horrifically stressful.
I eventually went on to work as a PT in various jobs however the financial
freedom I had so hoped for just did not come. In fact
every year I have worked we have had a huge tax bill we could not pay so we are
now more in debt than when I started this pursuit. I also realized that the dream I thought I wanted so badly
was not what I wanted at all. What I realized was the most valuable and worthwhile job I could have was being a wife to my husband and
mother to my family.
This choice to go back to
school and work hard looked so good from the outside as I gazed upon it however,
when I put it into the "salt water" I saw my motives and recognized it
as sin…. my choice was full of worms…..
I was in need of plucking
out my “eye” for seeing my choices from my own self-aggrandizement, pride and
self-arrogance.
God says everyone will be
salted with fire…I have definitely been salted with the fire of affliction during
these past few years and when I began to take a look at what my heart motives
were I realized I needed to pluck out my “eye” that was seeing this as a good
thing. Because in reality it was full of worms.
Every one of us has choices
to make in our lives, every day and every hour. What we think, how we react to another’s words, what we will
do, how we will behave, what we will buy, where we will go.... And these choices are largely dependent
on how we “see” our circumstances.
Jesus says he is the water
of life and we are the salt of the earth….
Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one
who wishes take the free gift of the water of life. [Rev 22:17 NIV]
You are
the salt of the earth. [Mat 5:13 NIV]
Have salt among yourselves, and be at peace with
each other. [Mar 9:50 NIV]
The very first choice that must
be considered of course is the choice to take the free gift of the water of
life. The choice to believe in
Jesus.
The salt will come over time as we walk with Jesus and then....
From this perspective we can not only gaze at our choices before us "seeing" the
good and the beautiful but we can also take our heart motives
behind those choices and put them into the living salt water in us and expose the worms before we ever "eat" of the fruit.
I sure wished I had done this before "eating" my choices however God is good, faithful and forgiving and saves us from the worms....that is another blog though.....
So loving on you,
