Patching up the hole

Squirrels can be very pesky animals, especially the squirrels around Tipton. With the abundance of pecans that we got this year, the squirrels have been very active.  And they are very well fed.  You can hear them running across the roof of the Fellowship Hall and it sounds more like a herd of buffalo then a few little squirrels.  But recently, the squirrels have become more than their usual annoying selves. 

A few weeks ago, we heard the sound of some animal, not on the roof, but in the roof.  It sounded like something running and moving on the ceiling tiles.  Our first guess, with it being so cold outside, was mice.  We had our pest control company come out and they put bait out to get rid of them.  But after a few days, the noise hadn’t died down.  So, they came out again and found that whatever the animal was, it had not taken the bait.  So their determination was that, somehow, these squirrels had come inside.

I asked them what we needed to do and they said that there is nothing to get rid of squirrels.  You just have to find where they are coming in and plug it up.

That got me to thinking; just like those squirrels who don’t belong in our ceiling, there are things that get into our lives that don’t belong there.

The Apostle Paul highlighted some of these things in his letter to the Ephesian believers.

Ephesians 4:31 (NASB)
 Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.

These are sins.  And just like the squirrels don’t belong in my ceiling, these things don’t belong in the lives of believers.  Also like the squirrels, these things are very hard to get rid of. 

Now, if I try to catch those squirrels individually, all I will do is wind up running myself ragged.  The same is true for these sins in our life.  If we try to remove them one at a time from our lives we will be unsuccessful.  What we have to do is plug up the hole! 

How do we do that?  With Christ Jesus!!

If I allow those little critters to run wild, they will eventually wind up taking over.  If we all those sins to run wild in our lives, they will eventually take over.  What needs to happen is that we need to stop the source of our problems.  Fortunately, Christ tells us exactly how to do that.  Romans 10:9-10 tells us that, “…that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.”

As we put our faith in Christ, His death cancels the penalty of sin in our lives.  Now, this doesn’t mean that we won’t sin anymore.  It means that sin no longer has the power over us.  And because of the Holy Spirit of God that lives within us, we can get a handle on these sins and bring them to the foot of the cross.

Have you patched the “sin hole” in your life?

Pastor Paul Beam