If you’ve not experienced this ‘bell-ringing milestone’ yourself… you probably know someone personally who has. I’ve known several over the years. It marks the end of what can be grueling treatments to rid the body of any and all cancer cells. But it’s the results of the PET-CT scan that every patient and their family members anxiously await for, because that’s when they receive the news that the treatments worked and they are now ‘cancer free’.

If a cancer patient undergoes major or radical surgery to remove cancerous organs or body parts…one of the first pieces of news you want to hear when coming out of surgery is to be told by a confident doctor… that they ‘got it all’.

Being told that they ‘got most of it’…or to be informed that despite surgery and follow up chemo or radiation treatments that there were still ‘some’ cancer cells detected in your blood work…would not be a source of great comfort to anyone. Care to guess why that might be?  I’m no expert at this but we do have a general understanding that for the most part… cancer cells have a tendency to spread.

Now, suppose you received an urgent notice from your local water board, informing you that all water will be cut off immediately and remain off for up to two days while emergency repairs are made given that there was some compromise in the system ,and ‘measures of fecal matter’ were detected in the public water drinking system. As troubling and inconvenient as this might be to most everyone, when the system is repaired and flushed out, what kind of numerical results to you want…and expect to hear when the water is flowing again? Are you going to be happy with an updated report informing you that they ‘got most of it’, and the ’numbers were reduced’ by 75 percent?

Anyone see where this might be going today?

I have come to learn over the years, that the way God views ‘sin’ and the way we view sin …is not the same. He (God) seems to be ‘OCD’ with it and makes it rather clear that He wants His children to be rid of it once and for all. Jesus did not teach us to ‘go and sin less’, or to ‘try harder to do better, but at least avoid those big sins’. You know as well as I do what Jesus taught…”Go, and sin no more…” (John 5:14; 8:11). Do you know why this is?

Sin spreads!

While Paul did not use the examples that I did here today, regarding cancer cells in the body or fecal matter in the drinking water, he did use on a couple of occasions the idea of leaven, or ‘yeast’ spreading through the dough, even asking…’Do you not know that a little leaven… leavens the whole lump’? (1 Cor. 5:6; Gal.5:9). When he presented that rhetorical question to the church there at Corinth, it was a follow up to his counsel on how a man who was caught in the sin of sexual immorality should be dealt with, and ‘ignoring’ the problem was not the correct method.

I know, we’re ‘not supposed to judge people’ …since ‘nobody is perfect’ and ‘we are all sinners saved by grace’. Or so we’ve been told; but that’s not the route that was taken by the early church. You might want to read Paul’s answer to that in vs. 9-13 there in 1 Cor. 5.

But do you remember what Paul’s counsel was regarding this man who was practicing this immoral sin? Paul did not suggest ‘stoning’ him or having him flogged, publicly. Look at verse 5 there and we read exactly what the order of ‘discipline’ was to be: ‘hand him over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh…SO THAT…his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord’. (what are told by Jesus that the ‘thief’s’ primary role or purpose is, in John 10:10?)

This unrepentant man was to be ‘put out’ from the local church body, because if ignored… allowing sin to continue can have a domino effect, in that it ‘spreads like yeast through a lump of bread dough’. Some might say- “well that was Paul speaking, but that’s not what Jesus would have done.” Oh really? Care to explain the ‘red letter words’ of Jesus found in Matt. 18:15-17? I don’t think you have to be a spiritual ‘rocket scientist’ to see how this plays out in a group or community of people when sin is not dealt with, as they began to ‘compare themselves by themselves’ which we are told is ‘unwise’ to do. (2 Cor. 10:12). Hebrews 3:12-13 explains in more detail what happens when sin is left unchecked.

Do I believe that God is ‘that serious about ‘sin’ in our midst? Well, if you could go back in time, you might want to interview some of those folks back in the early days of the church’s inception…who witnessed how God dealt with Ananias and his wife for telling a ‘little white lie’… as recorded in Acts 5. You might also want to revisit the stories found in Joshua 7 and 1 Samual 15 to see how God dealt with ‘incomplete obedience’ with Achin and King Saul.

Friends, I am not sharing these passages from our Bibles to try and make God out to be some ‘abusive father’ who has anger issues. And I have no doubt that if you let your imagination run away from you, the ‘enemy’ will be happy to add fuel to that fire of distortion. I’m simply trying to share what I have come to learn in recent years…just how God has ‘set things in place’ to operate in this world we live in, and I am still learning. And can I just tell you the situation is dire and urgent…and a ‘sleeping church’ would do well to wake up and smell the coffee, as we like to say. You might want to make sure you have 1 Peter 1:14-17 marked in your Bible, and be sure to note the call by Peter as to what percentage of our 'conduct' we are to be 'holy' in, and the mindset we should be in as we live this out.

I’m sure my message yesterday might not have ‘landed well’ for a number of readers; and I get that. But I can’t change or dilute God’s word to make people feel better about themselves. Sin gives place to our spiritual enemy who can ‘come in like a flood’, bringing much pain and destruction (Isa. 59:19). Sin is ‘serpent food’ that actually gives him ‘legal right’ to come and ‘devour’. We see this explained in Jeremiah 50:6-7, with the emphasis placed on vs. 7, given that is what the enemy said in justifying why they were doing what they did. And who is our ‘enemy’ today? (1 Pet. 5:8).

Care to guess how a child of God might avoid being ‘dealt with’ by the ‘wicked one’? Go read 1 John 5:18. That verse has been here all this time, same as the one in John’s gospel, 5:14. Can I just tell you, again…why all this talk makes your brain turn into mush and causes anxiety and confusion to want to well up within you about now? It’s because the majority of us have been taught that we will always ‘remain sinners (saved by grace) on this side of heaven’. And this is exactly why even today…’God’s people continue to be destroyed for a lack of knowledge’. (Hosea 4:6)

I’ll be back tomorrow, Lord willing.