Thinking Through The True Cause Of Sin In Our World!

Rain is falling on the area of the Great American Desert where I reside. It started with a soft, gentle shower, just a light outpouring of summer nurture. By late this afternoon it had turned into an unrelenting steady, bitter cold, large drop affair. Not a good one to be motoring about in on two wheels. This precipitated(don't you just love puns)my using a car to run over to the market this evening. While at the market a young man stopped me and asked which sin he was missing, and then swiftly proceeded to tell the six he was sure of. Anger, envy, greed, gluttony, pride, laziness, and he looked at me awaiting the seventh. Lust, of course, is the correct answer, but I couldn't just leave it at that and continued to explain that our "lust" comes from the latin "luxuria" or as we might term it today, luxury, which would mean that by today's standards one man's lust is another man's luxury! It was meant as a sort of joke, but the intent was such that the young man headed off with more questions than he came with, which made me stop to think, is it just possible that the reason for the slurring of meanings is the result of the seductive side of sin itself. We don't just wake up one morning and decide to go out and do 3 or 4 before lunch, we, in our humaness, are quite literally seduced by the sin before the commission. We "entertain" the thought, give it permission to wander in many of the directions it can take, and then "justify" our own seduction and subsequent giving in to the desire. Now the whole process of each of the seven sins has set my mind to working on the difficulty we have with avoidance. None of us in our faith walk wish to be caught up in any of the sinful acts available to us. In fact most folks quite purposefully try very hard not to sin. Even those who are not christian follow a set of moral guidelines that they have chosen for themselves in one way or another. So the way that I'm looking at it right now is, "The act or deed(sin) is secondary to the seduction that precedes it, and that is the "thing" we need to be wary of. Sin itself is more or less unavoidable, but being aware of the seduction at it's inception could make an enormous difference in how we act on the impulses created by that seductive process." The bait in most traps is never aquired, because after we realize we've been trapped we're like that rodent that desires the cheese attached to a spring mechanism, dead! The other scenario is one in which we don't want the bait anymore because we realize we're trapped. Just had to think this through a bit "on screen" and then I can reread later to see if I'm making any sense. There is an escape from the trap, too. That is, if you aren't dead already as a result of the seduction! It's the forgiveness that is found through faith in God's Son, my Savior. If you know you've been seduced, seek God's help, He's particularly well versed when it comes to the problems that sin can create. In Christ's Love, Preacher.