Just Say No

Day 285 in my "Year In My Life Through Pictures" blog series

I have a sweet tooth. Just wanted to get that out there. So, what does a sweet tooth not agree with? My diet. This makes it very difficult when one of my favorite sweets is in the house, Little Debbie Nutty Bars. This is a test to my flesh, if I give in for a momentary satisfaction or to "just say no". I have determined that just saying no is the way to go. This also is affected by my "big why" in that my "why" for losing weight is much larger than my "why" for wanting to eat a Nutty Bar. Well, a whole box of Nutty Bars.

This is also a struggle in the spiritual realm often for me. Should I really commit that sin of the flesh instead of remaining true to my Lord? Do I really want to defile my Savior for a few moments of fleshly pleasures? Of course the answer is a firm no, so why do we choose to sin anyway? Is it that our flesh is so depraved, even if we are children of God? Is our flesh that in control that we can't say no? Not at all, we say no all the time to sin. In fact if not by the grace of God in any of our lives, saved or not, we would be so heinous that no one would want to be around anyone else. We couldn't have friends, because we would always be trying to steal from them, lie to them and probably kill them. The grace of God that keeps us from doing that is an amazing thing to ponder on for a while.

Just how bad would we be? Would we be bank robber bad? How about murderer bad? How about Hitler bad? I'd say even worse than any of those, because even Hitler had a type of universal grace from God that still withheld his full potential of evil, even though he is often considered the most evil man to have ever lived. Even Satan is restrained to a degree by God's grace. After all in Job we are told that Satan must obtain permission still from God to do anything.

So next time you are set between deciding to sin and deciding to not sin, think of God's grace in your life. Think on Him and His love a perseverance and tolerance of our sins, but not in a way to justify sinning, but in order to show just how much He loves us. That thought would make any true child of God really have to fight to say "yes" to sinning.