Sinning with Stretchy Pants

Our youth pastor once talked about how avoiding sin required some prep work. You need safe guards in place. He compared it to going over to a certain family's house, who is known for serving yummy meals, while he is on a diet. He said that it required doing some prep work which meant that he would take along his own food, to ensure he stayed on his diet.

Sitting in my pew, I felt a little ashamed. When he mentioned doing prep work before going over to that family's house for the meal, my first thought was to skip all other meals that day and wear stretchy pants so I could pig out.

So instead of sticking with what is right, I immediately went to planning a way to not do what was right.

Definitely not a Hall of Faith moment there.

I have done that in my past. I knew I wasn't doing what God wanted me to do, but I went ahead and wore the proverbial stretchy pants so I wouldn't feel confined by my convictions.

We can come up with some great justifications while doing our sin planning. Just like I thought of skipping meals so that when I indulged later, it wouldn't be as bad, we convince ourselves the sin we are planning on doing isn't as bad as another sin. The problem with that is the fact that sin is sin.

There are no big sins or little sins. We like to categorize them as such because it makes us feel better. We don't feel we are as bad as we could be if we were doing such and such. Or we aren't as bad as that other sinner over there. But Jesus only died on one cross. He didn't die on a big cross to pay for the big sins and then go die on a small cross for the little sins.

One size cross fits ALL our sins.

Back to the stretchy pants.

Instead of thinking of ways to plan how we can sin and get away with it (yeah, there's no getting away with sinning), we should spend our energy and time thinking of ways to plan how to avoid sin.

So no more stretchy pants for me!