You think the picnic went great until you start to itch and realize you brought ticks home with you. What tick bites—those sneaky sins whose venom is already inside before you notice—do you have? Those are the ones Jesus came to rescue us from.
We all want to avoid destruction and tragedy. And given our own inclinations, we all move away from the very source of escape from those things.
As we wrap up our exploration of Psalm 9, we’re confronted with a question: are we living in the path of the sin storm or turning the shelter of God?
After Jericho’s walls fall without a fight, Israel feels certain the next battle will be routine—so certain they never bother to ask God first. Joshua 7 exposes a harder truth: what happens when success convinces us we’ve earned God’s blessing. One man’s hidden sin and a leader’s unexamined confidence unravel an entire people, revealing the dangerous gap between assumed standing and actual standing before God.
As the Israelites finds themselves out in the wilderness for years, Numbers 20 shows a people in a fog of discouragement — even Moses himself loses sight of what God is doing. But even when the discouragement feels overwhelming, we don’t have to let it get the final word.
Little sins that seem almost harmless still multiply until they leave us too blind even for grace. In Genesis 4, Cain’s story is one of just such little sins and it serves as a caution as we tend our own “harmless sins.”
We think we have everything under control and know how to anticipate our weaknesses, yet sin still sneaks up looking attractive and attacks when least expected. In Genesis 3 a crafty serpent made the forbidden tree seem good for food, a delight to the eyes, and desirable for wisdom.
When pain makes even sitting in a chair impossible, someone else’s ordinary comfort can suddenly look like the one thing that would make life right. In Exodus 20:17, God forbids coveting anything that belongs to our neighbor—but how do we distinguish a healthy desire for change from a heart dissatisfied with what God has given?
Maybe you’ve had a Christmas where the lights and the music were all there, but it felt like you were watching from the other side of a piece of glass—present for the season, yet not really in it. Isaiah 53 describes a Savior understands how we feel on that other side of the glass and came to break it.
We’re always drawn to the new and the shiny. In Genesis 3, the serpent made the one tree God forbade look irresistable. Wouldn’t it be nice if everything we shouldn’t do just clearly didn’t look right?