Not Even a Hint

Imagine it is the coldest day of the year. You wake up in the morning and crank up the heat. But for some reason, it just doesn't seem to get warm in your house. You keep turning the heat up and you pile blankets on top of you.....but still...you are freezing!

Then you realize that there is a draft coming in. Once you investigate, you notice that the draft is coming from your back door being completely OPEN!!!! The coldest day of the year and you are letting in all the cold air from outside. No heater would be able to keep up with that!

That may seem crazy, but I have to tell you, I know exactly how that feels............because it happened to me recently!

Yes, on one of the coldest days of the year, I woke up and turned up the heat higher than normal to take the "chill" out of the air. I put 2 long-sleeved shirts on and then I piled 2 blankets on top of me while I began my day at work.

A little while later, my kids went off to school and my hubby left for work. I sat downstairs, typing away on my computer, but noticing that I was just not getting warm at all. A few hours went by and I realized that the air was getting colder instead of warmer. I noticed a draft coming in. WHAT WAS GOING ON???

I went around the house and checked the heat to make sure it was on and working. Then I added some more blankets wrapped around me. Still didn't help.

A short time later, I decided something was majorly wrong. My house should NOT be turning into an icebox when the heater has been running nonstop for over 2 hours. I opened the door to the laundry room and that's when I realized what the problem was.......the door to our garage was standing there WIDE open!

A few hours before, my husband left for work out that same door. Apparently he left without remembering to shut the door behind him. (How does that happen????) So that day...on one of the coldest days of the year....our house was wide open to the frosty air outside. Our laundry room was completely freezing!

As you can imagine, my next few moments involved both shutting the door AND calling my husband to ask him what in the world he was thinking when he left the door open. He was very surprised to hear that he had done that!

During the next hours of thawing out in our basement, I was thinking about this whole incident.

One door.

ONE.

That's all it took to make our house completely frigid.

One door opened let in enough cold air to affect our house in a negative way.

If we think of this as our lives....what happens if we leave the "back door" open and let just a little bit of sin in?

How much sin is too much?

How much sin does it take to affect us? ....to affect our lives? ....to affect our household?

A little bit of sin can cause the enemy to have a foothold in our lives (Ephesians 4:27). A tiny bit of sin is all it takes to affect our lives negatively.

Sometimes it's easy to open up just a little door to sin. Some sin is appealing...even fun at times. Sometimes sin is attractive and it's easy to think we can manage just a "little bit" of sin.

But a little bit is all it takes. One open door is all it takes. Just as the cold overtook my house, one little bit of sin will eventually take over our lives.

Take a pitcher of water and add one drop of food coloring. That one drop is enough to affect the entire pitcher of water.

It's time to shut all the doors to sin in our lives. We protect our houses in the winter by sealing windows and doors. Why not seal up our spiritual lives and protect ourselves from even the slightest bit of sin?

It's time to have not even a HINT of sin in our lives!