Check Your Vision

That’s why Eve thought it was good for food- satan used the promise and provision of God and twisted it slightly to get Eve to consider going against God’s express command.

He continues to use the same tactic today

2. It was pleasing to the eye

Can I be honest for a moment this morning? This might be a little controversial to some but please hear me out before you stone me with the hymnals.

We in the church (the Christian church throughout history) have done a grave disservice to the world by denying the pleasure of sin. The reason people go against God express commands is that most sin causes some sort of emotional and/or physical pleasure or both- for a season. The enticement that was given to Eve here is the same enticement that you and I face every day.

I listen to a variety of pastors for my own spiritual growth- one of them being John Piper, and I was listening to a teaching by him yesterday and he referred to an article in Leadership magazine so I looked it up. The article was written by a well sought after minister who traveled extensively to give revival style meetings. In that article, he detailed struggling with lust for over 10 years before finally being delivered from it. The article was anonymous as he would most likely permanently loose his ordination if he ever went public with it, but it described his descent into a lifestyle that was fractured. HE called it a cognitive dissidence= believing with all his heart what the bible had to say on the subject, but being unable to change his behavior of pornography and visiting strip clubs when he traveled.

He cited a statistic that was staggering- that a recent survey of a major hotel chain had found that the highest usage of adult movies ever seen was during a youth pastor’s convention.

Shocking isn’t it?

There is one other thing that was very troubling to me about this article.

It was written in 1983. 34 years ago.

Do we think it’s gotten better, or worse since then with the advent of the internet?

It’s easy to dismiss people and especially leaders who fall into sin as failures, liars, cowards, and hypocrites, but to dismiss the sinner denies the obvious truth.

Sin is very attractive, looks good to the eyes, may even feel good for a season. We need to admit that.

Our message as the Christian church needs to be this-

“Sin may very well feel good now, but sin is something you have bought on credit. Sooner or later, you have to pay the bill, and that is when the suffering starts”

The bible agrees with this when it says For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.

The third thing that lead Eve to disregard God’s commands was that she desired to know things that she was not able to handle knowing.

That’s another problem with sin- it gives us knowledge of evil that God never equipped us to handle.

We have a friend who was raised in a very strong Christian home. When Tammie and I first got saved we’d hang with her and her husband, and they mentored us intensively during our early days in the faith.