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Killing Entangling Sins & Invading Weeds

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Andrew and I tackled our side yard yesterday. The idea was to pull a few weeds. We knew what we were looking for. It’s a weed that loves our yard, grows tall and spiky, but with shallow roots. Pulling this weed type is fully satisfying because it takes little effort to root that thing right up and watch the pile grow. You see immediate progress.
What we encountered surprised us. The easy to pull weeds made some friends and we had many types of weeds to deal with. I grabbed a hold of a net of vines and pulled.
Andrew cried out, “No, Mom! Don’t pull those. They are beautiful flowers. You are taking away all the pretty plants.”
“These are weeds.”
“But they look nice.”
“Yes, but look what they’ve done. They’ve become like a net on top of all the plants that are good. Now they are trapped and unable to grow. Some are dying under the weight of these weeds.”
“But, Mom, when you are pulling the flower weeds, you are pulling out some of the good plants too.”
“I know. I wish I hadn’t waited so long to deal with these weeds. If I had kept an eye on them, I could’ve pulled them before they caused this much damage.”
I continued, “Andrew, these weeds are like the sins in our lives we allow to grow. Like these different types of weeds, some are harder to pull up and get rid of than others. Some take more work. And some sins, like the flowering weeds, don’t look so bad so we ignore them. But what we don’t realize is that all sin is dangerous. Eventually, it will do what it sets out to do. Consume our lives. These “beautiful” weeds provided a cover but that cover killed what we actually wanted to see blooming in this spot.”
“God wants our lives to flourish and bloom and grow strong and beautiful. It’s important that we notice when weeds begin to grow in our hearts so we can pull them from the roots and get them out of our lives before they grow into a mess like this.”
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith…..” Hebrews 12:1-2