He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy. Proverbs 28:13
Recently, we decided it was time to install some video cameras on our church property so we could monitor things that happened when we were not there. The system we installed allows me to get alerts on my phone when there is motion so I can see the event in real time. Having cameras turned out to be a big benefit to us, but something else had the same idea for a different reason. All night, the alerts were being triggered. Each time I would look at my phone, it was only a spider web being blown in the wind. It was not visible to the camera during the day, but the night vision on the camera made it light up like a Christmas tree. The alerts meant nothing, and they became so annoying that I would eventually have to turn them off until I could clean the spider web off the camera the next day. Needless to say, I got frustrated because the cameras were hardly able to be used for their intended purpose.
One day, in the middle of the day, I got several motion alerts in a row, which was rare. When I opened the live video, I saw a spider crawling back and forth on the screen making a web. Call me dumb for not thinking of this before, but that is the moment the idea hit me: I don’t need to keep wiping the webs away from the lens; I need to kill the spider!
How often it seems we do the same thing with sin in our lives. Built into every Christian is the desire to live for Christ, so we often try to “clean things up.” We get convicted about the sin we carry around, so we try to wipe out the cobwebs. We decide that we are “not going to do that anymore.” That determination might last a few weeks, but it seems the spider webs always make their way back into the recesses of our hearts. What is required is a permanent solution; we must kill the spider. Seek out what lies at the root of the sin problem. Often it is pride; sometimes it is bitterness; other times it may just be known sin left unconfessed. Whatever it is, we must get it out. When we allow it a permanent place in our hearts, the “alerts” we get from the Holy Spirit begin to mean less and less because we just attribute it to the root sin that is always there.
It is time to stop just cleaning out the webs and kill the spider!
Read also: Proverbs 28:9-14
Quote of the day: “Till sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet.” - Thomas Watson