A Tree of Sin

Romans 6:23 “But now that you've found you don't have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you, what a surprise! A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way! Work hard for sin your whole life and your pension is death. But God's gift is real life, eternal life, delivered by Jesus, our Master.”

Last night I decided to stay up and draw.  I wasn’t sure what I was going to draw but I felt God was guiding me to a picture.  I prayed that He would work through my fingers to draw what He wanted me to.  As I started to draw without any idea of where I was going, a tree began to form; the background dark with a blunt moon gracing the left side of the page.  As the top of the tree started to appear it curved into humans reaching out their hands, stretching them towards the sky while stuck to this tree growing in the foreboding darkness.  Like Adam and Eve, we choose to eat from the tree God told us not to.  The seeds grow inside of us until we’re stuck in a matured system of sin and pain.  It starts inside of us and grows to the outside, plaguing our lives.  When we realize what we’ve gotten ourselves into, we finally reach our arms out to God.  As we cry out, God stretches His arms the rest of the way to us and rips us out of what we’ve created for ourselves.  It’s painful and we will need to be stitched back together but God is more than willing to do this for us as long as we allow Him to.  As we lay bleeding looking back at what we had been stuck in, God takes our chin and turns our head to look ahead at what we had been missing all along.

James 1:15 “Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.”