“It Ain’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be”
That title “It Ain’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be” is an old expression that means sometimes we are led to believe (or choose to believe) that sin is much better than it really is. Paul Simon of Simon and Garfunkel sang a song called “Kodachrome” with a similar theme. One line contains the words- “everything looks worse in black and white”. Now, I am not going too deep on this, but my understanding is that his imagination was better than his reality…sooner or later. In this article I want you to journey with me into a fact of life that is common to all – or at least it is common to the 100’s of people I know from more than 12 countries in the world.
Here it is, ready – Sin can’t live up to the billing the world and media give it. Pick a sin, any sin. I won’t list the all here, but we’ll pick out a few obvious and one or two not so obvious ones and compare them to what God offers.
Sex outside of marriage, for example, is treated so lightly today as if to advertise it as the common goal of a relationship. Don’t get me wrong, I am not against sex. Neither is God. He invented it. He built it into the our interaction with the opposite sex for more than just procreation and more than just for recreation. I am staying in a hotel in Virginia tonight and after arriving mid-afternoon, I was channel surfing. I had to keep moving because I could hardly find anything that didn’t show people abusing sex or speaking casually of it or using sex as a foundation of a joke.
I turned off the TV and began watching some YouTube videos, but the commercials became a problem for me. I know. I know. You may accuse me of being unrealistic to expect or hope that sex would be kept private between a man and woman who are already married to each other. Call me old fashioned. I am simply trying to be Biblical. If you trace many of our culture’s (the world’s) broken places, you will discover that many of our woes are connected to broken families, absent dads and/or moms. And if you trace these back many decades you will find a growing disregard for marriage, for loving relationships characterized by mutual giving, and for sex as an exclusive partnership inside marriage.
No, I am not trying to be controversial, but you and I can do something about this starting or continuing today. Whether we are considering what has happened in this area of marriage, or in substance abuse, or buying/selling/making money; entertainment, dishonoring of parents, abusing children, etc., you can see a pattern. We have replaced what God says with what “seems” ok or “right”, but we are using a standard of our own making or allowing others to dictate an ungodly standard. They are selling it as OK or so fun. But they do not sticking around to clean up the messes made: broken hearts, broken lives, dashed hopes, self-destruction, disregard for human life, and a trend to become violent against others or even toward our own self.
OK, I am almost finished with this one, but let me just say that God’s way of loving Him, loving others, and even loving self leads to life, to closeness, to true intimacy, and hope. One test to see whether you have His love or a counterfeit is to answer one simple question: “Am I more loving, caring, and free than before I started this relationship, practice, or chosen path? Satan always leads us to a culture of death, loss, and condemnation. Jesus always leads to life, fulfillment, and joy. The ways of God are rarely the easy ways, especially at first, but they are surely the better ways. You may have to examine your life over some weeks or months to answer honestly, but it is worth discovering the truth. Your future and that of your family, community, and country depend on more and more of us getting this right.