Taking Out the Trash

When your house is 3/4 mile from the main road, trash day requires more than the typical amount of effort.  Tim has to put the big, rolling bin (full of trash) into the back of his truck and haul it up to the road.  Then after it is emptied, he puts the big, rolling bin (now empty) into the back of his truck and hauls it back to the house.  Week after week, we keep producing trash and so the process is repeated over and over again.   Sure, Tim could skip taking it out a week or two and see just how much trash he could stuff in there, but that would only make the inevitable more difficult.  The longer it sits, the more that trash stinks and the more it grows.  So unless we want to end up on an episode of Hoarders, the trash has to go.

It's a bit like sin.  Getting rid of it is unpleasant and more than a little trouble.  Leaving it creates more problems than we can even imagine.

Paul talks about some people who refused to take out the trash.  They heaped sin upon sin until their lives overflowed with it.  They took their sins to the limit, and there they discovered that God has a limit.  There they met the wrath of God.

I'm thinking it's time to take out the trash.

"They displease God and are hostile to everyone in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved.  In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit.  The wrath of God has come upon them at last."  1 Thessalonians 2:15-16