November 26, 2021
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When you've driven as much as I have over the years, you know when it's time to stop. I've been driving along at night, and suddenly I'm enveloped in this thick fog; usually in the mountains. Semis are pulled over to the side of the road, and they're professional drivers. They know well enough not to go on. It's definitely time to stop before I hit something. Same thing when I suddenly find myself in one of those driving rainstorms, or I've been in a snow storm. You know, "whiteout" they call it. Those times when you literally can't see a car length in front of you. It's like you're temporarily blind, and you'd better not keep pushing ahead.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Blindness that Makes You Crash."
Fog can make you like temporarily blind. So can rain or snow. And so can your hormones. Yeah, it's happened even to King David, who God called "a man after God's own heart." David's hormonal blindness, which led to so many devastating crashes, is described in one of the saddest chapters in the Bible. In 2 Samuel 11, beginning with verse 2, our word for today from the Word of God, the Bible says, "One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, and David sent someone to find out about her." Right about here you feel like screaming at the Bible, "David, don't do it, man!"
But he did do it. "The man said, 'Isn't this Bathsheba...the wife of Uriah the Hittite?'" Uriah, by the way, was one of David's most trusted, most loyal soldiers. The Bible goes on: "Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him, and he slept with her." Here's David - God's man, God's king, but his sexual desires started pumping, and he followed them all the way to disaster. From these few moments of sexual pleasure will come a baby who dies, David's murder of his loyal associate to cover up his sin, rape and incest and even an attempt to overthrow him among his own children, and an agony of soul that David could never have imagined that night.
That's what's so dangerous about lust, sexual fantasies, about pornography, about flirting with sexual sin - your hormones blind you, just like they did David. You let your lust keep pulling you toward a crash, and it makes you blind to so many things you can't afford to forget: the consequences, what you stand to lose, who you're going to hurt, the agony of a broken relationship with God. But you don't care much about all that; you just care about satisfying your sexual desires, following your passions, meeting your needs.
But God has sent you this way today to send you a wakeup call. Please, consider where your passions and your desires are taking you. Count the cost. Think about all you have to lose if you keep driving down this road. Think about the price that you will pay in your soul - maybe the price you're already paying. Think about the hurt this will cause. And don't make the deadly mistake that millions of people have made, underestimating the power of sin and overestimating your power to control it.
Sexual desire is blinding. It can blind you like a thick fog. Please, don't keep going this way. Pull over now and stop before you crash!