June 14, 2021
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While I was with one of my grandchildren, I saw a frog. She loved it! Then I picked up that little bug-eyed green fellow and held him close so she could get a better look at him. It was one of Kermit's cousins, you know. I didn't have any second thoughts about picking up a frog. No, they're harmless! Well, most of the time - unless it's what they call a poisonous dart frog. I don't think we have those, but they're about one and one-half inches long, and they live in tropical rainforests in Central and South America. And they are the good-lookers of the frog kingdom. They're not some boring ole' green. The dart frog is really very brightly colored. He looks very interesting, but he can be carrying enough poison to kill 20,000 mice. Or more important to you and me - ten people!
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Pretty Poison."
Here's a creature who looks so good and kills so dead. Just like sin; maybe the sin that's been looking pretty good to you lately. So many people have reached out and touched what they never should have touched, and they paid a painful price that they could never imagined. Sin may be pretty, but it's pretty poison!
Listen to this eye-opening revelation from our word for today from the Word of God in James 1:14-15. "Each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full grown, gives birth to death." That's a sledgehammer verse. It traces a moral disaster from the first desire for something that's wrong to the sinful choice to get what looks so good, to its final result. When that "baby" called sin finally is born, what you get is death because sin always kills. It kills families, it kills marriages, it kills reputations, and it kills ministries. Sin kills your self-respect, kills people's trust in you and even your closeness to the God you can't live without.
The story of this attractive killer goes all the way back to the very first humans God ever created, Adam and Eve. With all the beauty of the Garden of Eden available for his enjoyment, God gave Adam this one prohibition: "You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."
Satan came to Eve and told her the exact opposite: "You will not surely die." And "when the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it" (Genesis 2:17; 3:4, 6). And they learned the hard way that no matter how much you think you have to gain from going outside God's boundaries, you have so much more to lose. They lost Eden, they lost paradise, they lost walking with God, they gained so much pain and they died.
It may be that the same devil is lying to you right now about the sin that looks so good to you. "It won't hurt," "Everybody's doing it," "Hey, you deserve it," "You need this," "Only a little," "Oh, just this once." Anything to get you to bite. Anything to get you to take the deadly poison of sin. But it looks like you have so much to gain if you just lie a little, cheat a little, flirt a little, try a little, or take just one look. But you have so much to lose. You won't know that until it's too late unless you listen to what God says.
See, first sin fascinates you, and then it assassinates you. And God, in His love, has come to you today to wave you away from a choice that will take you where you never wanted to go, it will keep you longer than you ever wanted to stay, and it will cost you more than you ever wanted to pay. Don't walk away from that sin - run away from it. Sin looks so good and it kills so dead.