We point at Adam and Eve and comment on how different it would have been had it been us. No, it wouldn’t have been different.
I’ve realized the chances are that a lot of times we’ve gone out of our way to sin—to be sinful. There have been plenty of obstacles between me and that opportunity to sin and I jumped through every necessary hurdle to get to that sin.
That guy/girl that provides all too much temptation didn’t answer your call or text for a reason. But how many times did you reach out? You didn’t have the gas to go to the store, but all of a sudden you had it to go to that party where there would be too much alcohol for you to maintain your promise to your minimum. Even that extra purchase that you said you wouldn’t make unless it cost a certain amount still found its way into your shopping cart.
All that is going out your way to sin. The temptation was there, but it wasn’t front and center until you made it so. We’ve all done a lot of wrong. And I’ve said it before, that the wrong I’ve done, I knew was wrong. I knew it before I did it. I knew after I did it. And sometimes I knew it while I was doing it. At some point I knew when something was wrong.
Yet, strangely enough, the wrongness I was aware of only led to my justification of the mess I made. For some reason, I couldn’t admit the wrong and that I was in fact wrong. But I could justify and deny all day.
There’s no wrong quite like knowing it and trying to make it right. There’s no sin quite like going out of your way to make it available to yourself. We live in a fallen world, so sin is inevitable; but it doesn’t have to be necessary.
It’s past time to stop purposefully tempting myself, and time to start willfully surrendering to God. Because the truth is, any time I go looking for sin, I always find it.
Matthew 18:7 “What sorrow awaits the world, because it tempts people to sin. Temptations are inevitable, but what sorrow awaits the person who does the tempting.”