Cut It Off, Friday, February 4, 2011

Reading: Mark 9:43-47, 43If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. 45And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. 47And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell”

Jesus was such a master teacher. He knew exactly how we are with our enduring fixation on the outward, the temporary, the body. I think we would be surprised at how much time and effort we spend caring for the physical body and its appearance. Can you imagine if we actually took this passage literally, what our churches would look like? We may walk into church and, “Oh, yeah, hey, there’s John. Wow, he must have really been struggling with what he was listening to this week. I wonder if he had his ears surgically removed or if he did it himself. Ouch!” “Oh, no, there’s Tim. I can hardly even understand him anymore, since his tongue was cut out.” “Hi, Bill, I see you brought your seeing-eye-dog to church again.” We may actually look like a clip from a freakish, horror movie. Jesus was, through an extreme illustration, attempting to communicate the temporary nature of our bodies. You may think, “Yeah, but, it would be there whole life without that part of their body.” Meanwhile, Jesus clears His throat and says, “But, we’re talking about eternity here.” We look at it as if it’s living without it your whole life but, in a true comparison to eternity, if your whole life was eternity, it would be as if you lived without it for .0000000000000001seconds. Jesus truly understood this. Do we?

If you had to cut off a part of your body because it was causing you to sin, what would it be, and why?(be honest)


What will you do to, not physically cut it off, but to render the parts of your body useless to sin?(be specific)

REVIEW

How did you render the parts of your body useless to sin today?


How were you successful and how did this impact your day today