Band-Aid-ing

You are working or playing hard and suddenly something cuts or scrapes you and you start shedding some blood. It may be basically minor and not life-threatening, but blood is blood. Perhaps the victim is one of your kids instead of you and the damage is still minor to you, but scary to your child. So, you clean it up with some soap and water, put some kind of antiseptic on it and then cover it with a Band-Aid. Little kids get ones that have cartoon characters printed on them in an effort to cheer them up. While Band-Aid is a brand name, it has also become a generic term for a stick-on wound covering. I have certainly had my share of those and the ones that are most visible are the ones that appear from time to time on top of my head. Since I shave my head every day, any cut or scrape that gets covered is pretty obvious. I seem to have a talent for running my head into things and get to wear the reward for doing so.

As Christians, we often turn to Jesus Christ to heal us, to make us well again, in both the physical realm and the spiritual. The four Gospels are full of stories of Jesus healing people or bringing them back to life. The question is: just how much healing do you really want? The kind of wounds I am talking about aren’t caused by a knife or a gun. They are wounds on our soul caused by our sins. We can ask for a healing when what we really want is just a Band-Aid. We just need something to cover it up, to get it out of sight and out of mind so we don’t have to think about it. So, we just ask for forgiveness, maybe say an extra prayer or two, go to church on Sunday and think that this takes care of it. The next time you have the opportunity to do the same thing, you don’t even think about the past healing, you just go ahead and do the same thing all over again. Now it is time to repeat the same cycle, over and over. Just cover it up and don’t think about it. Yes, God will forgive us our sins, Jesus taught us that and he made sure it was part of his prayer, the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus also told the various people he healed by telling them their sins were forgiven and they should go and sin no more. Repeating the same sins again and again is like pealing off the Band-Aid, picking off the scab and reopening the wound.

Jesus knew us. He knew we were mere human beings and that we would sin again. He also made sure we knew that God’s love and forgiveness were without limit. He does expect us to try to do our best to avoid the occasions of sin and to avoid sinning to the best of our ability. Knowing that we will does not cause us to sin or choose to put ourselves in the path of it. Jesus does expect us to work to heal ourselves of sinning. Just as an alcoholic has to stay away from alcohol and the drug addict must avoid drugs in order to survive and remain sober, so too must we protect ourselves and stay away from those people, those places, and those things which will lead us to sin.

We are not powerless against sin. We have a choice whether to sin or not. We also have a choice whether to just put a patch on what we do or to ask Jesus for his help in healing us so that we learn to turn away from sin and set ourselves up to enjoy the ultimate reward, being fully healed of this earthly existence and spending the rest of eternity in the awesome presence of God!