Hi, Passionate Youth Reaching Out, today is Thursday, July 14, My name is Grant and this is Start Up, helping you start your day with an upward focus. Today we look at where sin begins.
Romans 7:7–8 (HCSB)
7 What should we say then? Is the law sin? Absolutely not! On the contrary, I would not have known sin if it were not for the law. For example, I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, Do not covet. 8 And sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind. For apart from the law sin is dead.
What Paul is saying here is quite helpful. He starts off by saying that God’s law is a good thing, it shows us what God accepts to be right and wrong, and we are all better off for knowing God’s standards. But what Paul is saying goes a little deeper than that.
Do you remember back in Genesis where we read of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? God made a law for them that there was a certain tree that they were not to eat from. Ask yourself, if the law wasn’t there, would it have been possible for Adam and Eve to sin against God? They could have chosen to not care for God’s creation, to abandon their responsibilities, and also to sin against each other, which is sinning against God. Those were all things that were wrong, but there was no law describing them yet.
They sinned in the place where the law was, and they did it through coveting. To covet is to want something that you can’t have. It might be your neighbour’s property, or it might be something that you are simply not allowed to have, and you want it anyway.
So why did Eve take the fruit from that forbidden tree , it was because she coveted a certain knowledge that God had. But without God’s law there, she would not have been able to see the sin. And so sin used the law against Eve, as a way of knowingly sinning against God, and in the end, it produced every kind of sin in this world.
Sin will use what is good, and twist it to bring much harm to your life. Understand how sin works, and then counter it with God’s power. We’ll keep talking about this tomorrow on Startup.
Challenge
The challenge for this week is to come to Hawkwood Baptist Church’s Stampede Breakfast this Sunday Morning and invite a friend. Come hang out with us and enjoy free food and good music. Go to hawkwood.ca for more information.
Invitation
Our next youth event is on Thursday, July 21, we are having a BBQ and sports night here at the Church. Grades 7-12 are invited, the cost is $3.
Thanks for listening to today’s StartUp, you can find all of the details about our youth group online at hbcyouth.ca. We are also on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, just search for Hawkwood Youth.
https://www.facebook.com/HawkwoodYouthPYRO/
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https://www.instagram.com/hawkwoodyouth/