HE’s not going to stop…

romans 2.4 (msg) says this, did you think that because HE’s such a nice GOD HE’d let you off the hook?  better think this one through from the beginning.  GOD is kind but HE’s not soft.  in kindness, HE takes us firmly by the hand and HE leads us into radical life change.  and because HE loves you, HE’s not going to stop.

so why not today?  let me give you a picture of what i’m talking about.  let’s say i have a piece of rope that had hung in a tree in our front yard since brett our oldest was young.  he’s now is over 30.  and it actually broke off.  nobody could use it any more.  but every single day, four or five times a day, i walked by this rope in my front yard.  i didn’t do anything about it.  it was just there every day.  finally one day – i don’t know what happened – but i decide to get it down out of the tree.  it had been there for a long, long time.  maybe it was because i just procrastinated.  maybe it was because i didn’t notice it any more.  maybe it was because i didn’t want that stage of my kid’s life to be over.  whatever the reason it just stayed there until one day i thought, today’s the day.  i’m going to get it down.  so i climbed up in the tree, started to untie it and i realize i can’t untie it.  the rope had grown into the tree it had been there so long.  so i had to get a knife and strand by strand cut it out of the tree.  a few years earlier i could have just untied it.  but by this time i had to cut it out of the tree.  most of it i had to cut out of the tree.  there are still pieces i couldn’t get out.  and the tree is marked by the rope because it had been there so long.  .

three lessons from that rope.

one, it’s not going to get any easier to do the one thing.  it just gets harder.  if i had taken this down years l earlier it would have been a lot easier.  it’s never going to be any easier than it is today to do what GOD’s putting on your heart to do.  HE’ll give you the strength to do what you think you can’t do.

the second lesson is the longer you wait the more the damage.  that’s the danger of waiting.  if i had left that rope in the tree it might have eventually killed that branch and killed the entire tree. 

there’s a third lesson.  when i cut this down, even though i had to cut it little by little, it would only take me fifteen or twenty minutes to get it out of there.  once you decide to do something, to act, it’s amazing how quickly a change of heart can happen in our lives.  it’s amazing how that can happen. 

just a thought from the front porch…