My six-year-old son has been on a Minecraft kick lately. He loves building things. Minecraft is like a digital version of Legos, allowing him to create things from scratch. For the last several days, he has been working on a house for himself and he even built one for his sister. Then he built a huge castle with all kinds of cool stuff.
Then, yesterday, he was trying to put a "lava river" next to his castle, and the lava caught it on fire and burned it all down. Understandably for a six-year-old, he freaked out. We finally got him calmed down and convinced him to rebuild, warning him of the danger of putting lava/fire too close to his castle.
He spent all of last night and most of this morning rebuilding his castle, making it "even better than before!" Then he decided he wanted a secret cave underneath his castle. This meant that he had to excavate blocks out from under his castle. In order to do that, he used lava to quickly burn the blocks out of the castle foundation. You can guess what happened. It caught his castle on fire...again...and burned it down. This time, it caught the rest of his village on fire and burned all of it to the ground; his house, his sisters house, the shed he had built, and the "pool" building, along with his castle, were all destroyed.
Of course, he freaked out again, then he had to go to school. But this whole saga got me thinking about sin in our lives. Too often we allow one little sin in, and it burns us. We get over it and start to rebuild, but all too often and all too soon, we start letting a little bit of lava back in, thinking we can handle it and that the same tragedy won't strike again. Of course, more often than not, it ends up making things even worse the second time around, and can destroy everything in our lives.
That's the danger of sin. It seems like we can handle little sins and they won't have too much of an adverse effect. But sins have a way of catching fire to anything and everything in their path. Even if we can successfully "put out the fire" in one instance, if we let the sin back into our lives, it can catch everything and destroy all of us.
The question is, where is the lava in our lives? In what ways are we playing with fire, hoping we won't get burned?
