One spring day our family drove out to the lake to move some building materials we had left there. Much to the delight of our children, we found a nest of three very young skunks under some of the boards. The children said, “Oh, they are so cute! Can we keep them and raise them for pets?”
We found a box to put the baby skunks in so we could take them back to town. We planned to take them to a vet and hoped he could remove the awful skunk odor so we could keep them as pets.
Though these beautiful little creatures were very young, we quickly discovered that their skunk odor had already developed. This should make each one of us think about the answer to this question: How soon does our sin nature begin to show itself? My wife and I were teachers, and we often saw children who were very much like our little skunks. They were beautiful little children, but their bad behavior showed that their sin nature had already begun to work.
Psalm 51 tells us what King David said: “I acknowledge my [sins]. . . . In sin did my mother conceive me.” He understood that he was born with a sin nature, and you and I were born with one too. Like the young skunks’ odor, our sin nature always shows itself when we are young. When we begin to show our sin nature, we become sinners by practice.
We also learn from Romans 8:33For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: (Romans 8:3) that God has “condemned sin in the flesh” — the sin nature. It is evil and unacceptable to God. But we can be very thankful that God still loves us so much that He has provided a remedy for both our sin nature and our practice of sin. The Bible says, “Through this man [the Lord Jesus] is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins” (Acts 13:3838Be it known unto you therefore, men and brethren, that through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins: (Acts 13:38)). Because the Lord Jesus, the only person who never had a sin nature, paid to God full payment for sins, He can forgive our sins. If any person will come to Him, admitting that he or she is a sinner and accept His Son Jesus as their Saviour, that settles the matter forever. God says, “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:3434And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31:34)). Then our sins are gone and God will never give us up. But it was a different story with our little skunks.
We had not gone far toward home before our little pets’ odor became so bad we had to take them back and return them to the nest. We realized, as pretty as they were and as little as they were, they were still skunks by nature. The skunks could do nothing about their nature, but each one of us can come to the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour and have all our sins forgiven and receive a new, God-given nature.
The little skunks could only grow up to be big skunks. Even though some of you, being children, are little sinners, you do not have to grow up to be big sinners and continue in your habits and ways of sin. If you will open your heart to the Lord Jesus and receive Him as your very own Saviour, you become one of God’s children and can look forward to enjoying the Father’s house and the joys of heaven.
Won’t you trust the Lord Jesus today to begin your happy life as one of God’s children?
ML-12/02/2007
A badger and a bird team up against a hive of bees to steal its honey.