There is a habit in human behaviour to look at things that are either known to be harmful or can be if abused and see them as nothing. If you look at all the habits people have, many of them are harmful and we know this but when it comes to saying no, we reason in ourselves that the danger is not for us but others. We downplay the consequences, believing that it won’t happen to us. As we live like this, we bring on ourselves all kinds of troubles that may have powerful impact on how we live the rest of our lives. Consider for a moment, how simple actions often lead to great harm yet before we do the action, we are OK with it. Once done we can undo what we did but must choose to live with it. In Christian life, God has called us to live differently from the world. This means we think differently and act differently because we are no longer led by our natural desires that say it is “OK”. Instead we are led by God, who knows what is best. This is the way God wants it but many Christians for love of the world fail to surrender all to God and thus take sin and the death it brings lightly. Many enjoy toying with sin. This has powerful consequences.
For the wages of sin is death,
but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Rom. 6:23
In our spiritual life, it is easy to have this same mentality and bring on ourselves more serious harm than in the physical. The bible tells us that what we see here in the natural is short live or temporary but what is in the spiritual is eternal (2 Cor. 4:18). The consequences for ignoring God’s word is that sin becomes something we get used to, instead of something we are overcoming. We tend to follow the world’s standard instead of honoring God by being faithful to His standard. We downplay or water down the sin so that we can enjoy them just like the rest of the world. Deciding that a sin is not that bad, does not change the way God sees it and, in the end, He is the one who judges and he does so by His standard not ours. So, it may be little white lies, looking at things that are sexy, vulgar, violent and thinking it is OK, cheating in small ways, speaking words we shouldn’t, it is all still sin. Sin brings death (James 1:15).
But your iniquities have separated you from your God; And your sins have hidden His face from you, So that He will not hear. Isa. 59:2
The reason God is so intense about our sin is that it kills us spiritually, physically and mentally. Sin makes us impure and corrupts us spiritually. Think about lying and how it stains our reputation, causes a person to lie not once but multiple times. A person loses sight as to what is true and what is false. God knows all this and out of love calls us to walk in truth with love (Eph. 4:14-15). Why? So that we can live without being hurt by the harm brought on to us by sinning. When we sin, we die spiritually because we are separated from God who is the source of all life. Most of the population in the world is dead as described in Eph. 2, but Christians have been given a new life, as long as we walk with God. We can choose to sin but the harm it brings will still apply to us and it will separate us from His presence.