Put On Your Running Shoes

It's funny. As a kid, I used to listen to Patch the Pirate almost too much. Yeah, the voice acting and stories are extremely cheesy but the CDs (tapes for me lol) were chock-full of doctrine and life lessons, as simple as they might have been.

I was confronted by some past sin recently and was then directed, by God, to focus on an old Patch the Pirate when he goes down under to Australia. I vaguely remember the premise of the story. Something about a wombat going in some spaceship, one of the crew members getting a buzz cut by a boomerang, some talking kangaroos that could punch people and even some of the crew sleeping in her pouch with her son, you guessed it, Joey. I know there were life lessons in the songs about forgiveness (Maybe? Forgive me, it's been a decade since I last listened to it) but the one song that stuck out to me the most was someone said something about Joseph running from sin. They sang the song "Put On Your Running Shoes." It spoke of Joseph having control over all of Potiphar's household except for Potiphar's wife. When Potiphar's wife was tempting Joseph, he "put on his running shoes."

As simple as that is, it is really good. Running from sin sometimes is quite difficult. My cousin and I were talking about sin and what sin or sins affects our life the most. The sins that affect me the most are music and keeping myself sexually pure. I have a past with both music and lusting (being very frank here). I am a guy and the lust of the flesh and eyes is ever prevalent. I personally feel that music can and will cause a hindrance in your spiritual walk with God but I am not here to talk about convictions and whatnot.

My point is this: I sin often. For crying out loud, I sin every day! When I attended Bob Jones, my PC (prayer captain) said to our prayer group one night, "Tomorrow, I want you all to focus on what you are saying and thinking. Write down every time you sinned or were half way through sinning. That way, you are conscious about what you are saying, thinking, and doing so you are less prone to sin." This was a great idea. Hard but a great idea nevertheless. To tie this into what I was saying previously, I bring this up to say this: how conscious or how aware are we of us sinning? Do we know we are sinning and let it slide or do we go around everywhere we go thinking about what we are going to say, do, and think and then act accordingly if it is a sin? No. That's difficult but we should. Then, when we are subconsciously tempted or tempted outright, we can run far away from that temptation when it knocks at our door.

So, what to take away from this? To sum things up, do your best to be consciously aware of sin before creeps up on you and the temptation becomes too great for you to handle. That sounds terrible but you need to be honest with yourself. God can protect you, yes but don't expect to win at the last minute. It's like you're playing basketball, it's the 4th quarter and you're down by 15 points. The coach doesn't say with 10 seconds left in the game, "Okay guys, I know you have not played your hardest and we haven't put in our best player yet but since it's almost game over, I guess we can play our hardest and put in the best player on our team to try to win this game." NO! You don't ever hear a coach say that! That's the same thing with dealing with sin! Yes, it's difficult to battle sin but it is worth it all in the end. I challenge you to do what my prayer captain said to us that night: to focus on what you are saying, thinking, and doing so you can see how much you sin and how much you need to run from sin. It WILL open your eyes to how much sin is in our lives and how much we desperately need a Saviour!