Way back years ago, my wife was trying to kill a fat fryer so we could have fried chicken for supper. She grabbed the fryer by the neck and began spinning him around and around at arm's length, without twisting his neck at all. When she threw him on the ground, he 1ay there befuddled and groggy for a minute or so, then hopped up and ran off. Trouble was, she hadn't killed a chicken ... she had only disturbed him for a short while.
I recall another incident in which a city girl had always enjoyed fried chicken until she saw her farmer uncle lay a chicken on the chopping block and whack his head off with an ax. Her statement subsequent to that episode was, “I’ll never eat another piece of chicken as long as I live.”
In dealing with sin, one of the great tragedies in the Lord’s body today is that of brethren (elders, deacons, preachers and members alike) who decide that it’s high time to do something about sin in their 1ives, or in the lives of others, but, like my wife's “chicken killing,” they start out wrong, continue the same way, and eventually end up wrong. They don’t crucify the old man of sin and death; they merely shake him up a bit as they pussyfoot around issues, soft-soap their way past clear-cut decisions and whitewash the blatant wrongs, so they’ll appear respectable and acceptable.
Another tragedy is that of witnessing the complete exposition of sin and reacting like the city girl by refusing to accept the simple truth -- if you want fried chicken, somebody has to kill a chicken. If we desire pure and undefiled religion, we've got to “kill” sin where we find it. If we don’t have the stomach for that kind of action, we might just as well make up our minds to the fact that we’ll be living in and with sin for the rest of our lives.
Visiting a delinquent member and telling him, in love, that hes wrong is neither unkind nor unscriptural. Labeling wrongdoing by individuals or “churches” as sin is what God requires. To do less is to do less than we should. Brethren, let’s quit slinging sin “round and round.” Let’s kill it where we find it.
