Plastic Shields of Faith

It’s amazing what you learn teaching kids. We use a curriculum in KidsZone, so we’re pretty much just handed the topic of the sermon. But studying it out and actually making it flow with the service is up to us. Lauren preached last Sunday and reviewed Wednesday, so that meant it was my turn at bat. She handed me the lesson outline and right at the top was the topic for the week: Sin. Yeah, that’s a great way to make friends. But, I got to looking over the suggested reading for this lesson and God really started talking to me about the subject.

The object lesson used meat to illustrate sin in our hearts. The required pieces of meat were one piece of fresh chicken, and one piece of putrid chicken. There is no way to describe the odor in words, unless you’ve smelled rotten meat before. I can’t draw you enough pictures to cover how offensive it is. I don’t get queasy, yet this made me want to vomit. It was the vilest, most disgusting, most vulgar thing I had ever smelled. And I’ve smelled a lot of stuff on my trips overseas. If you follow this blog, then you know how much I favor cleanliness. Doing this object lesson went against every fiber of my being. Even fresh chicken is awash with deadly bacteria. Salmonella and Campylobacter—naturally occurring bacteria in chicken—are responsible for most of the cases of food poisoning from chicken. And this doesn’t even begin to describe how gross putrid chicken is. Needless to say, Ziploc® is my friend! The rotten piece was double bagged, just for good measure.

Even with my plastic “shields of faith” over the chicken, I still thought I could smell the meat. I had the putrid piece in my shirt pocket, so as not to give away the surprise at the end. I found myself leaning over and sniffing my pocket to see if I was truly smelling the chicken or if it was just my mind playing tricks on me. As I would greet the kids and give them hugs, I would ask them if they smelled anything. Yes, paranoid, because I had this meat in the pocket of my favorite shirt. But no one could smell the chicken. It was a good thing, too, because children are more sensitive to odors than adults are, and I didn’t feel like cleaning up puke that morning.

I was also donning my favorite corduroy jacket, and it has a pocket that is right over the pocket of the shirt I was wearing. The way I set up the lesson was to have the vile meat in my shirt pocket and the fresh meat in a box a couple of my girls prettified. Now, the idea behind the box was to make it attractive, so they used glitter and balloons and extremely yellow paper for the makeover. The resulting box would make anybody want what was in it, regardless of the fact that it sported the word “Sin” in bright, green letters—complete with two pink foam stars on the tittle of the “i.” And that was the whole point, to make the box desirable. The Bible tells us that sin is pleasurable for the moment, but in the end reaps destruction. The box represents how sin is marketed to us by the devil. Yet, what is inside the box is disgusting.

We see this thing our flesh really wants, and it look so fun! But when we sin it’s like taking the piece of meat that’s inside the box and sticking it in your jacket pocket. The pocket was right over my heart, right where the sin is. I showed the (shielded) meat to the kids, and demonstrated that when I sin, I place that vile thing in my heart. Now there is something gross and unsanitary in my heart. And as Christians, Jesus lives in our hearts. We are forcing Him to coexist with something vulgar. But God can’t coexist with sin, so our sin puts a wall between God and us. And when people sin they tend to run away from God in fear. Adam and Eve hid in the bushes when they sinned because they were afraid to face God and tell Him they sinned. So we hide, and we run, and we try to bury the guilt. But the longer that sin stays in our heart, the worse it gets. The sin gets smellier and smellier.

I reached inside my jacket and pulled out the putrid meat from my shirt pocket and showed them what happens to sin that’s left alone. It doesn’t go away; it gets worse. I opened the two bags to let the kids smell the meat, but there were only two kids brave enough to take a whiff! It didn’t take long, though, for the smell to propagate through the room. When you leave sin in your heart, you can try to cover it up. You can try to pretend it’s not there, but eventually the smell gets out. People will stop wanting to be around the person who is living in sin, because sin makes us ugly.

God knew Adam and Eve were going to sin; it was no surprise. In fact, He planned for it. He didn’t plan on it, but He did plan for it. The Bible says that Jesus is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. God already had the way of escape prepared before He even made Adam and Eve. He wasn’t surprised that day in the garden when they hid from Him. Yet we still do the same thing. Running away doesn’t solve the problem. If we will come to God and admit we blew it and ask for His forgiveness, the Bible says, … He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. God doesn’t just fix the sin; He also cleans up the stink and makes us as though we’d never sinned in the first place. But He can’t do anything if we don’t first go to Him and ask for His forgiveness.

Sunday morning I led all the kids in the prayer of repentance. There were no visitors, and there were no unsaved, but the regulars sure wanted to get the rotten meat out of their hearts! And now I’ve got my favorite shirt and my favorite jacket in the laundry. Even if there is no smell and there were plastic “shields of faith” over the meat, I can’t stomach the thought of wearing those clothes again without giving them a bath.

~Jonathan

Update

You can find the full story of Jesus at this page: The Story of Jesus.

January 17th, 2006 · Back to Top · Tagged: Articles

Zeal

A story about my life as a missionary in Thailand.

Navigate

Locate

Syndicate