Sowing & Reaping - Part 6

Transcription (edited)

[music]

Announcer:  Sin without consequences? Another cruel and ridiculous deception.

Michael Pearl:  Thirdly, we're deceived regarding the probability of escaping the consequences of sin. That's the biggest deception of all, I think. Many of us will admit that sin is bad. We'll admit that it's wrong. We'll admit that it has some bad ramifications, we shouldn't do it, and so forth, and be guilty when doing it, but still somehow think that we can do a little bit of it, and go back and escape the ramifications.

When I was a young man, very young, I preached on the street a lot, from the time I was about 16. I went to rescue missions from the time I was 17. I saw the results of sin. I worked with my daddy in construction when I was 9, 10, 11, 12, 14 years old. And I worked with sinners. I worked around sinners. I saw their lives. I compared their lives to the lives of the Christians I knew. I made up my mind real early I didn't want to be a sinner. I didn't want the way they went.

I had some uncles that were drunks, that were mean, fighters, ran their wives up. I had one who took a pistol and blew his brains out. Had another one killed himself that I hardly know out in California, out of about ten brothers, or something, my daddy's brothers. I had some ungodly relatives that I saw the consequences of their life.

I saw them sinning at different age levels. I saw some of their gross sin, and the things that happened to him. One of them, a severe car accident. Another one died from some explosions. Wild bunch I came from. I knew that sin resulted in death. I saw it. It resulted in misery, broken lives, and broken . . .

So I made up my mind that if life was like a train track going down through here, that occasionally has a side track that goes off downhill into the darkness, goes over here into the flames, goes down here through pleasure city, disappears down into Sodom and Gomorrah, that I would stay on the track that took me to the place I wanted to go.

I'd never go down the track a little ways that I had to turn around and come back on. That if I was going to go to the Celestial City, walk in righteousness, and holiness, and please and honor God, that there was no point in going to Las Vegas just to look at the lights. No point in going to Las Vegas just to see one of the good shows.

If it's a place I needed to leave before I saw the whole thing, then I didn't need to go see any of it. If it's a place where I could take an ounce, but not a quart, why take the ounce? Just keep drinking living water.

I made up my mind very young that I would stay on the track that took me where I wanted to go, not get off on some side track that I could venture down for a little tingle, and then turn around, come back, and continue my path.

Now, most young men never make that decision. They spend their life going part way down an offshoot to Sodom, and then come back, and then go down another offshoot to Gomorrah, and then come back and go down an offshoot to Hollywood, and then come back . . . They keep spending their life making these little detours, and trying to come back to center.

They end up being sinners, great sinners. You know the problem with that is sometimes when you take a trip downhill . . .

It's like when I was up in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, one time. There'd been a storm the night before. Eureka Springs is really steep, big old mountain there. They say that the first lawsuit in Eureka Springs was somebody threw the garbage out the back door, and put the fire out of their neighbor. It went down the chimney.

There are really places where you could do that. You could throw your garbage out your back door and go down your neighbor's chimney. It’s just hills like this.

I was out driving after the storm. The road was still a little bit wet. I started off down this road, this steep hill. I got about halfway down it, and there was a tree had fallen across the road. I couldn't go back any further, so it was a simple matter of just backing up.

I put it in reverse, but it wouldn't back up. The tires just spun. I thought maybe I could turn it around, but it was squashy and kind of steep going off the roads on both sides. It was a narrow road. There really wasn't enough room to turn around. I tried to turn around a little bit and keep my tires on the pavement. That wouldn't work.

I continued to try to back up. Burnt one tire right off the thing, just burnt the tire off of it, just came right off the rim. I was sitting flat.

I had to walk about a mile to get to a telephone, and get somebody to come and pull my car back up the hill, and put me another tire on it.

There are places you leave the straight and narrow path. You start downhill and you think, "I'll just come back." And you find out you can't come back. You'll burn the tires off trying to back up. You'll never back up. All you can do is slide further and further.

It's like getting on shale when you're mountain climbing. You think, "I'll just walk across this shale." Until you've walked on it, you have no idea how it can just slide, and keep sliding, and keep sliding. It may come up to an end where it drops off 100 feet into a hole, or 200 feet. There's nothing to grab a hold of. You just wait for the inevitable. You reach the end of the slide, and you go off.

Sin will do that to you. It'll get you on a slide. You think you'd never have gotten there. You thunk your feet were on solid ground. One day, you step just a little further than you ever stepped before. The next morning, you get up and realize you're a child molester. You realize that you are a porno freak completely. You realize you've got AIDS. You realize that you're a criminal. That the law is looking for you.

Someone's searching the Web right now and finding out, getting your name, your number. SWAT team's going to pick you up with 125 other people. You're going to be put in court. Your name's going to be in the newspaper. You're going to go to jail for 20 years. That's not enough. You should have been executed.

I'll go down to prison where you are, and you'll say, "I just didn't think it would ever come to this." Your wife will come see you. I see the wives coming in. I talk to them. I see some of the grown kids. "Haven't seen my daddy. He left when I was two years old. He’s been in here now . . . I brought my little girl down for him to see."

It'll come to that. I deal with them every day. That prison's full of somebody. It wasn't people decided they wanted to go to prison. It wasn't like you see on TV, bunch of crooks and criminals and people shooting it all up.

Most of those people in that prison were just good, ordinary Baptists, Methodists, and Pentecostals that got too deep in sin. It carried them away. Some of those people will get in there for the first time, they walk up, and they know the Bible upward and downward and forward and backward. They know it.

One sits right here, he's a Bible college graduate. He never expected to be in that prison, but he's been in there for many years now. Don't know what he did.

One of them said to me, "Would you pray I'd get out?" I said, "No, I won't. I don't know if you need to get out or not. If you got out, I might have to shoot you. As long as you're in here, I can preach to you." I'm quite honest with them.

[music]

Announcer:  We are happy you could listen today, and hope you enjoyed it. Please remember to check out our great current specials.