Leaven

I closed my eyes in prayer this morning as I sat in my garden and prayed for the people in my building. I could hear a chorus of little birds singing and thought of St. Francis who preached the gospel to all creatures. He looked at a little bird and said, “It has nothing, yet hear how it sings to God. Just a few berries and it praises God with its song.”

Then I thought of how sad it would be if the birds stopped singing. So it is on the Island of Guam. Some brown snakes who are not native to Guam were imported – no one knows how for sure – and they had no predators on Guam. Soon they multiplied by the millions and devoured every singing bird on the island. Their sweet singing is heard no more.

The snakes are everywhere on Guam and there is nothing that can control them. They are around the children’s feet as they play in their yards. They are in the kitchens where women are cooking, in the living rooms under the chairs and in the sofas. They are on the floors where babies crawl. They are everywhere in the houses, cities, and countryside. They hang from trees, and fences surrounding the airport where people try valiantly to keep them from spreading to other countries—like ours--by hitchhiking on an airplane. I hope they do not come to our borders.

So it is with sin. Like one small pair of breeding snakes, sin enters the life of someone who lets it in. Soon it fills the life and destroys every good and beautiful song of praise.
Leaven represents sin. The Bible give examples of boasting and hypocrisy as examples of “leaven.” “Your boasting is not good.” (Matt. 6:11a) “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.” (Luke 12:1)

Leaven also represents false teaching. “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” Then they understood that he did not tell them to beware of the leaven of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” (Matthew 6:11b-12)
If you let sin and false teaching into your life, it multiplies like yeast until it fills you body, mind and soul. Your whole being becomes ungodly.

What will happen to ungodly sinners? The Bible is clear: “For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; 5 if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; 6 if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; 7 and if he rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked 8 (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard); 9 then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, 10 and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority.
Bold and willful, they do not tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones, 11 whereas angels, though greater in might and power, do not pronounce a blasphemous judgment against them before the Lord. 12 iBut these, like irrational animals, creatures of instinct, born to be caught and destroyed, blaspheming about matters of which they are ignorant, will also be destroyed in their destruction . . .” (2 Peter 2:9-12)

What can a person in this horrible state do? Only one thing: turn to Jesus.
Do you think your sins are so small that God will not destroy you? Do not be deceived. “Do you not know a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. (I Cor. 5:5-8)

Come. Come as you are. Come now. Christ died for the ungodly. That means he died for me and for you. Receive Him by faith and follow on to know Him more day by day.

Say to God, “Make your face shine on your servant; save me in your steadfast love! Grant me grace to seek Your face every day. Hide not your face from me. Turn not your servant away in anger, O you who have been my help. Cast me not off; forsake me not, O God of my salvation! Teach me your way, O Lord, and lead me on a level path.”