One day I was in the back yard pulling up some pesky weeds. While they were small, they kind of looked like flowers but as they grew larger you could tell that they were weeds and if I didn’t get them out of the yard, they were going to start taking over. So, I went out and cleared the ground and everything looked great, at least for a while. A few weeks later they started growing back so I cleared them again. After a couple of times doing this it dawned on me that these weeds will continue to keep coming back until I dig up the weeds by the roots. As I started to dig, I would get some of the roots but not all the roots. I figured I had gotten enough of the roots so that I would not see any more weeds. I covered the ground and went back to my life. A little while later I noticed little sprouts starting to shoot up again out of the ground. Guess what, my little friends were coming back. This time I knew what I had to do. I had to dig deep and keep digging until every part of the root of those weeds were pulled up out of the ground.
As I went on my weed killing adventure in my back yard, I noticed some correlations between the weeds in my back yard and the sexual sin we find as men that has taken root in our lives. Sexual sin over time grows deep roots in our souls and in our lives. The longer we are involved with it, the deeper and stronger the roots become, winding, and entangling themselves into every part of our lives. Like the weeds in my yard sexual sin begins to steal the good things in our lives and keeps us from flourishing, like the weeds in my back yard kept my flowers from growing. Clearing the weeds from the surface of the ground removed the sight of the weeds but the roots were still underground, alive, and highly active. We often think that if we read a book or take a class, like clearing the weeds from the ground, those things will be enough to clear sexual sin from our lives but like the roots of the weeds, the roots of the sexual sin still remain alive and very active under the surface.
The longer I let the roots grow deeper, the harder it was to dig them out. If I had dug the weeds out by the roots when the weeds first appeared it would have been much easier to expel from the yard. The longer we let sexual sin stay in our lives, without digging it out by the roots, the harder it is going to be to get it out of our lives for good. We can do a lot of things to help remove sexual sin from our lives but if we never go after the root causes, we are setting ourselves up to have a much harder time trying to uproot it from our lives the next time. You might ask what the roots of our sexual sin? I do not know. It is different for all of us but this I do know, there is a root. It may be buried in childhood traumas, pain, wounds of the past, the point is like the weeds in my back yard, we must keep digging to find the roots of our sexual sins, all of them. Then and only then can we have true and lasting healing and freedom from sexual sin.
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