Salvation & House Cleaning: The Shadows of Sins

As I was reading a very familiar passage in the Bible, this morning, I was reminded of another facet of salvation and sharing the Light that Christ wants to fill our lives. This evil generation of which Christ Jesus speaks (and out of which He calls each of us sinners) began when He began His earthly ministry and shall not end until He sits as King in Jerusalem for His thousand year reign on Earth, before God's Final Judgment.


Luke 11:29-36
²⁹  And when the people were gathered thick together, he began to say, This is an evil generation: they seek a sign; and there shall no sign be given it, but the sign of Jonas the prophet.
³⁰  For as Jonas was a sign unto the Ninevites, so shall also the Son of man be to this generation.
³¹  The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with the men of this generation, and condemn them: for she came from the utmost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here.
³²  The men of Nineve shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.
³³   No man, when he hath lighted a candle, putteth it in a secret place, neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick, that they which come in may see the light.
³⁴  The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness.
³⁵  Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness.
³⁶  If thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light.


As I read that passage, I was struck by the degree of the effects of my sin from day to day; that each of my sins directly obstructs the Light of Christ from wholly filling my life and shining out to reach others. It is each and every one of my sin's shadows that obscure the message of God's salvation in Christ when I try to convey it to others who need Him. I may not realize the effect at that time, but as the Bible says, in Numbers 32:23, "...be sure your sin will find you out." Thus it is with the shadows of our sins that obstruct the Light of God that He wants filling our lives and enlightening the lives of those around us. As He says in, Matthew 7 and Luke 6, about the mote and the beam (a wooden splinter versus a large beam), we cannot judge righteously nor see correctly to help others if we are bearing greater sin in our own lives than what error there is in another person's life. It is the same principle of learning to get our own lives right with God by way of His only plan of salvation and through His only Savior; learning to clean up our own house sufficiently before we go forth to try to assist others to remove the same sins as ours from their lives. May we closely attend to the counsel of the LORD GOD Almighty in this and all matters.