This weekend (http://www.capebiblechapel.org/media.php?pageID=5), we glanced rearward at 2012 by looking back thousands of years at a man named Saul.  Saul was good-looking and . . .  Well the positives sort of stop after good-looking.  It reminds of my teenage forays into the world of dating, when looks were all that mattered.  My mother would ask me about the girl I had taken out and if all I could excitedly say was, “She is really good-looking!”, my mom knew this was nothing but trouble.  For Saul it was much the same, nothing but trouble.

You see, Saul had a repentance problem.  What I mean by “repentance problem” is that Saul would rather live an unhappy life and die a gruesome death before admitting–truly admitting–that he had some flaws and needed change.  His pride would not let him repent as the quote from Robinson Crusoe so aptly describes of mankind: “Not ashamed to sin, but are ashamed to repent.”

Part of this tragedy is the way we let our sin pile up, like paper clutter upon a messy desk.

I was talking about the messiness of my own desk with a wise man the other day.  He told of his former company and its absolute disdain of clutter.  The rule there was, “Pick up a piece of paper, do something with it, throw it away.”  By doing this, one’s desk was clutter-free each evening before heading home.

What if I viewed my “little sins” more in this light?  Sure, it is just a little shred of a thing, but piled up it can make quite a mess.  What if each evening I allowed God to search me and I was willing to relinquish sin in my life, both big and small?  Perhaps then I could avoid the Saul-like catastrophe of a living a life and dying a death my way rather than God’s.