Sin Grows Rapidly
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Children often fail to realise that sin, no matter how insignificant it appears at first, once we let it into our lives can grow very rapidly. Here are two illustrations to illustrate this.
a. Ask the children to imagine that they had a choice of receiving either $500 immediately, or 1 cent doubled every day for a month. Which would they choose? Most children will opt for the $500. Bad choice! If they had chosen the 1 cent doubled each day for a month, they would have ended up with over $5,000,000. (Work it out for yourself!). Sin grows rather like that. It may seem small and insignificant to start with, but left unchecked, it can rapidly grow to become a serious problem.
Alternative : A similar illustration can be used regarding witnessing. If you told just one other person about Jesus today, and then tomorrow you both each told another person, and then the next day all four of you each told one other person, and you continued on like this. How long would it be before the entire world of about six billion people heard about Jesus? Answer: Just over a month! In contrast, if I, working alone, attempted to tell everybody in just Auckland (population 1 million) about Jesus at the rate of ten per day, it would still take me over 270 years to complete the task!
b. Have a volunteer come out and hold his arms outstretched. Produce a small length of wool, and tie it round the volunteer’s wrists. Explain that this one twist of wool represents one sin (e.g. one lie). Ask the children to imagine that your volunteer told one lie, then realised what he had done was wrong and determined to break free from his sin and give up lying. Have your volunteer break free from the wool, which he will easily be able to do.
Repeat the above procedure, but this time produce a longer length of wool, and begin to wrap it around your volunteer’s wrists, explaining that this time he did not give up his lying, but told another one to try and cover up his first, and then another, and another, etc. End up with about ten twists. Tie the length ends together. State that eventually your volunteer realised what he was doing, and decided to break free from his lies as before. But what happens this time? No matter how hard he struggles, he is unable to snap the wool and break free.
That is how sin works. The Bible says He who sins is a slave to sin (John 8 v. 34). Think for a moment what a slave is – someone who cannot do what he wants to do, and has to do what he doesn’t want to do! If sin becomes a habit in your life (whether it is lying or something else), without help, it will be extremely hard to stop – even if you want to. The good news is that if we ask him, Jesus is able to break the power of sin in our life and, as the Bible says, If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. (John 8 v. 36). Finally, produce a pair of scissors and set your volunteer free.
by Maurice Sweetsur, http://objectlessons.blogspot.com/
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