Paper cuts to our souls

While driving to a meeting yesterday I listened to a podcast from Ravi Zacharias.  In it he told of a late night phone call he once received from a friend who was asking for his prayers.  The friend was an Emergency Room doctor and earlier that evening a woman who had been badly beaten by her boyfriend was brought into the hospital.  The woman was near death.  The doctor quickly scrubbed and began working on the woman.  He opened her up and began to massage her heart with his hand trying to keep it beating.  In a few minutes he realized she was gone.  As he was cleaning up a nurse brought in a bag that came in with the woman and told the doctor he needed to see it.  It was filled with dirty needles; the woman was a serious drug addict.  He told Zacharias that in the course of treating her he had cut his hand on a rib bone, and now if the woman had a drug-related disease he could be infected.  Zacharias asked if the cut was large, and the doctor said it was like a paper cut.  Zacharias said he asked if the doctor was saying that he could be exposed to a possible life-threatening disease from a paper cut, and the doctor said yes.

Zacharias went on to ask in his message how many Christians are damaged spiritually by paper cuts to their souls.  A small cut here, another small cut there as we compromise our values and beliefs little by little.  Few people fall into major sin all at once.  Most begin with a small compromise here and another one there, and then one day we find ourselves in major problems spiritually and wonder how we ever got there.

Society makes it easy for such paper cuts to occur.  We listen to the radio and hear a song we like, and although it may have some questionable lyrics we download it to our I-Pods so we listen to it as often as we want thereby feeding its message into our minds.   We reason that most of the song is OK so it's alright to listen to it.  We go to a movie and tell our friends how good it was and recommend they go see it.  We might even mention that there are just a couple of scenes that caused it to get an R rating.  We watch television and become immune to the growing amount of sexual scenes and foul language that is making its way into our living rooms.  Things aren't going well at home and we meet someone who seems to really understand us and even appreciate all we do, and soon an emotional connection is made that should not happen with someone other than our spouse.  We get up a little late and reason that we'll skip our morning devotions and Bible reading because we just have too much to do.  All small things no more than paper cuts, but over time they can create huge problems.

Do we stop listening to music or watching movies or television?  Should we all slip off somewhere to a monastery and hide out there until Jesus comes so we are not polluted by the world?  I don't think so.  Jesus said His disciples were to be in the world but not of the world.  Our ministry is right here in this imperfect, sin-filled world, and to abandon it is to abandon our mission.  But, we need to be aware of the paper cuts that can occur in our lives and take steps to deal with them immediately.  To pretend that this one thing is no big deal is like saying it's OK to drink just a little poison.  How much does it take to cause you great harm?

Maintaining the spiritual disciples is never easy is our fast-paced world, but they are essential if we are to protect ourselves from the paper cuts our society tries to inflict on us.  Even then, there will be times when we will realize we have been cut, we have allowed a measure of compromise into our lives, and at those times we thank God for His forgiveness and confess once again our failing.  Paper cuts do not have to lead to a damaged soul if we will remain vigilant and deal with them as soon as they occur.