James Garfield was a lay preacher and principal of his denominational college. It was said of him, because he was ambidextrous, he could simultaneously write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other. In 1880, he was elected President of the United States, but after only six months in office, he was shot in the back with a revolver. He never lost consciousness. At the hospital, the doctor probed the wound with his little finger to seek the bullet. He could not find it. So he tried a silver-tipped probe. Still he could not find the bullet.
They took Garfield back to Washington, D.C. Despite the summer heat, they tried to keep him comfortable. He was growing very weak. Teams of doctors tried to locate the bullet, probing the wound over and over. In desperate they asked Alexander Graham Bell, who was working on a little device called the telephone, to see if he could locate the metal inside the President’s body. He came, he sought, and he too failed.
The President hung on through July, through August, but in September he finally died-not from the wound, but from the infection. The repeated probing, which the physicians thought would help the man, eventually killed him.
So it is with people who dwell too long on their sin and refuse to release it to God. The soul that sins shall surely die because sin is the deadliest disease of all. Its effect lasts for all eternity unless it is rendered powerless by the blood of Jesus Christ. Paul said it well in Romans 8:1,2 (NIV): “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.”
Those of us who have discovered the cure of sin have Good News to tell those still living under the curse of sin. May we do it today before anyone else perishes from the infection that only the Great Physician can cure.
Pastor Joe Ford
