WHAT THIS SIN WILL COST.
By Sunday School Times
WE can not sin and then go back to where we were before. Every sin is a losing of life-forces. It has been said that each time a person has what is called a "cold," there is a permanent impairment of his vitality. Whether that is so or not, it is true that every time a man sins, he has permanently impaired his spiritual vitality, his powers of resistance, for this world at least. God in Christ will forgive his sin, and has released him from the eternal death penalty of that sin; but God Himself can not, or will not, restore him to all that he was before he had sinned. If a man loses an arm or a leg in a drunken brawl, the sin of that drunkenness will, if he wishes, be forgiven, but the arm or the leg will not be restored. Nor will innocence lost through sin ever return; and the cutting word can never be unsaid, though forgiven. The loss is not only in first sins, it is in every sin. All that we can do is to take God's second-best, or third-best, or tenth-best, after our sin-failures, when He wanted us to have His best. In the day that is still ahead, which shall we choose?