Just One More Time

The person who contracted herpes after a one-night stand, the guy who got AIDS through drug use, the girl who got pregnant after sleeping with her ex-boyfriend one vulnerable day, the college student who got caught cheating on the final exam and automatically failed the class, the adolescent who punched the opposing soccer team's coach for what he perceived as an injustice and the victim dies in the process (leaving the teenager in trouble with the law and unable to continue playing his favorite sport), I know these people and more can testify to the fact that any deviation from God's word or a moral lifestyle as the unbelieving world would term it is not worth it.


How often we run to lying, cheating, stealing, being careless with our sexual health, viewing entertainment that is filled with depravity and violence, and a host of other choices in the heat of the moment or when we sense that getting our way seems unlikely or we are unwilling to wait or work to bring about what we desire.


The next time you seek to justify sinning and desire to indulge in the expanse of temptations available, keep in mind that...

• Just one more time may cost you your health
• Just one more time may cost you your marriage
• Just one more time may cost you your reputation
• Just one more time may cost you your job
• Just one more time can cost you your future
• Just one more time further hardens your heart toward God and the conviction of the Holy Spirit
• Just one more time serves to mar your Christian example and diminishes your witness
• Just one more time can cause a chain reaction of unforeseen consequences that will devastate you and bring you to ruin

Just one more time!


As someone who has been (aside from many other sins) a compulsive liar, a self-injurer, a thief, a masturbation addict, and taken part in other destructive choices or formed harmful habits over the course of several years, I can adamantly say that no sin, lifestyle, or decision that dishonors Christ (disobedience, spitting in His face through treating ourselves and others as less than having inherent worth due to being made in the image of God) is worth it.  Spending time with those who have no fear of God and no desire to seek Him is not worth it.  The pleasures of sin, the high you feel by indulging in sin without others knowing, the hours, days, and years spent feeding your lust is not worth it.  The feelings of gratification, the late nights, the flirtation and casual sexual encounters are not worth it.  The anger and rage you take out on your family when life is too overwhelming for you is not worth it.  The hurt feelings you cause by your absence in the lives of people God has graciously brought into your life because you would rather live selfishly is not worth it.  And on and on and on it goes.


Sin will never be worth it and will always cost you.


"To move across from one sort of person to another is the essence of repentance: the liar becomes truthful, the thief honest, the lewd pure, the proud humble.  The whole moral texture of the life is altered.  The thoughts, the desires, the affections are transformed, and the man is no longer what he had been before.  So radical is this change that the apostle calls the man that used to be 'the old man' and the man that now is 'the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him.' "  A. W. Tozer


"If you will not determine to be pure, you will grow more and more impure."  Unknown


"Sin and the child of God are incompatible.  They may occasionally meet; they cannot live together in harmony."  John Stott


"Pleasure without God, without the sacred boundaries, will actually leave you emptier than before.  And this is Biblical truth, this is experiential truth.  The loneliest people in the world are amongst the wealthiest and most famous who found no boundaries within which to live.  That is a fact I've seen again and again."  Ravi Zacharias


"God’s purpose for the men and women He redeems is not simply to have them believe certain truths but to transform them in a lifelong process that stretches toward heaven."  D. A. Carson