“Be sure your sins will find you out.” I have heard that growing up. It is true. Richard Eggers discovered it recently.
Richard is 68-years-old and was fired by Wells Fargo bank in Des Moines, Iowa. It was a result of a routine background check that found he had been arrested in 1963 for putting a fake dime into a laundromat washing machine. Eggers said, “It was a stupid stunt, but I don’t think it warrants a termination almost a half a century later.”
I really agree with Richard, but the whole situation points to the fact that “your sins will find you out.”
Someone has said that many people spend the first six days of the week sowing wild oats – then go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure! The problem with that practice is that consequences never have a crop failure!
Trying to cover up and avoid having your sins find you out recently caused a scandal in Moscow. A photograph surfaced of a church leader wearing an enormously expensive watch, a Breguet timepiece worth at least $30,000.
The church leader was Patriarch Kirill I. The church decided to work a little miracle to make the offending timepiece disappear. Editors doctored a photograph of the leader on the church’s website. It simply extended the black sleeve on his arm where there once appeared to be the expensive timepiece.
The church thought it had solved the problem, until it discovered that the Patriarch had his arm on a highly glossed table that revealed a reflection of the watch on his arm. They had simply extended the black sleeve of his robe to cover where the watch once appeared. They failed to erase the picture of the watch on the table!
Coincidently the Patriarch had addressed the watch issue three days before the photo doctoring scandal hit the blogosphere. Kirill was doing an interview with a Kremlin-friendly television journalist, Vladimir Solovyov. Kirill told him that he began researching as to whether or not he ever owned a Breguet. He sorted through a lot of the gifts he had received over the years and discovered that he did indeed receive the Breguet. (The Russian Orthodox Church gives more expensive gifts than Methodists.) But Kirill insisted that he had never worn it and he contended that any photo of him wearing it had been altered with Photoshop.
Kirill was caught. Your sins will find you out. The psalmist David wrote, “God, You know every sin I’ve committed; my life is a wide-open book before You.” (Psalm 69:5 MSG)
Sins do carry consequences. There is no avoiding that. There is a good news. We cannot eliminate the consequences, but we can receive forgiveness by confessing our sins. The Bible says clearly that if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from everything we’ve done wrong. (I John 1:9 CEB)
Richard Eggers discovered that not even 50 years eliminated the consequences. Patriarch Kirill wasn’t successful using Photocopying. Neither time nor technology will eliminate consequences!
Confession is the only constructive way to deal with consequences!
