I found something out this week which kind of took me aback.  Turns out, that bear wrestling is an actual thing.  I mean that there are people, still to this day, who get into a ring with a bear and wrestle with them.  Believe me, PETA doesn’t like it and I’m not sure I do either.  After all, the bear is muzzled, its claws removed.  There is a high degree of danger but, nevertheless, the bear almost always loses. 

  It doesn’t sound like a fun past-time to me but hey, neither does Tik Toc so take that for what you will.  But what if that bear weren’t chained and muzzled and declawed?  Well, that fight would end a different way, wouldn’t it?  The bear would win, all the time, hands down.

  Now consider for a second, that you were a bear fighter, and not one of those namby-pamby ones who wrestles bound bears.  No, you wrestle those bears full-on, without the protective measures.  How would you fare? 

  Not so great, I assume. 

  But what if, after a particularly nasty loss, on in which you were torn and bloody, so thoroughly beaten that any onlooker would assume you’d never get back onto the mat with a bear.  Imagine their surprise when you head back and, yet again, take another whipping?  What if you did it, again and again?

  It’s preposterous, really.  At some point, you’d get the memo, latch onto the idea, truly understand – there’s no getting on the mat with a bear without losing horrifically.  Wouldn’t you?

  Well, I think most of us, given that situation, would be wise enough to stop wrestling.  Why?  Because we’re wise like that….

  Or are we?

  The fact of the matter is that if you swap out that bear for sin, then you’ve got a pretty good portrait of ourselves.  After all, who here hasn’t wandered back to some forgotten sin of the past.  Finding whatever it is that leads us away from God comforting at first, it’s easy to believe that we’ve got the wrestling match in hand.  Oh, but then the bear’s muzzle and chains are removed and, well, you get the tar beat out of you yet again.

  And, in a manner of speaking, it’s a subtle form of insanity.  There’s a phrase that captures this dynamic perfectly.  Although it’s often attributed to Einstein, he himself swore he never said it.  The saying is this – insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  While not the words of a genius, they sure are genius words.  To my mind, nothing so much captures the insanity of sin than that. 

  Whatever it is that we do that isn’t of God’s will always ends up badly for us, and for others.  Maybe we gossip about other people.  Perhaps we tell lies, looking to bolster other people’s opinions of us.  It could be that we use alcohol or drugs or pornography excessively, causing harm to ourselves and others.  It really doesn’t matter what sin or sins are particularly potent in our lives the bottom line is this – we know we shouldn’t be doing something but find ourselves doing it. nevertheless.

  The church has classically described 7 types of behaviors as deadly sins.  Think of these as kind of the main categories of sin.  As such, particular sins all fall into one of those 7 categories.  Greed, anger, lust, gluttony, sloth, envy and pride.  IF, for example, we are able to help someone and then don’t, then he sin in sloth, apatheia, unconcern for another’s suffering.  If we have a habit of staring lasciviously at members of the opposite sex, that would be a manifestation of lust.  See how it works?  But the key thing to keep in mind is that these seven deadliest are potent.