Daily Devotionals

Truths to Live By - One Day at a Time

Devotional: August 28th

“Be sure your sin will find you out.”

God has built certain unalterable principles into this world of ours, and not all man’s ingenuity can escape the outworking of these principles. One of them is that you can’t sin and get away with it.

Some of us learned this early when we swiped jam or other foods which left their tell-tale marks which mother easily discovered. But the truth applies to all of life, and is attested by every newspaper.

The poem “The Dream of Eugene Aram” is a remarkable illustration of the point. Thinking he could commit a “perfect crime/’ Aram murdered a man and threw his body into the river—“a sluggish water, black as ink, the depth was so extreme.” The next morning he went down to the riverbank where he had committed the crime

And sought the black accursed pool,

With a wild misgiving eye;

And he saw the dead in the riverbed

For the faithless stream was dry.

He tried to cover the body with a huge pile of leaves, but that night a great wind blew through the area, leaving the corpse plainly visible.

Then down I cast me on my face,

And first began to weep,

For I knew my secret then was one

That earth refused to keep,

On land or sea, though it should be

Ten thousand fathoms deep.

Finally he buried his victim in a remote cave, but years later the skeleton was discovered; he was tried for the crime, and executed. His sin had found him put.

But there is another way in which sin catches up with us. E. Stanley Jones reminds us that “it registers itself in inner deterioration, in the inner hell of not being able to respect yourself, in compelling you to live underground in blind labyrinths.”

And even if a man’s sin could somehow remain undetected in this life, it will surely overtake him in the next. Unless that sin has been cleansed through the blood of Jesus, it will be brought to light in the Day of Judgment. Whether it be acts, thoughts, motives or intents; it will be charged against him and the penalty announced. That penalty, of course, is eternal death.