I heard once that celery is the perfect diet food: apparently it takes more calories to digest celery than you actually get from the celery. Now, whether that’s precisely true or not, I do not know, but I can tell you this: that’s a great metaphor for sin.

Imagine if your entire diet were of celery. The more you eat, the hungrier you get. Starving, you sit down to a huge feast of celery. You gorge yourself, only to rise from the table more ravenous than when you sat down. Sin is like that. The more you eat, the less satisfied you are.

One of the saddest truths about sin is that it is a quest for happiness that can never deliver. We sin because we think what we’re sinning to get will please us. But sin never satisfies. It pleases, but only very briefly, and then leaves us hungrier than before for real happiness. Someone sent me this quote recently which I think explains it well:

“Again and again it appears that Christians are not sufficiently in touch with themselves. They do not know themselves well enough to realize that, because of the way in which their nature has been changed, their hearts are now set against all known sin. So they hang on to unspiritual and morally murky behavior patterns, and kid themselves that this adds to the joy of their lives. Encouraged by Satan, the grand master of delusion, they feel (feelings as such, of course, are mindless and blind) that to give up these things would be impossibly painful and impoverishing, so though they know they should, they do not. Instead, they settle for being substandard Christians, imagining they will be happier that way. Then they wonder why their whole life seems to them to have become flat and empty.” J.I. Packer, A Passion For Holiness, p. 85

Feel flat and empty? If you’re a Christian, there’s a better way. There is joy unimaginable available for the taking in Jesus Christ. Here’s the secret that will deliver us from substandard Christianity: remember the gospel. Verses like John 15:9-11 are incredibly helpful in this way:

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.

Want your joy to be full? Abide in Christ, and remember the love that sent him to the cross for sinners like us. Meditate long and hard on the three verses above. Make a list of any “unspiritual and morally murky behavior patterns” and repent from them. Give them up to find the joy that is in our Lord and Savior, Christ Jesus.

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