But if you don’t understand sin for what it is, if you don’t see sin as an affront to a holy God, if you call sin by some other name, a misjudgment, a malfunction, a mistake, or sickness, if you say that man is uh ill but not evil, he’s weak but not wicked, he’s sick but not sinful.
If you say that, then you’re never going to deal with your sin as you ought, and you’re never going to have fellowship with God. Take God’s word and turn with me, please, to 1 John chapter 1. 1 John chapter 1. And in a moment, I’m going to read uh to you beginning in verse three. 1 John chapter 1. When I was a younger preacher, I used to pastor church, a college church down in Florida on the edge of the Everglades.
And uh there was a sugar mill out there in the little town of Felsmere. Wonderful little town. We had a delightful time and was our joy, Joyce and I, to serve the Lord in that little church. I had a deacon out there who would hunt frogs for a living. He was professional frogger. He would go out at nighttime and one of these airboats and uh and uh gig frogs.
And he did a made a handsome living hunting frogs out there in the swamps. And he told me a story one time I’ll never forget. He said, “Before I was saved, not only did we hunt frogs, but uh we poached alligators.” He said, “Actually, if you got a big alligator, uh his hide was worth far more than anything you could get that night uh for frog legs.
” And he said, “We didn’t shoot the alligators, but actually we would shine our headlight on them.” And he wore a light between his eyes, a very powerful beam. We’d see the gator’s eyes and then we would take our boat and come alongside him keeping that light right on his eyes and he would stay there on top of the water.
And he said we kept a big hammer beneath the seat and these men set up high in that boat on a seat that’s about that high off the floor of the boat. And he said we’d keep a hammer under there and we’d come alongside that alligator and hit him between the eyes with a hammer. We didn’t shoot him because if you shot him, the game warden would hear and the game warden would come.
So he said we just hit him real hard with that hammer. Uh this deacon, brother Neil, said to me, he said, “Pastor, I saw the biggest alligator I believe I’d ever seen. I knew he’s very valuable. I didn’t want to miss him.” So he said, “I idled my motor and came up right alongside this alligator.” And he said, ‘I took my hammer, a ballpeen hammer that I had under my seat.
And he said, I gave a mighty swing. Now, you’d have to know Neil, he’s a small guy, wiry, muscular. He said, I gave a mighty swing. He said, but when I did, I missed the alligator’s head. And he said, the force of that hammer coming all the way around flipped me out of the boat, straddled the alligator. This is the part that tickled me.
