A leopard has no sense of self-awareness. It knows maternal instinct while it raises its cubs. It knows hunger when its stomach is empty. It knows the satisfaction of a full stomach after a kill.
However, show a leopard its picture, and it will not recognize its own spots. It does not matter that no two of these great cats are identical, and that their coats are as individual as our fingerprints are to us. To a leopard, its spots go unnoticed on its skin. They are simply a part of who the animal is, and it cannot conceive of itself in any other way.
Sometimes we are too much like the leopard. Our spots have become who we are. We no longer notice the smudges that stain our perfection. They have been there too long, and we accept them as part of our personality and our core being. We lose our concept of what God wants us to be in exchange for the satisfaction of a full stomach after a kill.
God wants us to wake up and see our spots, for if we let the sins of this world stain us, how will the unbeliever know we are any different than they are? How will the life of Christ appeal to them, if our spots are the same as theirs?
In the World English Bible, Jeremiah 13:23 asks us:
“Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then may you also do good, who are accustomed to do evil.”
One is linked to the other. If we cannot do one, we cannot do the other. We must become better than what our natural man demands that we be. If we revert to our natural state, we are depriving ourselves of a great opportunity to win others for Christ.
John 3:16 shows us the great length God went to so that we would have the ability to turn from death unto life.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
However, he will not force it on us. To cleanse our sinful stains, we have to choose to walk with him.
James 4:1-5 speaks to our relationship with our fellow man.
“What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, ‘He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us’?”
Only our relationship with God can make our relationship with our brothers one of perfect harmony and Christian fellowship. It is when we turn from desiring the world and all it has to offer that God will give us all he has to offer.
What God has for us will be so much more than the world can even pretend to give. We will truly know abundance when we reside in the arms of the Father.
When we can see our sins, we can turn them over to God to wash them from our skin.
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Code: FGO.F.12.14b.vp