Pastor's Corner
By CURTIS WIENS
First Baptist Church of Durham
Several years ago a story in a national magazine described a couple who "adopted" two wolves. They discovered the two wolves, still young and small, while making a movie about caribou in Alaska. They took the wolves to their home, raised them, and gave them the kindest treatment. For a while, the wolves behaved just like friendly dogs. Finally, however, the wolves turned on their masters, who barely escaped with their lives, and then fled to join a wild wolf pack. No matter how kind their treatment, the nature of the wolves was such that sooner or later they were bound to behave like other wolves. The wolf nature could not be educated out of them.
That is a good analogy of our sinful nature. It always stays the same. No amount of education, refinement, culture, counseling, psychiatric treatment, self-help courses, New Year's resolutions, or anything else can take away our selfishness and proneness toward sin.
God says, "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" (Jeremiah 17:9, NIV). That is the condition of the human heart — all human hearts, even the hearts of the greatest philanthropists, humanitarians, and even all preachers and Christian leaders. And that is why God says, "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God" (I Corinthians 15:5).
But thankfully, there is a solution to the wicked, selfish, human heart, and there is only one solution. That is radical heart surgery. It is not "bypass" heart surgery but "replacement" surgery. That surgery takes place when one receives Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
The apostle Paul calls it "circumcision
Wolves will always be wolves. But the grace of God, He enables obedient humans to become new creatures. "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come" (2 Corinthians 5:17).
