How much sin are you willing to accept?

I would like to start this section with an informative report from the United States Food and Drug Administration’s guidelines of purity for a few familiar products which I got from John Ortberg’s books “The Life You’ve Always Wanted” (which I highly recommend):

· Apple butter: If the mold count is 12 percent or more, if it averages 4 rodents hairs per 100 grams or more, if it averages 5 or more whole insects (not counting mites, aphids, or scales insects) per 100 grams, the FDA will pull it from the shelves. Otherwise, it will go right onto your English muffins.
· Coffee beans: (Caffeine addicts beware!) Coffee beans will get withdrawn from the market if an average of 10 percent of more are insect-infested of if there is one live insect in each of 2 or more immediate containers. (The FDA says people just don’t like getting too many live insects with their coffee beans – one container is okay, but with more than that we draw the line).
· Mushrooms: Mushrooms can’t be sold if there is an average of 20 or more maggots of any size per 15 grams of dried mushrooms.
· Fig paste: If there are more than 13 insects heads per 100 grams of fig paste in each of 2 or more subsamples, the FDA ruthlessly tosses the whole batch. (Apparently other insects body parts are tolerable, but we do not want to be staring at too many insect heads).
· Hot dogs: You do not want to know about it.

If anything is really good, we long for it to exist in its pure form: oxygen without exhaust fumes; snow unmixed with slush. This holds true of people we know. Purity is a word greatly prized in the New Testament. Unfortunately, in our day it has been largely lost. It sounds quaint, Victorian, prudish, bloodless. It sounds as if a person isn’t fully human, when actually God’s call for us to be pure is precisely his call for us to be purely human – humanity is as he intended it to be, uncontaminated by sin.

Made me think about how much sin I am willing to accept in my life. Hmmm…..