Cigarette Killer

In his book How to Be Born Again, Billy Graham tells of a man in Australia who went for a haircut.  His barber commented about the sore on the man’s lip.  “Yep,” said the man.

“My cigarettes have done that.”

            “Well,” said the barber, “it doesn’t seem to be healing.”

            “Oh, it will, it will,” replied the man.

But when he came for his next haircut, his lip was split and ugly.  The barber expressed alarm, but the man said, “Don’t worry about it.  I’ve switch to a cigarette holder.  It’ll heal soon.”

The barber even showed the man pictures of similar cases of skin cancer, but the man shrugged them off.

The third month, the man failed to show up for his regular haircut.  When the barber asked about him, he was told, “Oh, didn’t you know?  He died of cancer two days ago.”

Sin is like that:  it’s a cancer that destroys little by little, sometimes so slowly that we don’t realize what’s happening to us.  Because of the world’s desirability, we don’t realize how—or how much—it is dulling our spiritual senses.  The unsaved person isn’t aware of the spiritual dangers that lurk among the desires of the flesh and of the eyes and the pride of life, and sometimes even we Christians are deceived.  That’s why the Bible warns believers against friendship with the world (James 4:4); being defiled by the world (James 1:27); loving the world (1 John 2:15); and being conformed to the world (Romans 12:2).

David Jeremiah, Signs of Life, p. 104