Blog: Smooth Criminal
The idea of hypnosis has always been intriguing to me. I remember seeing cartoons as a child where someone would take a watch a have it sway back and forth continuously providing a focus for the person being hypnotized and then someone would snap their finger after making a command and the person would do as told without much effort from the person hypnotizing. Seems unreal and unlikely that beings as intelligent as humans could fall into such a trance but there is a smooth criminal on the loose whose goal is to distort, destroy, and demoralize. He doesn't use a pocket watch to hold our attention but he does use something just as shiny, our desires. Desires are things we long for, crave, or want very badly. And there's nothing innately wrong with having desires. So how does one turn what is good to bad? It takes a Smooth Criminal!
This illusion is elementary compared to what the real smooth criminal can do!
Last week we began our Sermon series The Gospel: According to Michael Jackson. And with that I tried to get the church to understand that in order to understand the good news we had to understand the WHY! We needed to understand that humanity was created as a special creation, in the image of God, with a God given purpose. Our job as God's new creation today (Christians) is to be like Him, citizens of heaven, and to bring along as many others as we can. But in order to do that last part we have to understand sin and how it is produced.
Sin in its most simple form, is doing what God told you not to do. No one reading this has NOT sinned. I am confident in that fact. And no sin is done without you, the reader/human, doing it. The smooth criminal doesn’t make you sin. He doesn’t have that type of power. He doesn’t even have the power to know your thoughts. But he does work with what he is shown. Michael Jackson’s song smooth criminal speaks of a person who breaks a window, forces his way in, and harms a person named Annie. But the adversary the devil doesn’t use such force. He uses what is within you to cause you to bring yourself to death. We are in dire need of help and the GOOD NEWS (GOSPEL) is, JESUS CAN!
