Selling apples with worms in them

I’m a small-scale farmer trying my hand at all sorts of crops, and learning along the way of all the pitfalls that one has to deal with from preparing the ground to sowing, from caring for the growing crop to reaping, and eventually selling the produce. The problems must be worrying me more than I realised, because last night I dreamt of my repeated and fruitless efforts to sell apples which were all infested with small white worms. I told my potential customers that the worms were all natural, that they were very clean white worms and that their presence in large numbers in the apples showed very acceptable farming practices without the use of harmful pesticides. Nothing I said would convince the customers to buy them.

In our Lord ‘s Prayer, we pray ‘forgive us our trespasses’. This reflects the wonderful truth that Jesus’ death for mankind provides a way in which any wrong-doing on our part can be forgiven and expunged from our record when we stand before the Judge of all mankind. He promises to remove our sins from us ‘as far as the east is from the west’ and promises that he will remember them no more.

The problem however is that we may not recognise our sinfulness. We may convince ourselves that what we do or think is only natural; that the sins are little white ones, like the worms in those apples, and don’t do any harm. As long as we think that way, we will not benefit from God’s gracious and costly gift of forgiveness. Such residual sin builds a barrier between ourselves and God, and leaves us without the peace and joy he promises his children.

What is needed is a time of quiet before God, when we ask him to point out to us the wrongs that we have concealed from ourselves. When he does that we can repent of those actions or failures to act, and know complete forgiveness and a fresh start, with no “little worms” crawling around inside. Then we can pray with David in Psalm 17:8: “Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings.”