Hardened Sinner

Hardened Sinner

I was sitting in my office at our ministry when I heard what sounded like the painful groans of a woman in the latter stages of childbirth—with two-week-overdue triplets and no epidural. Whatever was happening was serious, because amidst the groans I could hear a distressed voice calling upon God for help. I dropped what I was doing and ran down the hall to the kitchen, not knowing what I was going to find. All I knew was that, whatever it was, it was going to be really bad.

As I looked into the kitchen, Danny, a staff member, was bent over the sink frantically pouring water into his mouth. He had a flushed face, sweat on his brow, and tears in his pained eyes. Next to him stood our IT guy, Dave, who didn’t look like he was in his normal confident, fix-it mode. His eyes widened as he told me what had happened. Danny had opened the refrigerator and inadvertently touched a bottle of hot sauce. He saw some sauce on his finger and had intuitively licked it off. Suddenly his mouth was on fire! Unbeknown to him, the bottle contained a hot sauce made with Naga Jolokia peppers--the hottest in the world. Pepper heat is measured by Scoville Heat Units (SHU), and this sauce was up there along with the surface of the sun: It was 650,000 SHU! I later checked out the website that sold the blistering substance, and one reviewer warned, “Yow, this stuff is hot. . . It will melt your face if you don’t mix it.” Obviously, Danny hadn’t mixed it.

I knew that Scotty used the sauce like the average person uses ketchup on a hotdog, so I rushed downstairs into the production studio where he was setting up lights. I wildly said, “Danny accidentally got some hot sauce in his mouth and he’s going crazy with pain! What should he do?” Scotty smiled casually and said that all he could do was give it time. He was a calm and cool veteran of the hottest of hot sauces, and many times I have watched in horror as he bit into incendiary peppers that I’m sure weren’t created to be eaten; they were to somehow be used in warfare. I had surmised that Scotty had so scorched his unfortunate taste buds that they had left his mouth.

Such is the way of the hardened sinner and his conscience. He thinks that he is getting away with sin because guilt no longer registers in his senses. He doesn’t feel the heat because his conscience has been seared. Look at Scripture’s warning about those who give themselves to sexual sin: “Can a man take fire to his bosom, and his clothes not be burned? Can one walk on hot coals, and his feet not be seared? So is he who goes in to his neighbor’s wife; whoever touches her shall not be innocent” (Proverbs 6:27-29).-- Ray Comfort