I’ll never forget a sermonette I heard at summer camp when I was young, not quite a teenager. On the speaking platform, the speaker had mounted a big piece of plywood on the wall. It was about eight feet wide and six feet tall, painted white, with a large drawing of a brain on it. Inside the drawing were several lengths of fuse squiggling through like the folds of our gray matter.
The speaker began talking about making choices. He described being at a party and being offered alcohol.
Then he pulled out a lighter and ignited it. “Once you’ve made that decision,” he said, as he brought the flame over to the board and touched the end of one fuse, “you can never undo it.” The fuse crackled as the spark meandered slowly from one side of the brain to the other, leaving behind a stark, black burn mark.
“The mark from that decision,” he said, “will remain for the rest of your life.”
He described other choices you might make: watching immoral movies, rebelling against your parents, taking drugs, having sex. He lit one fuse after another after another. One by one, we watched that white drawing of the brain become charred by these scorched trails of ash.
By the end of the sermonette, the brain was covered with irreversible scars—marks representing the effects of just a few bad choices.
This impactful image came back to mind recently when I was studying Jeremiah 17:1, which says, “The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond: it is graven upon the table of their heart ….”
Think seriously about what this verse means. It is extremely crucial for you at this point in your life.
“This is a dreadful warning,” Gerald Flurry wrote in Jeremiah and the Greatest Vision in the Bible. “Sin becomes deeply etched in our minds, as if it were written there with ‘a pen of iron’ and ‘the point of a diamond.’ It becomes engraved upon our hearts. It’s like being hooked on heroin.”
Sin often brings immediate pleasure (Hebrews 11:25). The person who first tries heroin feels nice for a while. But Jeremiah 17:1 shows what is happening while he is mesmerized by that sparkly fuse: That sin is burning into his mind an unerasable mark.
Nobody who decides to try heroin wants to become addicted to it and spend the rest of his life serving it. One addict said that after trying it for the first time, he never really escaped it. It cost him his fiancée, his job and countless opportunities. But that was all somehow OK because of how it made him feel. “If I never did it, I wouldn’t live every day wishing I could feel like that again,” he lamented.
“Heroin is something where your ignorance to it is truly bliss. … I never meant for it to last this long—to destroy my life, my body, my relationships, and taint the rest of my existence, because now I’m an addict, and I always will be.”
Addicts know it all too well, and they readily admit it: Heroin enslaves people. In fact, all sin does! As Jesus said, “Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin” (John 8:34; New King James Version). The Apostle Paul wrote, “Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?” (Romans 6:16).
Think about this. Remember this as you face the choices that are coming up in your life: Sin hooks you. “The key is to never let it begin,” Mr. Flurry wrote. “Once we are hooked, it is almost impossible to repent without mind-paralyzing trials. That is how hard a sinning mind becomes. Sin penetrates our very being and becomes a real part of our lives. This should cause men to acutely fear sinning. But it rarely works that way. Jeremiah shows that even when some people know where sin leads, they still continue sinning” (ibid; emphasis added).
If you ask just about any adult in God’s Church about this, you will hear the same thing. Just about everyone has regrets in their lives—sins we wish we had never committed, problems we never would have had if we had never made that first wrong choice, scorched parts of our minds that happened because we made a sinful decision.
Satan and the peers, musicians and celebrities he inspires do a terrific job of making sin attractive. But that brightly burning feeling is charring your mind. “They promise … freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption; for whatever overcomes a man, to that he is enslaved” (2 Peter 2:19; Revised Standard Version).
The less experience you have with sin, the cleaner your mind is. You don’t have those black marks and scars. You are free—truly free!—from the life-searing problems of slavery to sin.
That is a far greater blessing than you can realize. Accept it in faith—before someone offers you that first high. Trust God. When you are faced with a choice to sin, remember: “The key is to never let it begin.” Put away that lighter. Don’t even start.