I would like to share a personal experience with you, one that I confess I am a bit ashamed of, yet I also am proud that I did the right thing, eventually.
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The backstory starts with us receiving a large tax refund, as well as some other “found” money from an insurance account. Considering this financial blessing, and taking into account the hurricane season will begin in June, and that I am getting just too darn old to be putting some 13 large, plywood shutters up on every window (which I have done no less than 6 or 7 times in the past 12 years), we decided to use this financial windfall to replace the original, 40-year-old metal windows with Category 5 hurricane proof windows.
Which are REALLY expensive! But I’ll never have to put up shutters, again.
OK, I’m almost there… this past Friday we decided on a company and the sales rep asked if he could finalize the paperwork the next day, and I immediately said yes, that would be fine. I knew the next day was Shabbat, but I allowed my desire to get this project started to override my desire to be Torah obedient.
And the moment I said it was OK to do the paperwork on Shabbat, the Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit) slapped me upside my head and said, “Hey! It’s Shabbat, duh!”.
And this is why I feel ashamed- I ignored the Spirit’s guidance. Why? Because my fleshly desire to do this overrode my spiritual desire to be obedient.
But that wasn’t all that I did to be ashamed of!
No, still trying to justify my buying something on Shabbat, I tried to come up with some loophole, some biblically acceptable justification to allow me to do the paperwork. Even though no actual cash would be exchanging hands, I would be putting a deposit down using a charge card, and that is buying.
One excuse I tried was telling myself that Yeshua said to “Let your yes be yes, and your no be no” (Matthew 5:37), and so even though it would be violating the Shabbat, I was telling myself that I agreed to let him come, so I can’t go back on my word.
That didn’t work, really, because I knew that the real “yes” was buying the replacement windows, and to simply reset the paperwork date was not going against my word.
Then I tried to ask God to forgive me because I am sorry (I really did feel repentant that I agreed so quickly) but I am going to go ahead with this, anyway. However, that just didn’t sit right with me because I know that God can’t really forgive someone for purposefully sinning, especially when it would be very easy to just avoid it by resetting the date.
That night was a sleepless night, and I decided to call the man early in the morning and reset the date to Monday. And when I made that decision, I felt proud that I overcame my flesh.
And it worked out well because when I texted him to reset it, he said that he was really busy that day, anyway, and resetting the date would be good for him.
So, here I am, ashamed to have ignored the Holy Spirit just to buy something because I wanted to. And when I did obey the Torah by resetting the date, that made me feel a little proud of myself.
I later realized that I just lived out one of the parables that Yeshua told! In Matthew 21:28–32, he told us of the two sons. The one son immediately said he would do as his father asked, but never did, and the other son initially refused to do as his father asked, but later obeyed (that was me).
The message from all this is not about me, or what I did, but about how we can be disobedient and still remain right in God’s eyes if we repent of that sin and then do as we should have done, from the start.
Righteousness is not easy for us; it goes against our most basic instinct, which is the Yetzer Hara (Evil Inclination). It is only when we listen to the Yetzer Tov (Good Inclination), which motivates us to be obedient to God, that we can do what is right in God’s eyes.
So, if you find yourself doing wrong, don’t just let it go because you’ve been told that God will forgive you so long as you believe that Yeshua died for your sins. Personally, I don’t think God will forgive someone who is not repentant, and to use Yeshua’s sacrifice as some sort of absolution for you when you know you are sinning is not going to get you anywhere.
No amount of “Our Father’s” or “Hail Mary’s” is going to help an unrepentant sinner.
So listen to that still, small voice in your head the moment it speaks to you. You know, if the Holy Spirit took form, I think it would look just like Jiminy Cricket, because we are all like Pinocchio. He wanted to be a real boy, and we want to be a real Tzaddik (righteous person), but like the little, wooden boy who let his personal desires cause his nose to grow, we also have to watch out that our noses don’t grow, as well.
And being Jewish, I don’t need my nose to be any bigger than it already is.
Thank you for being here and please remember to share these messages with everyone you know, even non-believers. After all, you never know how fertile the soil is until you plant a seed in it.
That’s it for today, so l’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!