When our children were young, they were given a very sturdy bike with training wheels, but they soon learned to ride without training wheels. How they loved this bike, and they rode it all the time, sharing it until they were older and had their own bikes.
One day the bike just disappeared, and they were so sad to lose it. We asked the Lord Jesus to help us find it, and then we got the idea to drive around our neighborhood to see if we could find it.
We all piled into the car and drove around the streets close by. To our great surprise, after about twenty minutes, we found the lost bike! It was parked near the street in front of Karla’s house!
Now Karla came regularly to the Sunday school which was in our home. She must have decided it was a quick and easy way to get home. But didn’t she know that what she had done is called “stealing”?
The Bible tells us, “Thou shalt not steal” (Exodus 20:1515Thou shalt not steal. (Exodus 20:15)). Stealing is sin. It doesn’t have to be something as big as a bike. It can be something as small as a marble or a pencil or a cookie out of the cookie jar, or it can even be an answer from somebody else’s paper during a test in school. Stealing is taking something, big or small, that doesn’t belong to us, and it is wrong. God calls it sin, and sin keeps us out of heaven. But God still loves us even while He hates our sins. He still wants to take us to heaven, but we can’t go with our sins. He tells us in the Bible that He sent His Son Jesus to die for us, and His blood can wash away every one of our sins, even those stealing sins, so we can go to heaven.
ML-10/21/2001