27/09/2011

Uncovering the roots (2)

The Bible talks about sins that are known as“deadly”, in other words, the most harmful and dangerous—because they givebirth to other sins. Let’s look at some of these sins, or bad roots:

10 Principal Bad Roots	100s of Bad Fruits
Anger	Anger causes behavioral problems, destroys relationships, makes a person difficult to get along with (leading to loneliness), aggression, and health problems related to stress.
Pride	Pride does not allow a person to recognize his own errors, and makes him stubborn and arrogant. He cannot ask for forgiveness, is overly self-confident, and keeps friendships at arm’s length. No one can stand a proud person. He or she ends up alone.
Sloth	This makes a person disinterested, relaxed, and slow. This person starts things but does not finish them, and is not dedicated, zealous or active in what he does. They tend to accept things as they are. Many suffer financially because of physical or mental slothfulness.
Greed	The love of money and material things is mentioned in the Bible as “the root of all evil”. The fruit of this root are destroyed marriages, lies, problems with the law (even prison), destroyed friendships, family quarrels, fathers that are too busy working to raise their children, worry, etc.
Envy	Bad feelings at the success of others. Gossip, grudges, inferiority complexes, insecurity, low self-esteem, enemies, etc.
Lust	This is primarily an uncontrolled sexual appetite, but is not limited to sex. It includes any burning desire for something that you should normally not have, including every form of abuse.
Gluttony	In essence, this is a lack of self-control—the root of all addictions and excesses.
Selfishness	This gives rise to individualism, feelings of ungratefulness, abuse, and makes a person self-centered, indifferent to the needs of others.
Fear	Gives rise to inaction, attitude-paralysis, jealousy, suspicion, depression, financial misery, procrastination, shyness, doubt, negative thoughts, etc.
Hypocrisy	Pretense and false behavior that cover all the other roots. It empowers all the other roots. Like the earth covers and feeds the roots of a tree, hypocrisy strengthens the bad roots in a person’s life.

There aren’t many root sins, even though there aresome that are not mentioned above. But the bad fruit that they cause are never-ending.

What is useful about this is that when you observe anyproblem, in you or in any person, you will invariably see that that problem has as itsorigin one or more of these principal roots.

Your job is now to understand which one of these rootshas caused your problems. Then, you will need to expose them. Be sincere,acknowledge all the bad roots in your life, and bring them to light. Then, you will be ready to wield the axe tocut off each one of them!

More on that tomorrow.

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