1 Timothy 6:3-5 If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness; He is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings, Perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself.

We make lite of OCD do we not? If you do not suffer from OCD it is hard to understand the issues of obsessive compulsive disorders. We look to the behavior of people who suffer from OCD with a detached interest. We as laymen do not have the training or skills to treat the disorder.

Where in my opening verses is the OCD?

Doting, in the Greek noseō, to be taken with such an interest in a thing as to amount to a disease, to have a morbid fondness for.

That sounds serious does it not? We glaze over words and phrases without understanding the serious implication of the behavior associated with the text. We in turn will often, like OCD, make lite of it, because we do not understand it. But what does it look like in our Christian walk?

Ever run across someone who keeps asking the same question over and over again? Perhaps it is a subject in question that they can never stop talking about. It is the verbal equivalent to constantly brushing all the tassels of a rug because one fiber was not flat and perfectly parallel with all the rest. That becomes tedious to watch and in speech tedious to listen to all the time.

How about a person that cannot let go of their opinion? You end up agreeing to disagree. With people who do this, unity cannot be establish.

Psalm 133:1 Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!

Psalm 38:17 For I am ready to halt, and my sorrow is continually before me.

Then STOP.

Every stop sign is a cautionary tale. They are placed where history says there is real danger. They do not put up stop signs on lonely roads with no cross traffic.

We have been talking about holiness at church, so the issue has been in the forefront of my thoughts for days. We are not through with the subject, it is not as easy as saying just don’t sin. It is and always has been an impossible task to be as holy as God. We blew that before we even knew there was a God. Our view of holiness will always be littered with our past.

Herein lies my point for today. It is the past. The verse above says my sorrows are continually ahead of me. That is a point of view. If you can see that the way you are going leads to sorrows, regret, and hurt, then stop, don’t go there.

When we are feeling empty, sad, lonely, unfulfilled or dozens of other emotions that say to you I need something, then the human tendency is to be recreational. We want to re-create feeling good. Our history of feeling good is a pool that is shallow and painful when we dive headlong into it. We have been there and found it unfulfilling as a life worth leaving and we turned to the Lord for help.

We find ourselves forgetting the pain, because it is pain, and the pleasures of the past, even though they were only momentary and not lasting, still feel like they were good. Most sin does or otherwise we would not have done them in the first place.

My advice here is as temporary as the sin which tempts us. Stop. Look at what lays before you. Is the Lord leading you? Temporary because you will have to do it again tomorrow.

Psalm 39:20 They also that render evil for good are mine adversaries; because I follow the thing that good is.