Illustrated messages

TITLE: Callouses

OBJECT: My fingers

DOCTRINE: Sanctification


I have been playing the guitar for many years, and for that reason I have callouses on my fingers.  When I began playing, I started getting blisters that were very painful.  But the more I played, the more the skin on my fingertips hardened, and I experienced less pain.  Now I can play for many hours without any pain because I have callouses on my fingers.


I am telling you this because we all have callouses, but not on our fingers, on our consciences.  I’ll explain it like this:  The first time you did something wrong, at first you felt horrible, but as you continued doing it, you didn’t feel bad about it anymore.


The first time you took something that wasn’t yours, you felt guilty about it, but as you continued doing it, the guilty feeling disappeared, and there a callous formed on your conscience.  The first time you had sex outside of marriage, you probably felt dirty and impure, but as you continued doing it, those bad feelings left; another callous.  And what about lying?  We have become such compulsive liars without being bothered by it.  If we examine ourselves, we will find that our conscience is full of callouses.


The reality is that one day we will die and we will have to give an account of our lives, for each callous we have on our conscience.  The bad news is that no one can enter heaven in that condition.  Heaven is a perfect place; it is God’s house, and if you cannot enter there, there is only one other place to go where there is no hope, only pain and eternal loneliness.


But if I take a nail clipper and I cut off all the callouses on my fingers, the feeling will return to my fingertips.  In the same way, God, knowing our situation, has already given us a solution to our sin problem.  He sent His son, Jesus Christ, to suffer a horrible death so that you and I could have the opportunity to be set free from all the callouses on our conscience.  He lived without any contamination, without any callouses on his conscience.  So only Jesus can take away our callouses of sin.


But you must turn your back on sin, and call on Jesus to clean out your life and purify your conscience.  Give Him your life, and He will give you a new heart, free of callouses.

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