Steve’s Big Toe

25 Jun 2009

One day I went up north with some friends. We found ourselves playing in the rapids on big tyre inner tubes. Time after time, as I tried to cross the fast-flowing waves while standing on the tubes, I’d crash into the water. One of those times I stubbed my big toe and there was a little puncture hole.
I let the water wash it off and continued.

When we finished, my foot was really sore and I figured I’d sprained my ankle. Not being new to the sprained ankle experience, I iced and elevated it. The next morning my foot was blue and swollen. I iced it some more and elevated it every chance I got.

The second morning was worse, so I decided it was time to visit the doctor. The doctor commented that it was a good thing I came to see him when I did because if I left it a week longer, I’d be dead!

I laughed and said, ‘Come on, Doc, no one ever died from a sprained ankle!’ ‘That’s right,’ he replied, ‘but you don’t have a sprained ankle; you’ve got an infection, and if you’d let it spread for another week it would have contaminated your whole body and you’d have died.’ Oh!

He gave me some antibiotics and I took them. My left big toe is now as pretty as my right big toe, plus I learned some things about more than just big toes.

I was in good physical shape. I exercised regularly and played basketball. And I got a little poison in me. I tried to treat it my own way—icing and elevating. But if I’d persisted in my own treatment I’d be dead today. I needed an antibiotic to get rid of the poison; something from outside me to kill the poison within.

The poison within

We all may be morally good people, in good ethical shape, but we’ve all got some poison in us. It’s also known as sin.

Many of us treat our sin our own way: we give money to charities, help old ladies across the street, try to be ‘good people’. But that is just the moral equivalent of icing and elevating.

If we persist in our own treatment, we will die spiritually. What we need is an antibiotic, something from outside of us that will kill the sin poison within us. What we need is the blood of Jesus.

By Stephen Court (from War Cry magazine)