For the person who keeps all of the laws except one is as guilty as a person who has broken all of God’s laws. James 2:10 (NLT)

Years ago when my girls were young, I woke one morning and decided to make some muffins for their breakfast. I pulled down the box of muffin mix and dutifully mixed up the ingredients. By the time the girls were up and ready for breakfast I was pulling the delicious looking chocolate chip muffins from the oven. They took one bite of the warm breakfast treats…and looked like they were going to wretch. Curling up their noses and making faces of disgust, they both reached for their juice as if it was the anti-dote to saving them from an infusion of arsenic.

In the ensuing investigation, I discovered that I had mistaken the container of sea salt on the counter for granular sugar. Sure enough, the muffins tasted like a mouthful of dried sea water.

I followed the entire recipe to the letter. I made a mistake with one small ingredient. That one small mistake, however, tainted the entire batch of muffins. So it is with what God’s Message refers to as sin, and the point from today’s chapter. We can live morally perfect lives in every regard, but if we mess up once it’s like substituting sea salt for sugar in your chocolate chip muffins. One mistake taints the whole person and once you’ve baked the sea salt into the muffins, there’s no way to make them sweet again. There’s no going back. Sprinkling a little sugar on top cannot make the putrid muffin palatable.