This morning, I had a serious conversation with my four-year-old son about sin in his life. Conveying the nature of sin and how it corrupts a creation made in God’s image is not easy. Nor is it easy to communicate to him that he was made for so much more, i.e., to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

This conversation took place in the back of my car, while parked in the garage. We weren’t going anywhere, nor had we recently come from anywhere. Suffice it to say he was buckled into a car seat so that I might get his attention and address some evidences of pride and self-centeredness that have been cropping up of late.

As I admonished him, the first thing that caught my eye in the garage was a lawnmower. I suggested to him that if a lawnmower could speak, and proposed that it would rather stay in the garage and rest rather than go out and cut grass, it wouldn’t be much good. It would be, so to speak, a waste of a perfectly good lawnmower. It was made for a purpose: to cut grass. You can probably see the parallel to how sin “wastes” us – men and women created in God’s image – and keeps us from living for the purpose for which we were made.

I think he understood. He probably also forgot the main point. Then again, he’ll probably surprise me sometime and mention how we’re like lawnmowers, next time we’re in the garage. Time will tell. And repetition will certainly be required.

I came across a similar and probably clearer metaphor this evening from Derek Thomas, a minister of teaching First Presbyterian Church, Jackson, MO. He suggests:

A Stradivarius violin made by cutting and sanding and glueing various kinds of wood enters into its glory when, after an aging process, a violinist of the calibre of Mr. [Joshua] Bell makes it sing. The true glory of any instrument comes when it is doing what it is made for. It gains its dignity and worth by showing us what it can do.

And we were made for worship. Only as we do so do we display the dignity for which we were designed. Sin, on the other is “to fall short of the glory” (Rom. 3:23). Only as sin is removed (by faith alone in Jesus Christ alone) can we truly glorify God and be what we were meant to be.

I would add one comment: whether we know it or not, we do in fact worship at all times. It’s simply a matter of the object of our worship. Is it the self? Is it money? Or is it, as it should be, the God who created us and designed us to reflect His glory? Only in so doing, as stated above, “do we display the dignity for which we were designed.”