A vine had grown up along the trunk of a massive oak tree in a park.  The vine had started small and no one took notice of it, but over the years the vine had grown taller and taller until the entire lower half of the tree was covered by the vine's creepers.  The mass of tiny feelers had become so thick that the tree looked as though it contained innumerable birds' nests.  Now, the tree was in danger.  This huge, solid oak was quite literally being taken over.  The life was being squeezed from it.

The gardeners in the park noticed the danger.  With a saw they severed the trunk of the vine with one neat cut across the middle.  The tangled mass of the vine's branches still clung to the oak, but the vine was now dead.  Over the next few weeks the creepers would gradually begin to die and fall away from the tree.

That vine reminds us of sin.  Sin often begins so small and seemingly insignificant that we don't even realize its danger.  A little lie here, an unkind word there, an uttered tidbit of gossip, a secret grudge, and before we know it, sin has us in its strangling grip, choking us to death--eternal separation from God.

Like the oak, we cannot set ourselves free from the grip of sin, but Christ's death on the cross cuts the power of sin in our lives when we accept His sacrifice for our own salvation.  Yes, the "creepers" of sin still cling and have some effect, but sin's power over us, its deadly effect on us, has been severed by Christ.  Gradually, sin's grip on us will dry up and fall away.  As the fourth stanza of Charles Wesley's hymn, O for a Thousand Tongues, says, "He breaks the power of canceled sin,/ He sets the prisoner free;/ His blood can make the foulest clean;/ His blood availed for me."

Yes, that old sinful nature needs to be nailed to the cross with Christ "so that sin might lose its power in our lives, and we are no longer slaves to sin."  Have you accepted the freedom from sin Christ offers?