Greetings from St. Louis! I’m up here on part two of my sabbatical experience taking care of some familial obligations. As a part of that, today I helped my parents mow the lawn. I suppose it’s what little I can do to earn my keep around here. 
I’m no stranger to lawnmowers. During the summer months I usually rotate weekends running a lawn mower at home and a lawn mower at church. I like those lawnmowers. That’s not the case with the lawn mower I was introduced to at my parent’s house.
This lawnmower was one of those “self propelled” or “power assist” lawnmowers. It has a little clutch engage switch that you can pull and that engages a belt that drives the wheels of the lawn mower forward, using some of the power from the engine. It sounds like a great idea until you realize that all of this just about doubles the weight of the lawn mower and creates a ridiculous amount of friction against the wheels when you try to just push it without the “power assist”.
After we got done, my dad asked how I liked it. My response was “It’s going to make a great sermon illustration about the nature of sin: it promises to make your life more enjoyable, and for the first little while it does, until you get into a corner or a tight spot.”
That’s what sin is. Sin winks at us and promises “power assist” in all sorts of ways. Maybe that bit of gossip will assist us to feel superior. Maybe that bit of lust will assist us to feel more attractive. Maybe that bit of anger will assist us to feel more righteous. And maybe it even starts to look like it will follow through on those promises. But then we find ourselves in a tough spot, and instead of the relative ease and flexibility of grace, we find ourselves tied to the stiffness and immobility of sin.
Sin only promises to work in one way. Add to that, it’s heavy and handles like an aircraft carrier. But God’s grace is more like my mower at home. It’s light, it’s flexible. It gets around corners and into tight spaces – even places I probably shouldn’t even knowingly take it. It’s flexible and forgiving, and it doesn’t make promises it shouldn’t. It just makes the promise that the job will get done, and in Jesus’ work for us, we find that the lawn is already mowed.