Matthew 18:8 · World English Bible
If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off, and cast it from you. It is better for you to enter into life maimed or crippled, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into the eternal fire.
A person who counts what the hand is worth and never counts the years will lose both. A habit held under control is a pathway kept warm, and a warm pathway fires on the day the state drops, which is exactly the day a person cannot afford it.
From the Self-Help reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
SELF-HELP
A person who counts what the hand is worth and never counts the years will lose both.
A habit held under control is a pathway kept warm, and a warm pathway fires on the day the state drops, which is exactly the day a person cannot afford it. What gets tolerated gets rehearsed, and what gets rehearsed becomes action at the worst possible hour.
Jesus sets eternal fire on the other side of the scale, which makes a deliberately smaller life the cheap option, and people refuse it anyway because a loss they can feel today outweighs a loss they only believe in. Severance closes the retreat in a way restriction never does, since something still attached is something a person can keep arguing for. Refusing the smaller loss means the whole life goes instead, usually on a day nobody saw coming.
Self-Help lens
What are you keeping within limits that you already know you will have to let go of entirely?
If you want to stop a habit, stop feeding it. Every time you let it act once more, you set its next appearance, and the gap grows harder to keep.
Do not treat a small wrong lightly. Drop by drop a water jar is filled, and a life fills the same way with what was allowed a little at a time.
A path walked often becomes the path the feet take without being asked. Clearing it is slow, and deciding not to walk it at all is the only reliable cut.
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Self-Help