Why Aren't We Cured of Carnality?

By Rev. Ernest O'Neill

Smallpox has been virtually wiped off the face of the earth. Forty years ago it was a killer disease. It was known as one of the most disfiguring and fatal diseases that we human beings experienced and yet, now it hardly exists anywhere in the whole earth. Why? Because of the almost universal use of the smallpox vaccine. Not because of the discovery of smallpox vaccine, not because of the existence of smallpox vaccine but because of the almost universal use of smallpox vaccine. Now I think you see the difference.

In one of the places we visited in India, 30 years ago, the people there knew that the smallpox vaccine was effective but they decided not to take it and they all died. So it wasn't enough for them to believe that the smallpox vaccine was effectual. If they didn't take it, it was not the remedy for the disease in their own lives. Loved ones, every secretary that ends up in bed with her boss, every cold war and every home represented here that destroys a beautiful Saturday and turns the Sunday into a hell, every one of you here who has experienced somebody stabbing you in the back, all those situations are the result of a disease among us that is far more disfiguring of beautiful lives and far more destructive of health and happiness than smallpox ever has been or ever will be. That disease is just sheer carnality, just carnality -- just determination to get from people what we should get from God.