Muddying the waters

“Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture? Must you also trample the rest of the pasture with your feet? Is it not enough for you to drink clear water? Must you also muddy the rest with your feet?” Ezekiel 34:18
We all know people who do this: they get as much as they can out of something, and then ruin it for the next person who would come along. I’ve been taught to have the attitude to leave a place in a better state than you find it (for example, when out hiking, camping, picnicking etc.).
But this happens in the spiritual sense as well. Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for doing this: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to” (Matt. 23:13), “Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering” (Luke 11:52).
We must be very careful that we aren’t doing the same thing. If you’ve been a Christian for a while, it can be very easy to look down on people and think they are so sinful that they couldn’t possibly be saved, or that they would have to clean up their act big time before God would accept them. We forget what we were like before we were saved. (In fact, I must admit, I have a worse time than this: having grown up in a Christian home and always knowing God, I can’t really point to any sin I was living in ‘before’ I was saved. Instead, I look at where I could have ended up if He hadn’t saved me, and try and take that perspective.)
Jesus died so that anyone and everyone would have the opportunity to come to salvation. We mustn’t be the gatekeeper, trying to keep the riffraff out. If we are making it hard for people to come to faith and putting obstacles in their path, ‘muddying the waters’, so to speak, we had better repent!