Disguised as a Stick

Last week I shared some lessons from cleaning up the brush pile behind my shed. This week I would like to share another. One of the reasons I wanted to clean the pile up was that I was concerned it might house snakes or fire ants. Well, my suspicions came true as I was raking up a pile of sticks. One of the sticks bent funny and then came by my leg. I hollered at Noah, “Snake!”, and we proceeded to take a break from clean up. I had not seen a snake until that point, and I was close to the end of the pile and was ready to be done. Maybe I had let my guard down, but I put it back up when the “stick” moved. That is all I thought it was until it came by my leg. Guard back up.

As Noah and I were talking about it later on, we were trying to figure out a spiritual application for this incident. When you have to write an article for the bulletin every week, you are always looking for an idea for an article. I remembered 2 Corinthians 11:14 which says, “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.” What I thought was just a stick, like all the other sticks, was not, in fact, a stick. Have you ever been there, when what you thought you saw, heard, or believed in reality was not. Have you had that happen spiritually?

Maybe it is a movie, show, or song, and everybody is raving about it. So you watch or listen, and they take the Lord’s name in vain or there is an inappropriate sexual situation or they are glamorizing some sin. What do you do? Everybody says it is a great show, and you were really excited about it. Maybe it is a relationship that starts out as just some common interests, but the friendship grows until you really like the other person. Then you find out they are not a very Godly influence on you. What do you do? Be careful! Something that looks good may be a snake hiding in a bunch of sticks.