Sunday, September 5, 2010

Wheat and Weeds

It seemed only fitting that I share this devotional.  It goes right along with a few of my blog postings recently.


----------------------------------------My thoughts are written in blue.--------------------------------------------


Taken from "Our Daily Walk" for September 4, 2010.



WHEAT AND TARES

"But while he slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way."-- Mat 13:25.

HOW CLEARLY our Lord taught the personality of Satan! Yea...Satan has a personality!  Who would have thought?


In His explanation of this parable, He said distinctly, "The enemy that sowed them is the devil."


He knew that in every heart--in the Church as well as in the world--the great enemy of God's Kingdom, and of human happiness, is always at work, sowing tares. 


The seed may be very small, but in a single night irreparable injury may be wrought.  Satan doesn't need something HUGE to get at people.  All he needs is the point of his little toenail inserted somewhere in your life and he's got you.  And in an instant, everything changes.  I know from experience and by seeing it happen to others.  They change instantly, from good to bad.  Nothing gradual.  Don't get me wrong, it CAN be a gradual change.  But once that little nail is in there, LOOK OUT!!!

Notice that we become as the seed we receive--those who receive the wheat-seed become wheat; those who receive the tare-seed become tares. 


"As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." 


How careful we should be over the books we read, the companionship and friendship that we form, the recreations that we take part in. Such are some of the processes by which our characters are being made.  Not only the books we read, but the music we listen too, the video games (and board games) we play, etc.  We should scrutinize every aspect of our lives to see if it is in tune with God's word.  If not.....trash it.  The world is watching 'Christians' more than you will ever know.  If you are doing the same things they are doing, they are probably thinking, "Why get saved?"


If we are thoughtless and careless, we expose ourselves to the reception of tare-seed, which germinates into weeds and rubbish. 


Of course, if our necessary duties take us into scenes where evil is rife, we may claim the keeping power of Christ, and hide ourselves in Him


As the doctor or nurse will saturate themselves with disinfectant when called to a house where plague or fever is incurred, so the Holy Spirit, in whom we may bathe our souls, will be as the antiseptic, and deliver us from the microbes of temptation. 


(Gal 5:16-17 ~ This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.  For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.)

There is not much difference, it is said, between wheat and tares, in the earlier stages of growth; it is only when the harvest comes that the distinction is dearly defined. 


So in the Church and the world, there are many counterfeits, people who seem to be good and true, but they are not what they seem, and in the day of reckoning they will be rooted up and cast forth as rubbish. 


The two classes that will be rejected at last are 
1.  "All that cause stumbling"
2.  "And them that do iniquity" (Mat 13:41-42 ~ KJV)


It may be that you are not amongst those that do iniquity (or sin), in any of its glaring forms, but are you causing others to stumble by your inconsistent behaviour or worldliness


Let each of us carefully examine ourselves, and open our hearts to receive from the hand of the Lord Jesus the incorruptible seed which He waits to implant by His Word.



If you are in either of the two classes above, you need to seek God's forgiveness.  And if you have been the REASON someone has stumbled, you need to seek that person out and beg their forgiveness.  The Bible makes that plain and clear in James 5:16a which says, "Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed  





0 comments: