The Ghost and The Darkness

In March 1898, the British started building a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. During the next nine months of construction, two maneless male lions stalked the campsite, dragging workers from their tents at night and devouring them. The two man-eating lions were credited with killing 135 people in less than a year before they were eventually killed by the project leader John Patterson.

As the attack intensified, hundreds of workers fled from Tsavo, halting construction on the bridge. Crews initially tried to scare off the lions by building campfires and bomas( thorn fences) around their camp for protection to keep the man-eaters out, but to no avail. The lions leaped over or crawled through the thorn fences. The lions were ruthless, attacking patients in the hospital tents, ambushing water carriers during the day. In his memoirs Patterson wrote: "(The lions') methods became so uncanny, and their man-stalking so well-timed and so certain of success, that the workmen firmly believed they were not real animals at all, but devils in lions' shape." .

In 1^st Peter 5:8 the Bible tells us, “Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour”. The comparison is one we need to understand. The devil is an uncanny and patient hunter. He knows when to strike when we are most vulnerable. When we are alone, injured and hurting. He moves in the darkness as quite a ghost and when he attacks, he leaves carnage in his wake.

As dangerous as the Devil is, the Bible does tell us that he can be thwarted.
Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you

( James 4:7).

We need to respect the great danger that Satan is but that danger shouldn't keep us from our work. God has provided us the tools and protection we need to defeat the Devil. He is a dangerous but he can be overcome (1^st John 2:14-15). Don't flee from the work, stand firm and resist. Then the devil can be dealt with.

Comments

Until Midnight

In Acts 20, there is the tragicomic event surrounding a young man by the name of Eutychus. He did what a lot of folks before and after him did, he fell asleep during a sermon. Unfortunately, he was setting in in the third story window at the time. So instead of nodding off and hitting the pew in front of him, he fell to his death. The good news was the apostle Paul was delivering the sermon and had the ability to bring him back. I don’t know, however, if we can judge Eutychus too harshly. The sermon had gone on till midnight. Paul wouldn’t finish it up till daybreak. That’s a long lesson. I know some folks that might want to jump out of a window if I had a lesson that long, yet these Christians wanted to be there to hear Paul. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pushing for all night sermons but I think we might need to adopt these folks' dedication. They knew that Paul was only in town for a limited time only and they were determined to ...

The Gift You Give Yourself

I always hated buying gifts for my Mom. If I got her something like a new set of pans, it was like saying “Here’s something you can use to go make me something to eat”. A gift for her was seemingly a gift for me. There are however gifts you give that benefit you more than the receiver. For example, forgiveness. When you give it, you are giving it to yourself as much as you are giving it to them. Jesus said that when we forgive others it means God is forgiving us our wrongs (Matthew 6:14-15). I once read: “ Heaven is where everyone's forgiven. Hell is where nobody's forgiven. So, when we forgive we pull heaven down into our lives. When we withhold forgiveness, we pull hell up into our lives ” Give yourself something nice today, Forgive.

Why Does A Lion Tamer Use a Chair?

Ok, I know you have seen the image. A lion tamer enters in the cage of the beast and forces it to obey his commands using a whip, a gun and a chair. Now you can see how the whip and gun could come in handy but you might be wondering why a chair would intimidate an animal as powerful as a lion? Clyde Beatty taming a lion with a chair It's not that the lion is afraid of the chair -- it's that the lion is confused by the chair. Cats are single-minded, and the points of the chair's four legs bobbing around confuse the lion enough that it loses its train of thought. Casually put, the chair distracts the lion from wanting to claw the lion tamer's face off. The powerful creature could destroy the chair in moment’s notice but instead it is distracted into submission. It’s not too much different than how Satan controls us today. By the power of God we could overcome anything that he would use to subdue us. We can overcome the evil one (1 st John 2:13-14). ...

Ecclesiastes 12:10

Search This Blog