Danny True
I know, that’s a strange title but it is poignant to the two subjects in this message!
The first item – lavender – was used to emphasize the subject matter of a Thursday night young people’s home study group a few years ago (okay, a lot of years ago – my, how time flies when – - – ). Anyway, the topic was how the enemy of our faith cunningly positions himself into our daily lives and creates chaos or other disturbances, yet many times we don’t know that he is even there or how he got in to do his dirty work!
A few hours before that class started I was pulling weeds in our flower bed and I received a “revelation” while doing that mundane chore. So, later that evening I had opportunity to apply what I learned from my weeding duties in teaching about one way how the devil gets in!
I could see that some of the young people weren’t “absorbing” what I was saying, so I told them we would do some “lab work” (I learned years ago that a better method of teaching is to have a time of “hands on” instead of pure lecture {talk}). So, I had the class to follow me into the garden and I showed them what I discovered that day.
Our walkway was lined with English lavender; fragrant, beautiful purple/blue flowers at the end of green leafy stalks. However, upon close inspection there were some stalks growing up inside the clumps of authentic lavender. They LOOKED the same yet those stalks were NOT lavender; they had no blooms. They were concealed “invaders”, not being productive (no flowers and no seed) yet they were consuming the nutrients from the soil that should have been used to keep the lavender alive.
My comparison was that the devil somehow manages to get into our “space” and, although he appears like one of the crowd, he actually robs from us by substituting un-Godly things and activities that prevent us from living full, productive lives in service to our God! This includes listening to “every wind of doctrine!”
The class did learn from that lab session. Years later, one of the members, after he had moved out of town and started a family, came back to visit and told me that of all the things I had taught, the example of the counterfeit (weeds) in the garden had stuck with him the longest and that he reflected on and applied that in later years in his own life.
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Another “lesson” that I have yet to teach was developed from this photograph that my late wife took in North Carolina of a pasture of sheep, yet one lone llama. Although they are not native there, I had seen grazing llamas in that clime before, but not just one in a whole field of sheep! After driving past that farm daily for a number of months I finally stopped and talked to a man who was tending the field. He told me that the purpose for the llama was to be a “sentry” or guard against predators trying to get to the sheep.
He went on to say that, although normally a docile animal when domesticated, the llama becomes very protective of his space when an intruder approaches. They are even known to attack the wildest of critters; wolves, mountain lions, etc. Since the llama lives with the sheep, he is “familiar’ with them; that is, he instinctively knows they are not intruders.
Part of his defensive mechanism is a loud or shrill sound, which alerts the farmer as well as the sheep. The sheep will huddle for protection and the farmer can take action to dispatch the intruder from the area.
The spiritual lesson to be learned from this is that the Lord has His agents (guardian angels, Godly servants, etc.) that he has placed among us to help ward off the evil one. Like the sheep AND the farmer, we have to be attuned to the “alarm”, the warning that the Lord (or His angels) sound, and act on that ( read James 4:7 here! ) to prevent the devastation that the enemy would like to inflict upon us!
Could that be part of the reason why Jesus is called the “Good Shepherd“??
