Stay alert! Watch out for your great enemy, the devil. He prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. Stand firm against him, and be strong in your faith. [1 Peter 5:8-9a (NLT)]
Like lions crouched in hiding, they wait to pounce on the helpless. Like hunters they capture the helpless and drag them away in nets. [Psalm 10:9 (NLT)]
Lynn Johnston’s comic For Better or for Worse follows a family through their everyday life. Recently, John, the father, experienced middle-age discontent. Confiding to his friend Ted that he’s become bored with life, John asks, “How do you break the cycle of get up, go to work, go home?” Ted suggests a little “after-hours recreation,” adding, “And I ain’t talking racquetball!” John declines his friend’s offer of a “spicy dish” and departs. “What’s happening to me?” he laments as he drives home. “I’m healthy, I have a good job…I have a wonderful home, two great kids, a loving wife…who could ask for more?” Dissatisfaction, however, rears its ugly head and John answers his own question with, “I want more!”
“I want to go home but an irresistible, biologic urge is forcing me,” says John in the next day’s strip. “My wife might never forgive me but here I am, in the one place I’ve tried to avoid for years,” he continues, “a place of unbelievable temptation!” In the next frame, we find him in a car dealership facing a grinning car salesman who asks, “Can I interest you in a late model sports car?”
That comic (and the story that followed) reminded me of Bible verses that compare Satan to a lion ready to pounce. If you’ve ever been in a used car lot, you’ve probably felt like fresh meat being tossed to hungry lions. Salespeople circle as you drive into the lot and, before you’re out of your car, someone is offering you a test drive. In fact, in the next day’s comic, even though John insists he’s “just looking,” he takes that test drive. The salesman confidently chuckles to a co-worker, “I love it when their lips say no, no…but their eyes say yes, yes!!” After his test drive, John reluctantly returns the car and admits its impracticality to the salesman. “I understand,” says the salesman sympathetically. As John departs in his sedan, the salesman’s co-worker wonders how he could let go of a customer so easily. The salesman smugly replies, “He’ll be back. … He left lip prints on the hood.”
Admittedly, I don’t understand men’s affinity for cars. To me, a car is just a way to get from here to there and, as long as it runs, I don’t care about suspension, exhaust systems, horse-power, or aerodynamics. Then again, my husband doesn’t understand my affinity for designer purses when he is satisfied with just an old wallet in his pocket. Satan, however, understands exactly what it is that floats our individual boats…be it fast cars, possessions, money, sex, food, drugs, power, or status. He starts with sowing a few seeds of discontent and follows up with the offer of a test drive—be it a little flirtation, just a taste, a tiny lapse, one visit to the website, or a minor breach of ethics. Satan, like a good salesperson, doesn’t have to be pushy once he’s matched his customer with the right temptation and he knows where we’ve left our lip prints! Satan may know our weaknesses but so do we! We need to avoid the people and places where we’ll find Satan’s hungry lions—be that bars, back alleys, shopping malls, coffee shops, websites or car dealerships!
They were sailing in the Sea of Galilee, a body of water notorious for sudden violent storms. At least four of the disciples were fishermen; did none of them question Jesus about the possibility of squalls or rough waters? Jesus, being God and omniscient, surely knew a storm was brewing and yet He told the men to take the boat across the sea. As the squall came rolling in, the disciples fought the waves. While they frantically reefed the sails and bailed water, Jesus calmly slept on a cushion in the boat’s stern. To the terrified disciples it seemed as if He didn’t care that they were going to drown.
Living in a nation where we worship freely and can both possess and read the Bible, we can easily get complacent and forget that Satan is trying to defeat the spread of the gospel message. According to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, those Gideon Bibles we find in our hotel rooms are becoming an endangered species. In this era of political correctness and inclusiveness, hotels want to avoid offending people of other faiths or no faith at all. Two years ago, for example, citing “diversity” reasons, the Travelodge chain in the United Kingdom removed Bibles from all of its rooms. Last year, the Freedom from Religion Foundation asked fifteen major hotel companies to keep Bibles out of hotel rooms. With threats of lawsuits, they succeeded in convincing hotels operated by some state universities in Arizona, Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa to do just that. The FFRF has also printed a sticker reading, “Warning: Literal belief in this book may endanger your health and life.” They encourage their supporters to place the stickers on any hotel room Bible they find.
As I looked through my basket of Christmas cards, I thought of all the people who have passed through my life. Contained in that basket is a fair amount of sorrow and misfortune—divorce, heart failure, assorted diseases, surgeries (some successful and others not), heartbreak, disappointment, cancer, mental illness, addiction, paralysis, birth defects, financial difficulty, and loss. Yet, within that basket, I also find hope, faith, resilience, peace, joy, perseverance, strength and love. There are children who defied the odds, families facing tremendous challenges with great courage, people who’ve forgiven the unforgiveable, widows and widowers meeting their new normal with confidence, hurt people determined to heal, caregivers finding strength to continue when many would quit, parents prayerfully waiting for prodigals to return, and people who can still laugh in the face of adversity.
Devotions of the Heart 