You walked out of the kitchen for just two minutes! You return and flames have engulfed the wall above the counter. You turn on the faucet and point the water sprayer to the fire. It doesn’t do much of anything. You remember reading something about baking soda so you run over and find the baking soda in the corner cabinet and randomly throw the ingredient on the blaze putting out a portion of the fire but the now box is empty.
You remember learning in school something about smothering the fire with a towel so you grab the kitchen towel and smother a portion of the fire but the remaining portion seems to continue to grow along the wall. The fire extinguisher! Where is the fire extinguisher?! Oh wait… it’s under the sink in the back left-hand corner behind the tub of cleaners. You finally get a hold of it, follow the 1,2,3 step process, aim the extinguisher at the fire and POOF! It’s out.
WHEW!! Reminds me of the problems we have in our lives. We know what we are doing or how we are living or how we are treating others isn’t right. We know we have a “roaring fire of sin” and we think we can deal with it on our own. We try one thing after another and it just isn’t working.
Then we remember that we haven’t really talked to God for a while. Will He even remember who we are? We kind of put him on the back shelf, behind our job, our Sundays of fun, our friends, our money, our idols.
Everything we’ve been doing to try to ignore our sin and this awful pit in our stomach of who we’ve wronged or what we need to change isn’t working – just like all the things we tried to put out the kitchen fire. Then we remember the true “sin extinguisher”. We cry out to Him and ask Him to help us and with one call upon His name, He’s there. He’s been waiting in the corner, behind the things of the world, just waiting to be called upon.
He’s there in an instant. He may continue to allow us to experience some of that fire for a bit longer until we are refined to exactly where He wants to use us, but He is there immediately when we call on Him bringing peace to the wild fire. Let’s pull out the fire extinguisher today and ask God to put out the flaming arrows of the devil so that we can live a peaceful life for Him every day.
Ephesians 6:16 – In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.
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