“I will meditate on Your Precepts and think about Your ways. I will delight in Your Statutes; I will not forget Your Word.” Psalm 119:15-16
Gnats…little in size…big in bother. Well, if you are a regular Grits reader you might know two things. First I was raised in the South and two, well, sometimes I had to great creative to have fun. Often, that involved the variety of bugs that called 6008 Carlton Road home.
Being a warmer climate we were blessed with a wide variety. There was the standard house fly, your common cockroach, the black ants, red ants, and fire ants. There was also dragon-flys, love bugs and the mosquitoes. We won’t even talk about spiders. Each one had its place in life—flies were flies and they sure knew how to make eating outside a pain.
The cockroach was almost a southern institution. It seemed that even the cleanest house had one or two. Since our house was older and had a few more places for them to enter…well, we sometimes had more than a few. The ants could inflict a world of hurt so we tried to stay away from them, the dragonfly was fun to catch, The love bug was fun to shoot with rubber bands and the mosquito was just a pain–the buzz drove you nuts and the bite itched like crazy.
There was one other bug though that really, really was a bother…a distraction…an annoyance…the pesky gnat. For those of you who don’t know the gnat is a small flying bug that just loves to buzz around your head. Whether it is your mouth, your eyes, your nose or your ears they just love to buzz. What is interesting is that they don’t bite–they just buzz–they just distract. If you are eating…they distract you. If you are sleeping…they interrupt. If you are talking…you spend your time swatting at them. And you need to add that the fact that there is rarely one gnat…usually there are a whole lot. They know there is strength in numbers.
Well, thanks for reading and there you go. Oh wait, surely there is more to the story than that. Well, there is. You see, there is supposed to be a spiritual application to this story on bugs, isn’t there? Well, here it is. You see, Satan knows that a distracted believer is an ineffective believe. He knows that a distracted church is a powerless church. He is a powerful instigator of distractions. On an individual basis, here in America you couldn’t put the distractions on a single piece of paper. Everything from career pressure to our hobbies distracts us from God.
As a church, the distractions are just as obvious. Take what has been labeled “worship wars.” Think of all the time and energy that has been wasted trying to decide if a church should use a hymnbook or project the words on a screen and whether they should sing hymns, choruses or a combination of the two. How about translation wars? We have the KJV, NKJV, NIV, TNIV, ESV, HCSB, NASB, and the NLT to name just a few. Whew.
And here’s the deal: All the time and energy we are using being distracted is time and energy that is not used to doing what we should be doing: sharing the great news of Jesus Christ with a lost world. Believe me, Satan knows this well…hence the distractions. I like what William Hendriksen said: “It was to save sinners that Christ Jesus came into the world. He did not come to help them to save themselves, nor to induce them to save themselves, nor even to enable them to save themselves. He came to save them.”
That is the heart of God…that is our mission. So, how about we try and ignore the gnats and get about the mission–being Jesus…sharing Jesus. Ok, this really is the end. Well not quite. In case all this bug swatting and trying to stay on track has you overwhelmed, just remember…He’s got this. Bro. Dewayne
Grits with Grace 