Our windows were iced over this morning.
The good people of Georgia woke up to an icy, cold morning today. The temperature was a balmy nine degrees. Southereners simply aren’t prepared for this kind of cold. Many of our homes have heat pumps. Heat pumps don’t do well in frigid temps. There are probably many kids who don’t own big, winter coats, not because their parents can’t afford them, but because they are too “cool” to wear them and rarely need them.
Due to many factors, local schools were cancelled today along with schools in several surrounding counties. The weather was too dangerous to contend with. As I was going about my business, the ice on this window, really caught my eye. It was beautiful and kind of fairy-tale looking with the barren trees in the background. You wouldn’t know, peering through it from the comfort of my home, how cold and dangerous it was on the other side.
My family and I were recently watching “Return of the Jedi,” and we were discussing how evil the emperor looked towards the end. He didn’t look that way in the original movie, but he became hideous, obviously evil. So, I posed the question, “Wouldn’t it be nice if everything that was evil was hideous, so we would know it was evil?”
We love to think of the enemy as a horned devil carrying a pitchfork, but evil rarely shows its true face in the beginning. Like the emperor in the first movie, it starts off looking rather benign. Billy Graham once said, “All sin is fun, for a time.”
When evil presents itself to us, it’s often in a pretty frosty package like that window. It can seem harmless, but what waits for us on the other side can be dangerous. In the first “Star Wars,” Darth Vader was scary. The emperor was just a little man. In the “Return of the Jedi,” Vader was a slave to that little man.
So, how do we know if something is evil in nature? We just had this discussion in our middle school Sunday school class. We have to ask ourselves if it lines up with scripture. We know from Proverbs 3:5, that, “We are to trust in the Lord with all of our hearts and lean not on our own understanding.” That means what we as humans, “think” or “feel” is right, may not be.
Isaiah 55:8-9, tells us that, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” That means God knows better than we do, just like parents know better than their children do. He is all-knowing and we are not.
Finally, Ephesians 6:11, tells us “To put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.” Part of that armor is the gospel of peace.
We have to read the Bible if we want to know God’s thoughts, God’s plan and God’s will. It’s really the only way we can know the truth. Now is as good a time as any. It’s a new year. Let’s get started. Feel free to share.
Have an awesome day!
Wendy 🙂