It’s quite likely that the only few people who do not realize how quickly a day goes by is a young boy or girl on the two-wheel bicycle with the training wheels spread wide apart. For others of us, a twenty-four-hour time period seems to fly by! Think not? Consider (if successful) a good night’s sleep may be for an 8-hour time period. Then, should you be well and able, and refusing to live on government hand-outs, you can count up another 8 hours a day for your employer. Now consider you’re blessed with a job where you get an hour for lunch, and 2 fifteen-minute breaks in the morning as well as two in the after. Let’s assume you live close to work where your commute is a mere 1-hour each way, and now you have a cumulative number of hours that total, 20 hours. Now for the big question! What did you do with the remaining 4 hours? Did I hear someone say the word “collapse?”
By now you may feel like David did when he penned Psalm 55. Verse 6 reads, “Oh, that I had wings like a dove; then I would fly away and rest! I would fly far away to the quiet of the wilderness.”
Following another day in the office making calls, writing articles, reading Bible passages that could be useful for Sunday’s Live Streaming, I relaxed on the recliner sofa in our TV room (with a TV that seldom is ever turned on). In place of, both of us choose to use our phones to view such ‘posts’ that alert, as well as bring up-to-date of happening’s that encourage us that God is still on His Throne, and is still in charge of what takes place on planet earth. On this particular evening, once I had watched LT’s excellent site, “And We Know,” I changed direction and saw a brief posting for a video on the animal kingdom, and specifically about lion’s and lionesses in Africa. I noticed something that took place where I was reminded of the often quoted, yet seldom seriously considered, Bible verse in I Peter 5:8, “Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.”
There’s a specific reason why the Bible refers to the devil as a “roaring lion.” A predator such as a lionesses will crouch down in tall grass, watching, studying, keeping an eye on, and observing every move made for one specific reason. Waiting to see which of the herd is the weakest! I’ve read that zoologists do not even know how lions can tell if one in the heard they are watching is diseased…however…somehow, they know and are able to sense it in some way. Once they make their attack on the herd, even a larger defending one of the weak ones in the heard can come at them to ward them off from the ‘weakened’ one they are after, and the lion will not even pay any attention to the one coming to help attempt to defend the weak one.
While weakness in some ways may get you sympathy and compassion from a friendly voice, that weakness will not get you sympathy from the devil! In addition, in the last 4-hours you and I have left of a day, or a few minutes squeezed in during fifteen-minute breaks, we will soon learn we are as weak as the weakened prey the lion is after.
If you are, or when you find yourself feeling weak, Psalm 119 is a great chapter to read, especially note verse 105, 106, & 140; “Your Word is a lamp to guide my feet and a light for my path. I’ve promised it once, and I’ll promise it again: I will obey your righteous regulations. Your promises have been thoroughly tested; that is why I love them so much.”
What about the remaining ‘four hours’?
Blessings, Psalm 20:7 Dale & Jeannie