Today I came across a letter that Oswald Chambers wrote to a friend of
his in the year 1909.
I had to laugh at the way he
describes the attacks we come under and the phrase he uses for the things that
irritate us.
The letter is in reply to one
sent to him by a friend. The friend had
written to Oswald to tell him of the struggles he was going through at the
time. This was Oswald’s response:
“Praise God for your report that the Devil is paying
attention to you – so long as he keeps firing at us you may depend he thinks
that we are worth watching. The ‘plague
of flies’ was not peculiar to Egypt – you will find them in the shape of busy
little people that try to get over the window of your soul and irritate your
outlook.”1
Isn’t that a wonderful way of looking at those taxi drivers who cut in front of us in the traffic or shop assistants who are rude and unfriendly?
A ‘plague of flies’ that disturb our souls and irritate us! It reminds me of a song my children sang when they were younger. “Shoo fly, don’t bother me. I belong to somebody”.2
Every time we start to feel irritated or angry we could just wave our hand in front of our faces and sing “shoo fly, don’t bother me. I belong to somebody”!
If we have accepted the Lord as our savior God says that we belong to Him.3
A synonym for belong is ‘to have a home, to have a rightful place” and the origin of the word belong comes from ‘to reach’. God reaches out to us and Jesus says “If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”4
It is God and the person who lives in a house that makes it a home and I love the way CS Lewis describes the way God changes our house because He wants to make it a fit place for Him to call home!
“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild
that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is
getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew
that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He
starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not
seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He
is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out
a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making
courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but
He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
When we feel that Satan is
paying too much attention to us we need to remember the verse that says “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you”.6 In
other words we can shoo him away as well!
3Romans 1:6, Holy Bible, NIV
4John 14:23, Holy Bible, NIV
5Mere Christianity, CS Lewis
6James 4:7, Holy Bible, NIV
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