Safely home, I opened the hatch, only to find groceries strewn across the back of the car. I had suspected as much. All the clattering along the drive clued me in.
I grabbed one of the sacks and started re-bagging the groceries so I could bring them into the house. Halfway to the door, the bottom fell out of the bag and groceries went tumbling once again.
I hadn’t noticed that the bag already had a small tear in it. Piling more groceries into a weakened sack simply caused it to rip wide open.
Lesson? When you stuff more things into an already weakened bag, it’s a recipe for disaster. It simply won’t hold any additional weight.
All of the forces with which we daily contend have a positive and a negative side effect. They are driving us to the Lord, making our prayer-filled days more spiritually flavored. But they assault our minds incessantly.
Proving: our current reality is not all there is.
The Spirit is our lifeline to the Father’s fount of grace. And the filter to guide us in the way of truth.
The errant groceries, rolling wild around the trunk, depict stray thoughts running amuck—until they are contained by the Word. We can bag them in truth—verses the faulty, bursting sack of the lies we fall prone to believe.
Gather them up—one by one.
Examine them carefully . . . prayerfully. Again and again.
Consider: do they line up with Scripture? Truth?
This practice will strengthen what contains your thoughts. Because piling more into a weakened vessel is a recipe for disaster.
It’s a lesson, once learned, that’s easier to avoid the next time around.