Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. – Galatians 5:1
My brother has a piece of property with a creek, and the creek had a good fishing hole. But one winter there was a flood. The water came down in such force that it filled the fishing hole with rocks and gravel. What a disappointment! We said to each other, “We will just have to wait for the summertime, when the water gets down low, and then see what we can do.”
When summer came and we started to work on emptying our former fishing hole of debris, the experience seemed to preach a whole sermon to me. The devil would like to come into our spiritual lives like a flood and fill our lives with spiritual blockades—things like bitterness, unbelief, or the cares of life. Looking at the blocked-up creek, I thought, “It’s not a new creek we need; we just need to get rid of the rocks.” The same is true with the Gospel: there is only one Gospel, so there is no need to look for another. The need is to look for what is hindering God’s blessings, because the blessings of God are still flowing.
At first glance, the fishing hole looked so filled in that we hardly knew where to start. Sometimes people feel that way too. Their lives are so full of problems, they do not know where to start. Look to God! He will help.
We began working on the creek by shoveling out the gravel and the small things, but soon we saw that it was a never-ending job. Then we noticed that all the little stuff had washed around the larger rocks. As the amount of small rocks increased, the little rocks began to support the big ones and even cover them up. We decided if we could get rid of the big rocks, the little stuff would take care of itself. It would just wash on downstream.
Isn’t that the way it can be in the Gospel? If we let a big hindrance in, the little things that ordinarily would not concern us will wash in and hang up on the big one. Pretty soon, our lives seem filled. We think, Where is my faith? Why aren’t my prayers getting through? The Lord is faithful, and the problem can be corrected.
We took an electric winch out to the creek. We tied it around one of the trees, and dug around the rocks until we could get a belt around them. Then we removed the big rocks, one by one. We found that when the big rocks came out, the little stuff did wash on downstream. We did not know what we would do with the boulders as we pulled them out, so we set them along the shore and they actually helped the stream go in the right direction. We decided we could stand on them to fish.
You can have victory over the hindrances in your spiritual life. Just like Paul said, you can stand in liberty, right on top of the former hindrances, “and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” God can use our biggest obstacles for His glory, if we will just do our part of digging them up and giving them to Him.