DEVOTIONAL STORIES
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I don’t like being sold something. I don’t like being conned, scammed, pressured, or otherwise coerced into buying something I neither want nor need. I can spot a phony at one hundred paces, and I will walk away from a “deal” that appears too good to be true. Unless the devil is behind it. I’m learning, thankfully, how to spot his false deals of a lifetime, but admittedly, I have fallen prey to his schemes more times than I care to count. And the ones that get me more often than not have this lie behind them: “Now, or never.” He’s tried the same lie, or a similar one, over and over again. He used it on Eve when he tried to convince her that if she didn’t eat the forbidden fruit, she’d be missing out. He even used it on Jesus when he was tempting the Son of God in the wilderness. He tried to convince Jesus to trade one little bow of the knee for the world’s kingdoms. One little bow, and Jesus would have been given it all instead of having to go to the cross. “Now, or never!” Satan lied. But Jesus didn’t bite. And we don’t have to either. I had to make a choice one time, concerning a writing project I had been working on for over seven months. My self-imposed deadline for finishing this project was definitely looming over the horizon, and I thought I had been given an opportunity to finish it up quite nicely, and quite on time. Spit spot, to borrow a phrase from Mary Poppins. And then something came to light that I felt would have compromised the integrity of the whole project, and me. And I had to decide whether to choose “Right Now” or “Right.” Grateful to have been given the information before it was too late to make such a choice, I chose what I felt God was saying was “Right,” and I basically started over again. I didn’t know if I would make my deadline, but I did know this: I would rather not finish the project at all than to bite at the dangling apple that was really full of poison. I was learning, and I still am. I am learning to take a deep breath, to ask God for the right path, and to walk in it.  I’m learning to spot the tactics of the high-pressure salesman that wants to rob me of God’s best by lying and cheating and scheming me out of it. I’m learning to wait. To trust. To plant my feet and refuse to move until God says, “Go.” Above all, I’m learning to want “Right” one hundred times more than I ever wanted “Right now.” ©2014 Wendi Miller *See Genesis 3:1-7 and Luke 4:1-13 Find Source Information KEEP READINGComments are closed.
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