by Ooreofeoluwa Kalejaiye

Created on: March 26, 2010   Last Updated: March 29, 2010

Shrewd as snakes; that seems intense doesn’t it? You wouldn’t think it would be the kind of thing Christ would tell us as believers but He did and I’m pretty sure He meant it. I remember in Genesis it was the serpent that deceived the woman into eating the fruit, why would Christ want us to emulate such behavior? The truth is He didn’t. Taking the previous statement of that verse, we see “I am sending you out as sheep among wolves” if this was to be written in plain English, I believe it would read, “I am sending you out defenseless among those who would endeavor to make prey of you” in order to survive and not get devoured, the statement be as shrewd as snakes would be very appropriate. Going out in this evil world of man is not something that anyone should take passive; it is a very active experience. For one to be relaxed and nonchalant would be a grave mistake. The bible says the devil is going around looking for whom to steal from, to kill and to destroy and he would do anything to achieve this, even down to using our fellow human beings to provoke the desire to sin in our hearts and that as we know is the beginning of the end.

I know a boy who struggles with masturbation. He didn’t start in one day, he fed his eyes at first, then he fed his thoughts, then he fed his imagination until finally, he fed his body. He has decided now that he wants no more; he understands that he has been freed from the power of sin but he still can’t break out of the yoke. He chose to confide in me for reasons I don’t know and in questioning I realized a few things. The friends he had before he got saved were avid fans of watching r-rated movies, and they didn’t stop at watching, they visited places where their hunger could be fully satiated. Now that he is saved, he hasn’t broken the ties with these people because he believes they would look upon him badly, and he would lose his reputation in their eyes. So they tell him they are going out to their usual place and he says he has church, and they scoff at him, saying things like it’s only a matter of time before he joins them again. They talk about these things freely and though he feels uncomfortable, he still hangs around and then these things stick in his mind causing him to act on them in the place where he believes no one sees but who is he deceiving, only himself.

These friends actively strategize how they will coerce him into falling

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