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Living with Gnats
Just a disclaimer before I begin writing this column, “Living with Gnats” is not referring to living with my brother, my sister and my brother-in-law, although sometimes they can seem like pesky gnats, ha.
We had a problem with gnats awhile back. Our apartment had become infested with them and we were going crazy trying to remedy the situation. I came home from work one night to find a gnat killing zone set up. My siblings had bought some fly paper, set up bottles with vinegar to catch them, poured bleach down the drain and all sorts of other crazy stuff. I can remember at the time it was really driving me crazy because normally I’m a pretty clean person and I had all these little bugs flying around everywhere.
Information from the internet and what people told me said that in order to rid your house of the gnat problem you must first kill off the main source. Once you find the main source and destroy it, there will still be some gnats flying around in your house for a couple of days, but eventually they will all die off and the problem will go away.
Just because you recognize that the problem exists doesn’t mean that it will automatically go away. It takes effort to get rid of those gnats. You might have to swat a few bugs, set up a few traps, buy some bleach, clean thoroughly and keep any trash out of the house for awhile. Good thing I had my brother Gabe to do most of the dirty work, ha.
Sometimes we get gnats in our Christian lives. We seem to have a problem or a struggle that won’t go away. It’s all around us and we keep swatting at it and fighting it, but we never get to the root of the problem, so it keeps coming back in our lives. We don’t like living with them, but after awhile you kind of get used to them. It becomes a natural thing to swat a few gnats while you’re watching TV or just doing something around the house.
We cannot live a productive Christian life if we’re always swatting gnats. If we’re always entertaining that sin, we’re always going to be preoccupied with that problem instead of turning our focus to God. That sin is always going to keep coming up in your life if you don’t get to the root of it. I remember seeing my sister in the kitchen with a can of Raid spraying all over trying to fight off the gnats. It was quite the funny picture. By only spraying one gnat at a time though, she wasn’t able to kill them all. It wasn’t until we cleaned out everything that we finally got rid of all the gnats.
If we’re going to be totally delivered and totally set free, we’re going to have to work at it. Philippians 2:12 says to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” God can and will deliver us and set us free in certain areas of our lives in an instant, but there are other areas that we have to really fight daily. I’ve known alcoholics and drug addicts that were set free right when they were prayed for and never had the desire to go back to that sin, but other areas in their lives took longer to overcome.
My challenge to you this week is to take a deep look at your life. Are there gnats flying around in certain areas? Is there a sin you just can’t seem to overcome? If so, you need to go to the Source. Go to God with your problem. It might take lots of praying and fasting to get to the middle of what you’re facing. It might take a deep cleaning to find where that sin problem is rooted within you. If you’re sick of swatting gnats, go to God and ask Him to set you free because no one should have to be “Living with Gnats”.
w/muchluv,
geno
HAVE A HAPPY AND SAFE FOURTH OF JULY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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