What do you do when you’re faced with a threat or some kind of danger? You react. It’s human nature to either fight or take flight when we see something bad heading our way. But what if you can’t see it? What if the danger is so subtle that it just creeps up on you without you even knowing it’s there until it’s too late? Then what do you do?
Take a frog for example. If you put a frog into a pot of scalding water it will immediately jump out. But what if you put it in a nice comfy room temperature pot of water? It is said that the little guy will most likely hang out, enjoying it, not even noticing as his bath turns into a sauna as you slowly raise the temperature. By the time he realizes he’s in trouble it’s already too late and you’ve got froggy soup. Why? Because each time the temperature was raised the frog had already adjusted to the hike in the heat, he had become complacent and comfortable with his surroundings and had no clue the warm water was actually going to kill him.
Don’t be that frog.
I know, most of us would deny that that could ever happen to us. We know the Word of God, we attend church regularly, we are intelligent and can spot a bad thing a mile off, but, I have to say, that in today’s climate it’s getting harder to sift out the bad from the good. It’s not the things that we can see that are chipping away at our Faith, it’s the subtle influences that trip us up.
Think of Lot and his family.
He and his family lived in Sodom for years. I’m sure when he moved there Lot promised himself that he would remain faithful to God and his vows, but over time, he grew comfortable with his surroundings. The longer he stayed, the more tolerant he became of his fellow city-dwellers’ sins until eventually nothing they did shocked him. He underestimated the effects that constant contact with sin would have on him and his family. When God told him to leave the city he and his family had to be dragged out because they had lived so long in a corrupt society that their thinking had also become twisted, and they didn’t want to leave.
What does that mean for us?
Today’s society can be described as a modern day Sodom. We live in an era where everything goes, and nothing is forbidden. If you think it, do it. Sin is openly lived out and celebrated, and those who still hold to traditional Biblical values are treated as lepers. Sadly, even among fellow Christians.
So, like the frog, every time the world turns up the heat a notch we may feel uncomfortable for a moment, but give it a month, or a year or two, and we are as comfortable as the day we first compromised our Faith. We allow the world to condition us to normalize and accept the sin they offer.
As Lot’s decision to offer his daughters to be gang-raped should have warned him that there was a serious problem in his spiritual life, when our own thoughts and actions drift away from God’s standards we too should take heed. While we can’t isolate ourselves from the world, neither are we to be a part of the world.
So what do we do?
We stay focused. We stay faithful to God. We read the Bible for ourselves, not just accept what someone else’s interpretation is. That means if someone says, “The Bible says this…” we go to the Bible to make sure it’s true. We go to church. We don’t watch movies that violate God’s standards, or listen to music that does the same. We pray for guidance, for God’s help to resist temptation. We choose, every day and every minute, to put God first in ALL things, and when we fail, we let God pick us up and brush us off, so we can start again.
But what we don’t do is stay in the pot. The world wants us comfortable and relaxed as they turn up the heat and slowly boil our Faith to death.
Don’t be that frog.