Autumn. I love it! It’s almost here. The warmth of the sun that energizes. The aroma of the crisp air and changing season. The cool breezes requiring a sweater or jacket. The beauty of God’s palette: crimson and cerise, yellow and honey, apricot and orange.
Autumn also evokes the thought of harvests. Which made me think the other day about scarecrows.
Definition of a scarecrow: an object, usually made to resemble a human figure, set up to scare away creatures from disturbing and feeding on recently cast seed in fields, from growing crops, or from those crops about to be harvested.
Sometimes, we need to be our own scarecrow to shoo the enemy away from what we have sown and to keep him from destroying our harvest. We have the power to command him to back off. Jesus told the disciples, “Look, I have given you authority over all the power of the enemy.” (Luke 10:19 NLT)
Something resembling a human figure and scares creatures away from a harvest! That’s the enemy for sure. We have the authority to forbid that ol’ devourer from stealing our seeds and destroying our harvests and to keep him from sowing weed-seeds in our harvest field.
How do we do that? In one parable, Jesus said, “The sower sows the word.” (Mark 4:14 NKJV) In another parable, He said, “He who sows the good seed is the Son of Man.” (Matt. 13:37 NKJV)
All those living in Christ are sowers, for we sow the seed, which “is the word of God.” (Luke 8:11 NKJV) In The Living Bible’s version of Mark 4:14, it says, “The farmer I talked about is anyone who brings God’s message to others, trying to plant good seed within their lives.”
When we have planted God’s Word in our hearts or in the lives of others or in our or others’ circumstances, when we have watered, cared for, prayed over, worked at something, and then the enemy comes along and tries to scare us away from it all with his taunts, alarms, and distresses, do we run in the opposite direction with our tail between our legs? Or do we become the scarecrow and frighten him away?
Occasionally, that ol’ enemy loves to work through others to trip us up in our Christian walk. He also loves to work through circumstances to scare us out of our faith or to tempt us by invading our thoughts.
He will use whatever he can to frighten us away from the seeds of God’s Word that have been sown in our hearts and the harvests God has waiting for us.
The enemy sometimes merrily dances among us. PBS used to air one of my favorite murder mystery series called Poirot, the great Belgian detective, by Agatha Christie. Once, as Poirot’s “little gray cells,” as he calls them, pondered a puzzle of murder clues at a masquerade party, he said, “The devil himself dances among us; we just don’t see him.”
We may not see him physically (which may be debatable), but we can see his handiwork. The devil waltzes around, dangling temptations before our eyes and whispering criticisms in our ears to steal our joy, kill our faith, and destroy our fellowship with God.
That ol’ scarecrow does all he can to divert our focus away from God and to delay or defeat His answers to our requests.
In other words, he tries to snatch your seeds and pick your harvests clean! Always dancing in delight as he does it. Therefore, put on your most intimidating scarecrow garb and “Be dressed ready for service” (Luke 12:35 NIV), “so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.” (Eph. 6:11 NIV)
Don’t let the scarecrow’s dance frighten you off from the harvest God says is yours!
Lynn writes devotionals and inspirational stories. She has one book waiting to be published in 2015 and is working on a second one. Her greatest passion is to fulfill God’s call on her life to encourage others and glorify the Lord with her writing. She currently writes for several sites and writes bi-weekly on her site, Heading Home. http://lynnmosher.com
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