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&In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths&

"Consider The Animals"

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"Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest."  Proverbs 6:6-8.  The United States Air Force had a commercial which said, "Be all you can be, Join the Air Force", and yet God's Word gives many examples describing how a person could actually achieve this admirable goal.  In His Word, there are instances where He uses His other creatures for us to pattern our lives after.  The ant is one such instance.  Consider the ant:  I have never seen an ant sleeping.  I'm sure they do sleep, but they spend most of their lives working to provide for not only themselves, but also for the rest of the colony.  God never made anyone lazy and He has provided the only real cure for laziness in His Word.  That cure is called "hunger".  And this cure can be found in 2 Thessalonians 3:10 which says, "For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat."  Just think, if everyone would consider the ant and abide by the cure for laziness so graciously provided in the Word of God, there would be no need for welfare.  The families and the church could provide for those who absolutely could not work.

The ant is not the only example in God's Word that uses His creatures to help us in our striving to be all that we can be.  We could take a lesson from all of God's creatures.  Genesis 7:9 says, "There went in two and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had commanded Noah."  If you will notice, these animals went in unto Noah.  Noah, bless his heart, didn't have to go out searching for and rounding up all those animals.  That would have certainly taken a long time.  No, God told those animals where to go and they just went.  Sometimes it seems that all of God's creatures willingly listen to and obey their Creator except for man.  Can you imagine what this world would be like if men would just listen to the voice of God and do as He says?  Now, these examples are not just for saved people.  They are for lost people as well.  God's will is that all would come to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.  When God calls, He bids us come.  If you have never accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Saviour, He could be calling you right now.  Will you come?

Well, I guess nobody likes to be called a chicken.  There have been a lot of fights started over someone calling someone else a chicken, but we could even learn from the chicken.  Consider the chicken:  "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not."  Matthew 23:37.

Friends, even a chicken will gather her children together and if you know much about chickens, you will know that you don't mess with a mother hen.  No, there is no creature on earth that a mother chicken won't take on to protect her young.  When I was a little boy, I lived on a farm and we had plenty of chickens.  One day when I went into the barn where we had some chickens sitting on their eggs, I noticed this hen sitting there on the nest and she had her head stuck way up in the air.  She wasn't moving and I just stood there and watched her for a long time and she never moved.  Then I noticed a big ole' snake laying across the doorway right near her nest.  Well, I wasn't too excited about being a hero, so I decided to be what men call a chicken and I ran back to our house and got my Daddy to come down there and kill the snake.  The snake was what we called a chicken snake, which eats the eggs.  Now, that chicken considered those eggs to be her children and she wasn't about to get off that nest and let that snake get them.

Wouldn't it be nice if all women would consider their children as children, rather than just an egg.  It would be amazing to find how many mothers, if you went to them at any given time and asked them where their children were, wouldn't be able to tell you.  And yet, a mother chicken knows exactly where her young are at all times.  They are always close by their mother and if danger comes, she gathers them under her wings to shield them from the danger.  Could we not all learn from the chicken?

Consider also the birs of the air:  "Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.  Is not the life more than meat, and the body more than raiment?  Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them.  Are ye not much better than they?"  Matthew 6:25-26.  It's such a sad shame that many men and women drive themselves crazy, worrying about everything.  And they just can't seem to come to grips with the fact that not only does worry never help anything, but that if they will totally surrender their trust to God just as the birds do, He will take care of them.  There are far more of God's children who have died from worry than from hunger.  I'll bet you never saw a bird at the doctor's office with an ulcer.  They don't worry.

Now, consider the cow:  I haven't found any scripture concerning the cow, but she is indeed one of God's creatures and I believe we can even learn from her.  I know I wrote an article about cows that wasn't too impressive of them (Cows Don't Smile), but what we can learn from the cow has nothing to do with her attitude.  Just last night, my daughter Kim was in one of her usual hug starved moods.  Only, last night it happened to be bed time when she decided that she just had to have some more hugs.  Well, as my wife was trying to oblige her with lots of hugs, I made the comment that she was milking it.  That is also a phrase I use a lot at work when someone is trying to get all they can out of the machine.

Most people don't really know what that saying means, but they have just always heard it, so they say it.  Once there was a city man who decided he had had enough of the city, so he bought him a farm and moved out of the city.  He wasn't there long before he made friends with an old farmer down the road.  A little later he decided that a farm wasn't really a farm without a cow.  So he went out and bought him a cow.  Everything was fine for a while until the cow went dry.  He then went to his friend down the road and told him his problem and asked if he could give him any advice.  The old farmer said he couldn't figure why the cow had gone dry so quickly.  Then he asked him how much milk she had given when he first got her.  He said, "Oh, I just took what I needed."

What he had been doing was if he figured he needed a quart of milk that day, he would just take a quart.  The old farmer explained to him that his problem was because he wasn't milking the cow.  He told him that if you don't milk the cow daily and take all she will give, she will just stop producing.

Friends, that's what many of God's children are doing concerning their fellowship with the Lord.  They only go to Him in prayer when they have a problem.  They only read in His Word what they think they need.  They only go to church to worship Him just what they think they can get by with.  This is when the spiritual life begins to dry up.  Wouldn't it be so wonderful if we could treat our spiritual life as if we were really milking a cow and getting everything we could out of it?  Consider the cow!  Are you "milking it"?