The Blindness In Misinterpreting God’s Way-2

The BLINDNESS In MISINTERPRETING GOD’s WAY--II

—Habakkuk 1:5[part-2--:5b](:5-11)

Attention:

Real Value!—from SermonCentral.com, Jun 18, 2007

A true story set somewhere in the ‘cold white northland’ above Chicago, Illinois, someone recalled...

“Several years ago I used to heat our house with wood. Every fall I would go out & cut wood with my friends Roger & Bob. I never liked cutting wood because it was a lot of back breaking work but I liked the price. It was free except for the labor, so we would take a Saturday here & there in the fall to cut wood & pile it up for the winter.

In addition to cutting wood I used to get the wood scraps from a store called ‘The Wooden Bird.’ They make beautiful hand carved bird decoys & animal replicas out of wood. Every decoy costs in the hundreds of dollars per duck, & they are really nice decorative pieces to put on the mantle.

Their shop used to be right here in town so every couple of weeks I would stop in & pick up their leftover wood scraps to burn in my wood burner. Right before Thanksgiving I stopped in to pick up a load of scraps. I walked in the front door & told them I was there to pick up the wood. An employee I didn’t recognize, wheeled out two bins like usual to the loading doors & helped me roll the bins full of wood, onto the bed of the truck. Usually the wood they gave me was obviously just random scraps, but this time they looked like decoys. I asked the new guy if he was sure that he was giving me the right wood, because they looked to me, to be unpainted decoys. I noticed that they had a few cracks in them, so I figured they were throwing them away because of the cracks. The man assured me that I had the right stuff.”

“I took my load of wood & promised that I would bring his bins back as soon as I got the chance. He told me there was no hurry & I could even bring them back after Thanksgiving. And then we parted with smiles & waves. So I went home & unloaded the decoys in a big pile in the basement. The wood burner was low so I grabbed a handful of decoys & threw them in the furnace. That dry wood burned nice & hot, so I threw in a few more to ward off the cold.

Then I went back to work. After work I went home & reloaded the furnace with decoys, & had just enough time to bring back the bins before they closed for the long weekend.

When I pulled up in my truck, two men ran out of the building & demanded that I bring back the decoys! I asked “Why?” And with urgency in his voice, he told me that I had taken their entire inventory of Christmas decoys worth tens of thousands of dollars by mistake! He related that he had urgently called the police, & was desperately trying to find my vehicle, & that he had been driving around for the past three hours in a complete panic, because I had taken their Christmas inventory.

I pointed at the overzealous new guy who gave them to me, & he just gave me the ‘deer in the headlights’ look, & walked back into the building. Then the manager said “Do you still have them?, because they are incredibly valuable”! Each decoy had taken them over a week to make, & they needed to get them back. Rather stunned I told them that I had burned a few of them but would bring the rest back. Then I went home & carefully loaded a few hundred decoys back into the bins & brought them back to ‘The Wooden Bird.’

The man heating his house with wood, was convinced/assured that the decoys he had received were trash, so that he could use them as he desired.....*However, he misinterpreted what was truly valuable, to be nothing but scrap!

So it is with, those who misinterpret God’s way! Such people will be blindsided by God’s way!

Need:

Lives fall apart.

Girlfriends & boyfriends break up.

Husbands & wives divorce.

Children die in their youth.

Loved ones become addicts & turn on their closest family members.

Dreams become unattainable & quashed.

Careers are stolen by others & lost to greed.

Health gravitates into infirmity.

*Some people misinterpret all those heartaches of life, & blame God.

*But others of us, expend a great deal of energy trying to wrap our heads around the constancy of temptation & our easy lack of resistance in yielding to sin.

We live in an time & place where it seems the majority of people have fallen victim to “calling evil good, & good evil”(Isa. 5:20-21), regardless of whether they openly admit it or not!