Open—Sam Ludvicek
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I have a short thought, maybe it'll lead to something else.
It's come up recently back home, this idea in First Peter Chapter 5.
And we often talk about it and have read it. Verse 8. Be sober. Be vigilant, because your adversary, the devil, is a roaring lion walketh about seeking whom he may devour.
Whom resist steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren that are in the world. It was mentioned that with all that's going on, there's a lot of people being filled with fear, a lot of Christians.
And back in the 60s, when I was pretty young, I still remember the school drills where they had people in school, the children hiding under the desk in case of a nuclear bomb. Well, like that it do anything. But nonetheless people are starting to be afraid like that again because of the threats from Putin and so forth.
We're just finishing up revelation in our local assembly and we were talking here recently about it and saying, look, we know there's no room in scripture.
For a nuclear Holocaust where the world wipes itself out, God won't allow that. But we could see something happen in Ukraine or something limited, and it's a pretty scary time for that. And a brother mentioned that maybe what we're seeing going on around the world, all these different things in a different places, our brother mentioned.
The persecution for Christians and other countries, certainly they go through much more than we do in many parts of this world.
Were confessing Christ can get you killed. Not nobody here is likely to confess Christ and get killed, but just want to make a note of this. Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary, the devil, is a roaring lion walketh about seeking whom he may devour. Now the male lion. When they roar in the jungle, it's not them.
That you need to be immediately afraid of. When they roar and they go around, you can think in your mind, and a native knows this. The safest place is not running straight from them. It's going sideways because the female lions are waiting for you, because he's driving you towards them, and they're going to tear you to pieces.
So when we lookout and we see the devil manifesting as a roaring lion, look in the direction that it's trying to drive people. That's where you don't want to be.
Because the rest of the pride, as they call it, is waiting. The females are waiting in the bushes as you drive them towards you. In Iowa, we've had a resurgence of coyotes.
And near the farmstead, or my brother and I, my wife reside in the evenings Now it's going to start coming in the fall. You'll hear the coyotes, Yip Yip, Yip Yip, Yip, Yip, Yip, Yip Yip Yip Yip. And you can hear them moving down through the Creek bed and so forth. And what they're doing is making noise because some silent ones are waiting up the Creek for the rabbits to come and they're going to kill them.
The noise is to drive you so when Satan roars.
He's trying to drive people in a direction, that direction that you see the sheep going and everybody that's that bows in fear to that running straight away from that's where you don't want to be.
Well, there's a lesson in that for us. And we see sometimes believers being driven in a direction like that and running afraid. We don't have to do that. We can calmly seek wisdom from this book and say, wait a minute.
I'm not going to go with the rest.
I'm going to take the wisdom of this book. I'm going to seek the Lord's mind and I'm going to go to the safe place. And if we are found, we're talking about Acts. How many times Paul ended up. He escaped many times, but there were times where he was.
Taken and he was beaten and he was whipped and he was stoned and so forth, and maybe that's coming for us down the road.
But when he roars, we need to take note of the direction he's seeking to drive people and be wise.