Chapter 3: Daily Drops

Imagine that you are at a restaurant and the waiter asks you what you will have to drink, and you reply that you will have water. Now imagine that his next question to you is “polluted or pure?” You would most likely look at the waiter in disbelief and wonder to yourself, who in the world would want polluted water? That is precisely the same question that the people in the dead church ask Jesus when he asks for water.

He asks for purity and those people question whether He is sure that He would not rather have pollution. I’m sure that Jesus at this point is probably giving the same look of bewilderment and wondering to Himself who in the world would want polluted water? Then He remembers that the people of the world are the ones that would, He then has patience with them as I’m sure you would with the waiter. Kindly explaining that you would obviously prefer the water that is pure. That waiter would acknowledge what you had asked for and deliver it to you with ease of understanding. Right?

That is, if he was listening to you. Let’s add in the fact that the waiter has a pair of earplugs stuck in one ear and is listening to music while taking orders. He doesn’t hear you when you clarified the obvious, that you have requested pure water and not polluted water. So, the waiter leaves to get your drink order and all that he has heard was the fact that you ordered a water. He gets to the kitchen looks at his notepad and has your table down for a water. He is unable to recall whether you wanted polluted or pure water.

So, instead of returning to your table and asking you again, this time without earplugs and with his full attention being paid to your request, he decides to guess and picks your water for you. Now, the law of probability would state that there is a fifty percent chance that the waiter delivers you what you have requested versus delivering you the opposite.

You see the problem is that he has now put your decision in his own hands, leaving it up to a fifty-fifty chance of whether he will get it right. The question is would you prefer that the waiter listened to you the first time, or that your drink order is left to a game of chance?

What about when God is telling you what He would like done? Would you leave His orders up to the flip of a coin of whether you will please Him or not? I surely would hope that you would not, however it is often more times than not that you find yourself picking heads or tails, because you failed to listen intently to what God was asking for. Being distracted by the other things that you have going on in life, deciding for yourself what is more important at that present moment in time.

It is little things like these, these simple small distractions that are the little drops of oil which are polluting the water. These are the bad works which are killing the good fruit. This is where the separation from the root begins.

What type of music are you listening to? Which films are you putting on the screen in front of your eyes? Are there things in life that are distracting you from hearing what God is requesting of you? Is Jesus asking you to do something that you are neglecting to do, because you are more concerned with what you want to do? What do you spend most of your time doing? The things of God or the things of the world?

Do not be deceived by the ways of the world, whatever it is that you focus the most energy and effort on is the same thing that you idolize. The word idolize has only one meaning and that is this “admire, revere, or love greatly or excessively.” What is it that you are in admiration of? What are you holding reverence for from day to day? What is it that you are truly in love with? Do you do anything that is not of God, even to the point of excess? These are all very good questions that we should all be asking ourselves every single day.

Now you may be thinking that you are doing some of these things, but they are not to the point of excess. You have probably heard of the saying that goes like this “the smallest holes can sink the largest ships.” That saying is very true, let’s look at the world’s largest ship at the time, The Titanic, which was sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in the year of 1912. This great ship that man had created over the course of three years with a workforce of about three-thousand laborers, was turned into a titanic anchor at the bottom of the ocean in less than two hours. Why did this happen you ask?

It happened simply because the crew failed to listen to warnings, there were emergency telegrams sent to the ship that warned of ice ahead. The crew decided to ignore these warnings and instead did what they wanted to do, which was sail full steam ahead straight into the face of certain danger. We now know, as I’m sure they soon learned, that this was not the best idea.

I’m sure they wished that they would have heeded the warnings, altered their course, and diverted from their race to destruction. However, once they saw and perceived their certain demise, it was already too late to fix the problem. They had no choice, despite all their efforts, but to plunge headlong into the iceberg and ultimately to the seafloor.

The Bible has its own words for how this saying goes, we can read it in the book of Galatians, chapter five, and verse nine.

“A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.” Galatians 5:9 KJV

We can see here that even a small amount of yeast causes the entire batch of dough to rise. The same way that even a small amount of disobedience or ignoring a warning will lead to greater disobedience and greater damage to the vessel.

When the Holy Spirit warns you about what you are doing or warns you that what you are doing is wrong, it is because He knows of the great danger that lies ahead. He knows that if you do not divert of off that course, that you will eventually run straight into sheer destruction.

When you get that telegram of truth, make sure that you take the time to read it and heed to its warnings with corresponding actions.