Get Rid Of The Thistles

When I was a kid, my father said he would pay me a penny for every two thistles I dug out of the pasture. I thought those purple flowers were sort of pretty, but he reminded me that they ruined the pasture, and were bad for the horses we had grazing there.

Pretty things are not always good! I discovered quickly how unpleasant those purple flowers were when I tried to pick them up and put them in my basket for counting. And the roots!...those roots went deep!

So also, we need to be reminded that some of the most attractive commercials are designed to sell us things that are destructive to our health. I recently saw a slick, full-color magazine, designed for the sole purpose of exploiting the “merits” of cocaine, and every drug that the drug-pushers can pander. It’s hard to believe that such a magazine could be on the market.

The same thing could be said about the porno-magazines, exploiting sex as a cheap, degrading thing, rather than the beautiful thing God made it to be.

God made the thistles and they are not bad. My Dad just didn’t want them in his pasture. God made his world, and nothing of itself is bad. It’s just the way we use things that makes them destructive. I am reminded of what George Washington Carver, a famous black scientist said about tobacco. “There’s nothing wrong with it,” he said, “but I believe if God had intended for me to make a smoke-stack of my nose, he would have turned it up the other way.”

There are many things that are pretty, and “delightful to the eyes”, but unlike Eve in the Garden of Eden, we must be more perceptive, more discerning.

“Walk circumspectly”…live carefully with others, because life is holy…don’t be fooled by lying words or pretty faces. Things are not always what they seem to be. In I Peter 3:10-12 we read:

“Whoever would love life and see good days,
must keep his tongue from evil and keep his
lips from deceitful speech. He must turn
from evil and do good; he must seek peace
and pursue it. For the eyes of the Lord are
on the righteous and his ears are attentive
to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is
against those who do evil.”