Don't Feed The...

James 4:7 -- "Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you."

image. gettyimages.com

Light bounced of the boat wake that came rushing toward the dock in Grandma Saunders' back yard and the warm sunshine hit the top of my head with a great intensity. My cousin [I'm not going to tell you which one] was standing at the end of the dock dropping bits of bacon into the water. We used to use Grandma's old bacon to catch blue crabs. It worked like a charm! Stepping onto the sun-bleached planks, however, I noticed my cousin didn't have a line out into the water. Nor did he have the pole net to scoop in his catch. It suddenly became quite obvious to me that he wasn't catching crabs.

He was feeding something.

Something big.

"Cousin! You are NOT doing what I think you're doing!" I all but shouted at him as I stepped up next to him and peered down at the seven foot alligator with his eyes and snout peering up out of the tannin rich Saint Johns River.

"Yeah, he's hungry." My cousin said as he threw another piece of bacon into the water.

"You cannot keep doing this." I scolded. "First of all, it IS actually against the law and second - he'll associate you and this dock with food. He will always come here looking for food - even if we are in the water at the time!"

My cousin just looked up and me and blinked. I KNOW he'd already been told exactly what I was telling him, but I also truly believe he thought the animal would starve if he didn't get a few scraps of bacon.

Sure enough, as the next few hot Florida days went by - our Gator friend showed up at the dock - peering up through the ripples in the water while he waited for his bacon. Not too long afterward a neighbor called in to Florida Fish and Wildlife and some nice guys came out and relocated the big fella to a safer, non bacon area.

I often wonder what happened to that Gator. I CAN tell you I never witnessed my cousin feeding one at the end of Grandma's dock after that. Perhaps watching the animal hog-tied and thrown into the back of a pick-up with electrical tape tightly wound around his pearly chompers cured my cousin of his passion for feeding the large animals.

Ya know - the thing is - we all feed our personal gators from time to time. Our gators - all of them - have the same name; temptation. And just like the alligators in the Saint Johns River, if we feed them - they will always come back for more. It's far better to leave them alone and let them starve.

image: nbcnew.com

Thankfully, God gives us everything we need to ensure our personal gators don't become habituated like the one at the end of Grandma's dock. Think about this; when Jesus was repeatedly tempted in the desert, Satan eventually learned that he wasn't going to win and gave up. [Luke 4:1-13] In other words - Satan fled.

Obviously there are going to be times after we've conquered a temptation gator when it will try it's luck again and peer up at the end of our spiritual dock, hoping for success. But making a habit of saying no and clinging to God's promises WILL always ensure victory. We must NOT grant the thing bits of bacon. Even teeny-tiny bits of giving in to it cause big, big problems.

The nice thing? We CAN, just like Grandma's neighbor, call in back-up. All we have to do is hand it over to God and let Him handle it. We don't have to go it alone. We can cling to THE PROFESSIONAL.