No more leaks

My life as a Christian is like a leaky ship! You may wonder if I know what I am talking about and what I mean when I say, “My Christian life is like a leaky ship.” Believe me, I know very little about being a Christian and much more about leaky cans.

I remember the first leaky boat we had as a child. My dad found her washed up on Barnegat Bay beach after a Northeast storm. We spent many months fixing it: we patched, we painted, we made a mast, a boom, a rudder and a sail. We named our rebuilt sixteen foot sailboat the: Barnacle. Then, once she was seaworthy and rigged up with her new mainsail and jib, we launched her on the Delaware River near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Within a few days, we boarded and set sail on our first journey downriver to the open waters of the Delaware Bay. A few days later we sailed up the Cape May Canal (New Jersey), then north along the Intercostal Canal to Atlantic City. About ten days after launching the Barnacle, we arrived at our home port in Barnegat Bay, near Toms River, New Jersey.

We had fun and adventures during the trip and constantly drew seawater out of our leaking boat for the entire ten days! We rescue day and night just to stay afloat! I will never forget. Yes, that was the first of about nine leaky boats that I have owned over the years.

A floating boat is surrounded by water that seems to be always trying to get inside the boat’s hull and sink it. Even if there is only a small hole, that is all that is needed. A sailor has to be constantly on the lookout for leaks in the hull of his boat. If there are leaks, you need to plug them as quickly as you can. – otherwise!

This is why I say that my life as a Christian is like a leaky boat: in my Christian walk, “the people of the world” surround me constantly. It seems like those people are always trying to pull me away from my Christian lifestyle of unwavering faith in God with all kinds of worldly distractions such as material things, selfish desires, and loveless words and deeds. I must admit that some of these mundane things are quite attractive and I actually invited some of them into my life before I realized what I was doing.

It sounds stupid and silly, but I know there were times when, with full knowledge, I deliberately opened a seacock (a valve in the underwater part of the ship’s hull) and let those evil and mundane things flood the ‘ship’, the vessel that is my life.

As silly as it may sound, you could say that figuratively I took an ax and made holes in my life and actually invited the world to do everything possible to sink me! I know better. God told me not to. I did it anyway. When I was “full of the things of the world” my leaking ‘boat’ (myself) flooded, was slow, and I almost sank to the bottom and drowned.

After some narrow escapes, and thanks to the vigilance and teachings of the Holy Spirit, I have learned my lessons! Now, I am always on guard. Now I am careful to be attentive to the places where “the world” tries to flood me with one or more of its ideas, I have learned to test those ideas, to examine them by putting them in the light of the Word (the Bible) to see if they are good or bad for me.

As you can see, all of these leaky boat experiences have shown me that for the remainder of my Christian journey here on earth I must be constantly vigilant and strive for – no more leaks!

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