God’s Hedge

Author: Sherry Heard

 

I do not know about today’s message, but it seems very much impressed on my heart, so here goes.

 

It has been on my mind recently that the relationship between man and animal can be a shadow of the relationship between God and man. Specifically I have been thinking of the relationship between man and pet.

 

If we allow our animals to run loose we can imagine all of the danger in today’s society that can befall them. We love them so we confine them, either indoors, or with fences, leashes, etc. They do not understand this confinement as love, but look at how willingly some of them take the confinement. Others fight it constantly. They dig and jump and do anything they can to try and get “free”.

 

So we are when God confines us. Have you ever been confined by God? I have felt His hedge of protection around me before when I ran headlong into the thorns and hurt myself! Think about a time in your life when you wanted something and could not have it, the more you tried to get it the more it hurt you. Sounds like getting caught in a hedge of thorns, huh?

 

When God confines us it is not to hurt us. It is to protect us. Think about children. We put up baby gates, put them in playpens, and even put them in car seats. All are restraints, designed to protect them. Do they understand that? Not really. Do they accept it? Some do, while others kick and scream and fight all the way.

 

The next time you are trying to get something you want and continue to get hurt by the attempt, stop and talk to God about it. “Lord, is this something you want me to have?” “Lord, is this a hedge of protection I keep running into?” Isaiah 1:18 “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”

 

If you are trying with everything you have to live for Him, I believe He WILL protect you. But if you persist in fighting through the hedge to get at what YOU want at some point He will let you have it and have the consequences that go with it.

 

Have you ever seen a parent letting their child fall down? So, they can learn how to get back up, and that doing a particular thing may cause them to fall? God does the same thing with us; however He is a loving parent and is waiting right there for us to turn back to Him with arms up stretched like a child to a parent.

 

“For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.” - Ecclesiastes 9:4