Entangled

No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier. 2 Timothy 2:4

I enjoy gardening. The one thing that makes me hesitate when planting a garden is my arch nemesis: the morning glory. The garden spot that I used for most of my kids’ childhood was replete with morning glory seeds or tubers, or whatever they need to survive from year to year. I could not seem to conquer them. I tried everything, but if it rained more than a day or two in a row, if my mother-in-law had a bad few days health wise, or if my kids had a few nights in a row of ballgames, those vines quickly took over my garden. Seemingly, before I could get turned around good, the vines were up and pulling on my vegetables. It was especially hard to keep them under control in the peas, beans, or corn. The vines quickly wrapped themselves around the plant and began to pull and twist my vegetables. I tried many different tactics over the years from spraying the whole garden spot multiple times throughout the fall and spring to covering the entire garden with black plastic in hopes of santizing the ground, still as soon as plants began to grow, up popped a morning glory, quickly outpacing my chosen vegetables. Once the vines began to wrap themselves around the plants, I couldn’t pull them up without damaging the vegetable plant. They became so interwoven with the plants, crossing rows and wrapping themselves around multiple plants until I just tried to keep the row clean and had a hard time with that. As a result, I often became entangled in the vines as I harvested my vegetables, causing me to stumble as I walked down the row.

In chapter 2 of 2 Timothy, Paul is writing to Timothy about persevering in God’s work. Verse 3 tells him to endure hardness as a good soldier, but verse 4 calls on him to remove himself from the affairs of this life that might get in the way of his service to the Lord. What does that mean for us today?

First of all, if you think for a moment that we don’t need to develop a warrior attitude as Christians in today’s world, you should think again. We are at war, Satan is hard at work making Isaiah 5:20 a reality. There was a time in America, when non-Christians showed at least a moderate respect for the faith of a Christian. That is no longer the case. However, when I say ‘warrior attitude’ I don’t mean ‘combative’. That’s exactly what the world wants from us. We are pushed and challenged, and those that stand against our faith look for us to show one iota of less-than-Christ-like behavior, and they grasp on to that and call us hypocrites. But, I do believe that we are to display the singleness of mind that a good soldier displays on the battlefield. In the midst of combat, brothers-in-arms, are worried about only the objective of the battle, petty arguments and basic disagreements fade away as they come together as a unit to assault the enemy.

Secondly, are you sure you understand the battle plan? What is our goal? What is our objective? We have the great commission to guide us. We are to carry the love of Christ to the world, that they might be saved. We aren’t called to be the judge, we aren’t called to be the condemners, the Lord Himself is quite capable of doing that through the work of the Holy Spirit. We are to share the good news! Helping people understand why He came, showing them the hope that we have within ourselves, that should be our primary focus.

Are you letting ‘affairs of the world’ color your world view and/or your behavior? Are you spending more time reflecting on God’s Word and God’s plan for your life or on outside influences? Politics, social media, sports, holidays, trips… none of those are bad things on their own. It’s when we allow those things to become more important than our relationship with the Lord that they become a problem. Personally for me, at least for right now, it’s best if I remove those challenges from my day as much as possible. I stay informed on what’s going on in the world through print media or websites, but don’t watch network or cable news that seems designed to evoke emotional responses from its viewers, I limit television watching, no longer spending hours watching mindless tv every evening. (It’s amazing how little I miss this, and how much I enjoy the other things I’ve found to spend my time on.)

Are you ready to disentangle yourself? I think we sometimes grow so accustomed to struggling along the path being weighed down by various distractions that we don’t even realize how much time and effort it takes to just ‘do life’. Take a week or two, remove every unnecessary activity… every… unnecessary… activity… so many of the things we consider to be necessities are not. Can you live without doing this activity? Yes? Then it’s unnecessary. I know we have things we enjoy doing, but to really realize how much effort we put into futile pursuits, a period of inactivity is necessary. The quiet of the pandemic opened my eyes to the extreme level of useless activity I was involved in. When my life quieted, and I could actually breathe, I found out what was truly important.

Let’s keep our rows clean to make maneuvering in this world easier. Let’s remove as much of the world’s influence from our lives as we possibly can, only then will our true hope be easier to spot and concentrate on. We have a relationship with the Creator of the Universe. His Spirit will communicate with us, but we have to be open and listening, not caught up in vines of busyness and sin.