One day when Dick and Phil were playing "hide and seek" in a patch of tall swamp grass they stumbled upon a mother rabbit and her little baby. In a flash the mother rabbit was gone, but in a few moments the boys caught the little one.
How frightened the little fellow was as they held him carefully in their hands! "What’s the matter, little fellow?" Dick asked. "We won’t hurt you. We are going to take you home and make a little house for you, and feed you, and take good care of you. You’ll make a dandy little pet!"
Hurrying home, the boys brought the rabbit to proudly show to their mother. Then they made a small cage and placed lettuce and carrots and a dish of water inside. Then they put the baby rabbit in his new home. Anxiously they watched to see if he would eat some food, but he scurried into a corner and huddled into a tiny ball.
"Perhaps you’d better leave him alone for awhile," Mother advised. "Maybe by tomorrow he’ll eat a bit."
Two days went by and the little rabbit hardly stirred from his corner. He looked sick and miserable with fear. Though hungry he would not touch the food the boys held out coaxingly to him. Finally Mother said, "Boys, I think that your rabbit is going to die unless you take him back to the swamp and to his mother. He has a wild nature and just cannot live in your cage."
The boys hated to give up their new pet, and argued with their mother that they could give him a much better home than he would have in the woods filled with dangers. "Why," Phil said, "he would make an easy dinner for a hawk, or an owl! A weasel might get him—lots of things could happen to him. But he would be safe with us!"
But Mother answered, "That is right, but just the same you must take him back or he will die soon. He has a wild nature and cannot appreciate the good things you would like to do for him. Perhaps the little fellow can teach us a lesson, boys! God has lovingly prepared a home for us in heaven. Our heavnely home is furnished with everything to bring greatest delight and joy, but we in our sinful natures could never appreciate that home!
“If God could allow us to come into His presence, and into heaven in our sinful natures we would be most miserable. In John 3:7 the Lord Jesus says, ‘Ye must be born again.’ When we receive the Lord Jesus as our Savior we receive a new nature.
“Now take the rabbit back to the exact spot where you found him and perhaps his mother will find him again." So the boys obeyed their mother and soon the rabbit was at home again in the tall grass of the swamp.
Dick and Phil remembered the lesson the little rabbit taught them, and today they both have "new natures" for they have been "born again,"... HAVE YOU?