Most boys and girls like flowers. What girl is there who hasn’t spent many a happy time gathering daisies or spring wild flowers? Even boys, who like their baseball and football, still enjoy hunting and gathering flowers. When my mother was a little girl she spent a day in the country during the summer. She, too, enjoyed flowers, and when she saw so many daisies growing in the field, she went out, and gathered as many as her arras could carry. Then she put them in a big vase in the farmhouse kitchen. The next morning when she came downstairs the flowers were all gone! The farmer had thrown them into the stove. He didn’t think of them as pretty flowers at all, hut as weeds, for they hindered the growth of his crops.
Not long ago I visited a place where there were too many flowers. It was the island of Bermuda. There were many flowers there which we had never seen before, and we admired them very much. But there were two flowers which had become so abundant that they were classed as weeds. You would never guess what they were. Morning-glory vines, and the climbing nasturtium! They were beautiful to look at, certainly, but they were climbing all over the trees and the pasture land so that the cows were having a hard time getting enough grass to eat. Wouldn’t you like to see a field scattered with bright crimson and orange nasturtium blossoms, and beautiful blue morning-glories? But the cows couldn’t eat those flowers!
Now I wonder if I can explain to you the lesson which I learned from this land of “too many flowers.” God has something which. He offers boys and girls because He knows they need it. That gift is eternal life and a home in heaven. But Satan hates God and His gospel, and he has tried many ways to keep boys and girls from accepting what God offers. How could he do that? Satan offers you something else instead. He offers all kinds of pleasures, and entertainments; perhaps not very wicked, but, like those flowers, very attractive and innocent-looking.
Many boys and girls are deceived by what Satan offers and they miss the very best thing that any boy or girl could ever have. They miss taking the Lord Jesus as their Saviour, and find when they come to die that they have been deceived by the devil’s offers.
ML 02/05/1950