When Grandma was a young lady, she taught in a one-room schoolhouse. Of course, she wasn’t called Grandma back then; she was called Miss Smith. The schoolhouse was out in the Canadian countryside. It’s hard to figure out how Grandma, or rather Miss Smith, could teach all eight grades in one room. How could she teach the alphabet to the first graders and algebra to the eighth graders in the same room on the same day? She also stood beside an old wood-burning stove and stirred hot lunches while she taught!
At another school where Miss Smith taught, the children brought their lunches to school in honey pails. There were 42 students and only 36 seats. How did Miss Smith teach that class?
But teaching everyone together in one room and not having enough desks weren’t Miss Smith’s only problems. Another problem was mice. There were a lot of them at the school where the children brought their lunches in honey pails. Often the children left their pails on a shelf at the back of the room. The mice could smell the food in the pails. As Miss Smith prepared lessons, she could hear the pails actually moving around because so many mice were running around them. A stamp of her foot brought silence, but not for long.
One day during class when Miss Smith opened her desk drawer, a mouse jumped out! The girls jumped on their desks, Miss Smith squealed, and the boys bravely chased the mouse as it headed for the cold-air register in the floor. The mouse escaped. That did it! Something had to be done about the mice in the schoolroom.
“Does anyone have a cat that is good at catching mice?” Miss Smith asked her class. Yes, one girl did. Since she lived close by, as soon as school was over, she went home and came back with a sleepy-looking creature in her arms. The cat curled up and dozed in a corner of the room until ... suddenly she streaked across the room and POUNCE! The cold air register was no protection for the mouse this time. The cat ate it, cleaned her whiskers and waited. Before long there was another streak across the room and POUNCE! The cat got that one too. She ate it and cleaned her whiskers. Before Miss Smith went home that day, the cat had killed and eaten six mice!
Miss Smith left the cat in the schoolhouse for the night. The next morning she found 16 dead mice on the floor, and, of course, she didn’t know how many more mice the cat might have eaten!
But wait. This story was supposed to be about when cats and mice lived happily together. It is. Did you know that when God first made furry cats and cute little gray mice, they weren’t enemies? Maybe the cats even had fun playing with the mice. What changed that? The answer is only one word: Sin. Before sin came into this world, every animal lived happily with every other animal. And the two people on earth talked with God every day and never had a single argument or angry word with each other. That would be pretty wonderful, wouldn’t it?
When sin entered the world because those two people disobeyed God, all of that changed. Death entered the world for the first time. Perhaps one of the first things to die was a little gray mouse. People started doing wrong things. They got a sinful nature they didn’t have before that made them afraid. Because they were afraid and sinful, they hid from God and then blamed Him for being the cause of their disobedience. And they started fighting with each other.
If you don’t know the Lord Jesus as your Savior, this is the nature you now have ... a sinful nature that has nothing good in it. You may look good on the outside, but you have wrong thoughts and you do wrong things.
If you do know the Lord Jesus as your Savior, you still have that old sinful nature, but you also have a new nature that is just like the Lord Jesus, a nature that God gave you when you believed on Him. So you have a struggle that goes on, like two people are living inside you, fighting ... because that’s exactly what is happening.
The good news is that God did everything that is needed to take care of that old nature, when Jesus died on the cross. He saw that old sinful nature, which is the bad nature in you, dying on that cross, too. It was buried with the Lord Jesus, and now you don’t have to obey it. “He that is dead is freed from sin” (Romans 6:77For he that is dead is freed from sin. (Romans 6:7)). Now you have the Spirit of God inside you that is stronger than that old nature, and you can remember that God doesn’t see you in that old nature anymore, but in the perfect Lord Jesus. You no longer have to obey your old sinful nature; you simply need to count on the Lord Jesus to give you the strength to walk in the new nature. “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ [lives] in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me” (Galatians 2:2020I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20)).
Messages of God’s Love 1/5/25