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“Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil” (Ephesians 6:11).
We have a bird feeder just outside one of our windows, and we can watch the birds who feed at it while we are eating our own meals. This spring we have noticed quite a few cowbirds on the feeder. Cowbirds are somewhat unusual, for they do not build their own nests. Rather, they look around for the unguarded nest of some other small bird, and then lay their egg in that nest. Sometimes the other bird recognizes a strange egg and either pushes it out of the nest, breaks it, or even builds another nest on top of it. But most of the time they just sit on the cowbird’s egg, along with their own eggs, and hatch the cowbird chick too. But usually the cowbird chick is bigger and stronger than the other nestlings, and thus gets more than its fair share of the food the mother bird brings. Then the real chicks of the mother bird get weaker, and sometimes die.
This is like what Satan does in our lives. He brings bad things into our lives, and often we do not recognize what he is doing. We do not realize how harmful that evil thing can be, until it is too late. As our verse says, we need to be on guard, in order to prevent this kind of thing from happening. If the mother bird saw the cowbird approaching her nest, she would drive it away, but it is when she is away from the nest that the cowbird comes. Let us all be on guard for what Satan may be doing.
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