How Sharp are your Knives? By Sue LeBoutillier
My kids gave me a beautiful handmade Japanese chef knife for Mother’s Day. My kitchen knives were a wedding gift so they are technically antiques. I should have seen this gift coming, because for the last decade I’ve been gifted a knife sharpener, received hints that serrated knives were not the only way to slice a tomato, and one of my daughters actually went to the grocery store and purchased a knife to use during her month-long stay. The hints got bolder!
Over the span of my married life, I totally acclimated to dull knives. My excuses? They were comfortable, I had developed work-arounds, but they had become dull and stopped doing the job a long time ago and I hadn’t really noticed.
Our spiritual lives can become equally dull over time and sometimes we either don’t notice or we make excuses as a cover. We can get in the habit of living the same way we always have. We get comfortable. We develop work-arounds. Let’s face it, sometimes we can become spiritually dull.
People close to us might drop some hints, but we have excuses ready because we mostly see our lives as functioning just fine and we don’t realize how dull we have become.
Well, there is a purpose for sharpness in our spiritual lives — it enables discernment. Look at how Hebrews 4:12 describes it: “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”
The writer is likening the use of the Word of God to the delight of using a sharp knife that actually works — even on a tomato!
How often have you fussed over a decision and asked yourself, “Is this just my idea or is God leading me here?” Those are the times when we need a division of soul and spirit. We need to be able to separate our own thoughts and plans from the leading of the Spirit of God. That takes a sharp knife and if we think we can get by with the same dullness that has overtaken us, we’ll be frustrated and ineffective because we lack discernment.
So, how do we acquire the equivalent of a nice sharp Japanese chef knife for our spiritual life?
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Take inventory and recognize those areas where we have allowed comfort to rule our lives rather than discernment. We have to be humble enough to admit that we’ve grown dull.
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Then, once we admit our condition to the Lord, we commit ourselves to the consumption of the Word of God — to meditate on it — to allow it to both nourish us and sharpen us.
My extremely loose paraphrase of Psalm 1 says, “Blessed is the one who doesn’t fuel themselves from the busyness and noise of the world, but drinks deeply of the water of the Word of God. That one will be like a tree planted by streams of water, yielding fruit in its season.”
I hope something in this little illustration makes sense for you today. And if you ever want to drop by, I would be happy to slice you a piece of any fruit or veggie in paper-thin slivers.