Spiritual Hyenas

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I wanted to pass on this great devotion that Stacy sends out at least monthly. I have her permission to repost.

May this bless you as it did me!

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Spiritual Hyenas

One behavior common in the animal kingdom is the arrival of hyenas trying to steal the prey from other animals. Rarely will you see a nature show portraying hyenas on the hunt for live prey. They let other animals do the hunting, the chasing, and the killing. They come along after the fact, in hopes of taking the food for which others have worked.

I have seen spiritual hyenas in the church. These hyenas are too lazy to “hunt” for spiritual meat, so they try to take it from others. Often times, they even demand that you spoon-feed it to them.

Spiritual hyenas are too apathetic to chase after God. They may show up at the altar and weep bitter tears, yet walk away unchanged because chasing after God is not something you do only on Sunday. A healthy spiritual diet requires that we pursue God on a daily basis. (Psalm 61:8; Proverbs 8:17)

Spiritual hyenas refuse to kill their fleshly desires. (Romans 8:13) They also refuse to fight spiritual battles. (Ephesians 6:10-18) They would rather prey on someone who is prayed up and ask them to fight the spiritual battle for them. Yet God says to put on the full armor of God so that you are able to stand against Satan’s schemes. (Ephesians 6:10) Notice that it does not tell us to find someone else to stand in our place against the devil.

When we allow spiritual hyenas into our life, the results are:

1. We are not giving to them from the overflow of God’s Spirit in us. Rather, they are stealing our spiritual food and we will quickly become spiritually depleted.

2. Not only do they steal spiritual food from us, they steal glory from God. If only they would seek the Lord for themselves, God would give them plenty of reasons to praise Him!

3. They begin to seek us instead of God. In a sense, we become God to them.

We are told to be very wise in the way we live, making the most of every opportunity. (Ephesians 5:15-16) When we are doing things which seem to be of a spiritual nature, we may think we are still using our time very wisely. However, spiritual hyenas are very sly and sneaky. Because of that, we must be careful to guard against them so we do not end up becoming unwise stewards of our time.

Have you become prey to a spiritual hyena?

© 2007, Stacy R. Miller

~~ Stacy ~~
Proverbs 31 devotionals