Feeding a Soul on Spiritual Sawdust
Poem★★★★The mule didn’t seem to notice the gradual change, so the farmer thought things were fine and kept decreasing the proportion of oats. But weeks later, on the day he finally fed the poor beast nothing but sawdust, the mule finished the meal and fell over dead.
A silly tale, perhaps, but it serves as a parable of the backslider-the Christian who slips further and further away from God through unrepented sin or neglect. Though we know our souls cannot survive on spiritual sawdust, we may well convince ourselves that a little won’t hurt too much, and a little less real spiritual food won’t be missed. Then, over time, the proportion of sawdust increases while the oats gradually disappear.
Before long, the change is complete, and our starved, sawdust-stuffed spiritual life has collapsed.
The point
A farmer secretly swapped a mule's oats for sawdust until it died; unrepented sin works the same slow, unnoticed way in a believer's soul.