The Ant

 Greetings to you all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ,

     Proverbs 6:6-9 says, “ Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise:  Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler,  Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.  How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? when wilt thou arise out of thy sleep?”

     I used to be the associate pastor at a church in West Virginia that had a very large  asphalt parking lot.  I was leaving the office one day and noticed a small ant dragging a piece of food across the paved area.  No matter where the ant was going, it was going to be a long time before it got there.  The object it was transporting was white and almost as big as the ant but it did not seem to be discouraged, if ants ever do get discouraged.  It just kept twisting and turning and working hard to get the valuable cargo somewhere.  Grasshoppers on the other hand, don’t seem to do a lot of work, but just eat everything they land on that is chewable.

     God, in the above passage, compares the ant to a sluggard, or a very lazy person who likes to sleep and who will look for any reason it can find to do what he wants to do.   The final question is, “When will you get up?”  The answer is usually, “later.  Just let me sleep a little longer.”  The sluggard is the person who is also labeled as a “procrastinator.”   Their motto is, “Why do today what you can do tomorrow?”  The above passage reminds all of us that God wants us to consider the ant and its practices or work ethic.  We often remark that our plate is full indicating that we can’t add anything else to it.  Maybe the ant’s plate is full and can’t do anything more than keep getting as much stuff as it can possibly manage into that small hole and stored up for when the winter weather comes along.  When the Apostle Paul got to the end of his life, he summed it up with, “I have finished the course.”  He had indeed finished what God had given him to do.  It should be our goal to finish well what God has given us to do and not to come to end of a day or the end of a year and say, “I wish I had done this or that.”  Don’t leave things for your “to do” list for tomorrow because you may not have tomorrow.  Praise God today for His working in all of our lives every second.