The Parable of the Tadpole
I heard a great message by John MacArthur last night.... talking about feeding on the Word. He was saying how inadequate it is to feed on God’s Word once a week and equated it with eating dinner once a week... He added that in order to grow, we need to take in food and we need to digest it and we need to use it.... In other words, we need to read the word, work it through our soul to the point that we speak it back to someone and then we need to let it be exercised out in our life.
Reminds me of a tadpole my kids won at a fair one year. We brought it home, put it in a bowl of water, but my daughter hardly fed it. We didn't have the heart to toss it, so she would remember - maybe once a week - and he kept hanging on. He never grew. Well... I have girls. Then, about a year later, we were visiting my brother's family in Wisconsin... and they mentioned they would adopt it.... so we said goodbye to the scrawny tadpole... and off he went to his new family in Kenosha.
We thought that chapter of our life was over... until one day I got a call from my sis-in-law telling me the tadpole kept her up all night. 'What? All he did was swim around like a goldfish," I thought. But... she made the mistake of feeding him. Hahaha. And, he grew! He became a frog.... and started to croak at night. HAHAHA! She apparently was pretty scared when his middle-of-the-night calls for friends penetrated the darkness of her home. I told her she should have never started feeding him.
No matter how many times we have read the Bible or how many Bible verses we have memorized, if we are not taking the Word in fresh...and digesting it (by working it through) and using it...by articulating and then living it.... WE WILL NOT GROW.
Here's another thought from the parable of the tadpole... it has to do with the Nature of his growth.
Think about the changes that tadpole went through once he started eating regularly. First he started to grow bigger. He grew arms and legs with feet, and his skin changed. He lost his swimmers.... AND.... the environment of his existence changed. He was alienated from the deep waters of his early years. Yes, he was still IN the pond, but he was not OF the pond. (so to speak).... And, he developed a voice that he never had before, so he could make a joyful noise. (He never had that before.)
When we feed on the Word and digest it, it becomes fuel for our body and is stored up in our soul. It changes our form. We grow patience that we never had before. We expand to the point that we can love someone…. or forgive someone who was unkind to us. We develop limbs to serve with gifts we never had before. Our eyes not only begin to recognize His Works, but we develop a depth of understanding to comprehend the breadth of His Wonders. Finally, we find a voice to articulate our Praise to Him. And, the more we grow, the more we are alienated from the world and the more we long to breathe the new fresh air of eternity. We are truly new creations. (2 Cor 5:17)…. aliens and strangers in the world (1 Peter 2:11).
Aren’t these wonderful reasons to want to eat His Word and grow? But I have one more motivating reason to consider…. When we assimilate the Word in our lives…. We are partaking of Jesus, the Living Word. John 1:1 says: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word Was God..." Jesus IS the Living Word! When we feed on the Word, digesting to the point that we are exercising it through our lives, we are assimilating Jesus… attaining to His fullness and “administering God’s grace in its various forms” (1 Pet 4:10)… Make no mistake about it… it is Jesus… the Living Word the Son of God…living through you. And, that is why we are the fragrance of Christ to those who have eyes to see Him, but the smell of death to those are perishing. (2 Cor 2:14-16)
Philippians 3:12 says, “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.”
Romans 8:11 says, “And, if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.”
One last point… All of us are in the same boat when it comes to our struggle with sin. In fact, in the teaching I heard by John MacArthur about feeding on the Word, he said the older and more mature we get the more we see our flaws and how far we have to go. So, don’t be surprised by the sin you see… Give it the weight it deserves. We hate the sin. We grieve over it. We are ashamed of it…. But we are NOT hopeless. We rejoice in Jesus who is setting us free. Isn’t this what Paul said in Romans 7:18-25?
“I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Rom 7:17-25
Let’s embrace the opportunities to grow and attain to the fullness of Jesus.
