The story goes of an Irish farmer who bought a donkey at market. After a week or two of owning the donkey the farmer began to realise that it was eating him out of house and home. Being a bit of a miser the farmer had a think about it and came up with a solution.

Some time later, when a neighbour visited the farmer, he noticed the absence of the donkey.

“Where’s your donkey?” he asked the farmer.

“Well,” said the farmer “it was eating me out of house and home, so I decided to put it on a diet. I gradually reduced the amount of food that I gave it day by day.”

“That’s great!” exclaimed the neighbour “But it doesn’t explain where the donkey is now!”

“Well,” replied the farmer, “I had just got the donkey used to eating nothing at all, when the dumb beast went and died on me.”

It may sound strange, but this is exactly how we treat our spiritual food. The cost of reading our Bibles day by day is just too much for us. We try it for a while, and then gradually reduce our intake day by day. It’s the donkey diet all over again.

The only problem is, that one day we find that we have reduced our intake to nothing, and we are spiritually dead.

We need to nourish our spirits by feeding on God’s Word. We need to put in, whatever the cost in order to not only survive, but flourish. There are enough dead donkeys in our churches, don’t be one of them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 20th, 2006 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Devotional. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.