The Proud Rooster

For years we had a little hobby farm that I so enjoyed.

We had a few hens , a rooster and some rabbits in the same enclosure surrounded by chicken wire.
One clever little rabbit figured out how to untwist the wire with his teeth and by pushing his nose through to open the hole and continuing to untwist the next link and the next …eventually opened a hole big enough for him to escape.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence even when you are a rabbit.

Or a chicken.

Once the rabbit hopped through his escape hole, the hens were very quick to follow and clucked with great delight at the abundance of fresh food on the other side of their pen fence.
The rooster was extremely proud of his harem and watched over them with possessive passion. When he saw that they had escaped his protective custody he squawked and clucked with great frustration and paced angrily back and forth in the pen ordering them to come back.
His hens paid him no heed whatsoever.

He tried again and again to get through the hole that the rabbit and hens had slipped though with ease, but he could not get through, no matter how hard he tried.
Why ??

The hole was down close to the ground where it was comfortable for the rabbit to do his work. The hens had no problem getting through ; they just ducked their heads down and bending their knees , quickly followed each other out in rapid sucession.
The arrogant rooster could not humble himself and when he ran at the hole to get through it, it just hit him at breast level. He tried again and again but since he refused to bend… it was impossible.

I read the following quote this week in a negative book review of a Christian novel.

“you are forced to digest speech after speech enhancing the characters' recently discovered faith, and their overwhelming zeal to convince everybody -including the unwary reader- that not only is their faith the only true , the only unmistakable way , but also that unless you are a true Christian, brother: your days are doomed.”

We could dismiss this as one man’s comment but I have been hearing more and more of this kind of sentiment… there is a definite trend toward ecumenicalism --- the belief that all religious roads lead to Heaven.

And yet Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life…No one comes to the Father except through me..” (John 14:6)

Without humility it will not be possible to bend the knee at the cross and accept Jesus as the only way of salvation.
If man insists in his pride that he can choose his own way to heaven , he will one day find that he was sadly mistaken .
He must duck his head, and bend his knee… like the hens.
The rooster is an example of the pride in man’s heart that will keep him from enjoying the pleasures of eternity.

“Most assuredly I say to you, Unless man is born of water and the Spirit he can not enter the kingdom of heaven..” (John 3:5)