A LITTLE LEAVEN

“A small bit of leaven raises up but unrestrained and careless brings about confusion and deceit. A little leaven spreads like death within the body and truth is twisted with a little deceit. You are my people set apart for my glory, but you must be careful with truth and you must be wary of the leaven of men who say they speak for the good of my people but who look to pervert truth. Truth is mixed with leaven to deceive my own.”

I lost an entire colony of my bees recently. For those who know me I have been keeping bees for a few years. Due to the summer heat and busyness, to my fault I have been a bit hands off with them. I used to keep my eyes on the health of my hives closely and I spent hours each time working in these hives to make sure they were thriving.

Sometimes though, when life gets busy carelessness sets in. The drive for your hobby cools and shortcuts are taken, they start very small, miss a week checking on the hives, a week there and then it extends. I had recently harvested honey from these hives and I replaced the frames I took from them with well-worn older frames. The other day as I was about my work on my property and passed this hive, normally it’s a flurry of activity with bees flying to and fro in their busy work but I noticed it was silent and I became concerned. I put on my gear and made my way down to this hive. As I walked over I had no hope for it, I already knew something was terribly wrong and my fear was made evident as I opened the box.

It was full of death.

Where it was once teeming with life, bursting with heavy frames of honey and thousands of bees it was now quiet. Roaches skated across the frames and white strands of what look like webbing hung about. The honeycombed frames themselves were full of death. Maggots wriggled about everywhere.

I was repulsed when I had to guess what the problem came from. I could only surmise it was coming from disease holding onto a frame that I had not adequately cleaned and disinfected. It was only 3 frames within 30 but within a few weeks it had infected and destroyed a healthy and thriving colony. And like the proverbial leaven it only took a little to spread like death across that landscape of bustling life.

As I stood looking at my hive a thought came into my mind, “There is a lesson in this.”

A few days prior to this I was woken up in the predawn hours to these words about leaven. “A small bit of leaven raises up but unrestrained and careless brings about confusion and deceit. A little leaven spreads like death within the body and truth is twisted with a little deceit.” These words echoed in my mind and I can only express it as my mind’s eye seeing these words in text scrolling across a television screen. And while it scrolled I heard the words spoken.

And these words here were prophetically played out before my eyes. You see, I had become comfortable and inattentive with the care of my hives as of late. That disease was the leaven and it didn’t happen immediately. It spread throughout the hive in small, incremental stages. I had passed by before seeing my bees but I didn’t take a care to stop and notice that their numbers were dwindling. I assumed all was good because it looked fine from the outside. And that is the danger to the one who claims Him.

Leaven is something that can start small but ultimately affects, spreads, overtakes and envelopes the whole. In a spiritual context leaven is the metaphor for sin, corruption, and the things that misguide and causes us to lose sight of our allegiance to Christ.

It is this danger of lost vigilance and carelessness that allow the small things to twist and overtake our hearts. Leaven eats away at our sure footing and makes us susceptible to falsity.

It is in lies, ego and pride, it is in negligence and tribalism, the us versus them that leaven spreads and does its ill work. Leaven always results in death. Death of self, of relationships, of spiritual understanding and of physical death.

We as followers of His way must walk circumspectly and we must always be careful to take account of ourselves. We tend to lean on taking account of other’s ways. Finding fault because we don’t approve of the things they do or don’t do like us or by casting our judgement on what they believe in or support. We speak ill but we avoid taking the needed daily checks in the pith of our own hearts, so that we might root out the small spores of leaven quietly growing within us. So, we look for the sin in others while ignoring the small festering deaths hiding within ourselves.

And like the death of that hive it is in the small avoidances of life and inattentiveness, that leaven spreads and overtakes and destroys a life or many lives. Because the time is short, for both these days and for your own days and they grow more evil by the hour. Therefore, we must be circumspect, for you are meant to be His agent for good, for the life and that cannot be if we are riddled through with ill ferment.

So be reminded that it is your call as His child “that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” - Ephesians 5:15-16

Lift up and strengthen those dealing with their own leaven and be the healing balm someone so desperately needs today.