The Chicken and the Eagle

"Are you enjoying your book?" asked Mom as Bailey curled up on the couch with a book of folktales."Yeah," said Bailey. "I just finished a story about a baby eagle who thought he was a little chick.""Why did he think that?" asked her little brother, Luke."Well, when he was still inside an egg, the egg was stolen and taken to the henhouse," Bailey explained. "The hen didn't know it wasn't one of hers, and she sat on it with the rest of her eggs. After the egg hatched, she brought him up like one of her chicks.""Someone should've told him he was an eagle," said Luke."Someone did tell him!" said Bailey. "The wise old owl who lived near the farm told him he was an eaglet--and that he could fly high in the sky like the great eagle--but he didn't believe it. He just kept on living like a chicken almost until the day he died.""That was dumb of him!" said Luke. "He could have soared the skies, and all he did was scratch the dirt!""We do that too sometimes," remarked Mom."We scratch in the dirt?" asked Bailey. "I don't do that.""Me neither." Luke shook his head."Not literally," said Mom. "But like that eagle, we often fail to realize our full potential. The Bible says we were all once slaves to sin. Then Jesus came to save us and set us free from the power of sin.""And that means we don't have to keep on sinning?" asked Bailey.Mom nodded. "Because we trust in Jesus, God has given us the power to say no to sin. But like that little eagle who lived the life of a chicken, we often choose to live as though we can't help but do wrong things. That's more foolish than he was, don't you think?" Bailey and Luke nodded. "We've been set free and don't need to be ruled by sin any longer," said Mom. "When we realize that something we're doing is wrong, we can stop immediately and confess our sin to Jesus, who always forgives us. We don't have to stay stuck in sinful habits--Jesus has freed us from sin so we can soar with Him!" -Tanya Ferdinandusz