Reflections on an Aesop's Fable

There's an ancient Greek saying, 'Trust Athena, and move your arms'!

Aesop's story goes that a shipwrecked man prayed to Athena to save him. All other survivors were swimming to safety and told him, 'trust Athena, and move your arms!'

I guess a secular understanding of this parable would be 'by all means have a bit of faith, hope and love, but be practical!'

To be honest, other, true stories come to my mind.

A man on the shipwrecked Titanic gave his life-jacket to someone else. He said, 'I'm going up, not down!' He knew that this life isn't all there is, there's an eternity to come. Even as he began to sink, he asked another man, 'are you saved?' and urged him to trust in the Lord Jesus Christ for eternal life.

Another story comes to mind. Perhaps apocryphally, Oliver Cromwell, a key figure in the civil wars in the British Isles in the 17th Century ordered his troops, the New Model Army, 'Trust God, and keep your [gun]powder dry'. In other words, by all means have faith, hope and love in God, but be practical as well.

My final story for now is from the New Testament of God's Word, the Acts of the Holy Spirit chapter 27. The Apostle Paul had been imprisoned for his faith in Jesus. He appealed to Caesar (which he was entitled to do as a Roman citizen). He knew through divine revelation that if the ship took him through the winter across the Mediterranean, the ship would go down. 

Doctor Luke who was with him writes that in the midst of a furious storm that when after many days they hadn't seen the sun, moon and stars for many days and were running out of supplies, they lost hope of being saved.

The night before the ship ran aground the Lord appeared to Paul and told him that no lives would be lost. So he told everyone to be encouraged and to have a bite to eat before they'd get ashore to Malta. And so it happened.

By all means be practical, but trust God. Humanly speaking, your situation might seem hopeless. Yet nothing's impossible with God, He can turn your life around. If we sincerely trust in the Lord Jesus, we're invincible until He calls us home.