Chaff or Grain?

I always look forward to Fridays' edition of this blog and how God speaks to each of us through what David Trotta writes:

We hear it all the time.  Football teams have a strategy to defeat their opponents.  Corporations have a strategy to gain market share over their competitors.

But, did you also know that our spiritual enemy, Satan, has a strategy to defeat us?  Let’s listen to his strategy as described by Jesus in Luke 22: 31, 32 - “Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift all of you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.”

Satan has a strategy to try and undermine our faith and turn our heart away from the Lord.  Jesus refers to it as sifting of wheat.  To help us understand what Jesus meant, let’s take a closer look at how wheat was sifted back then.

There were two primary steps in the sifting of wheat.  The first was called threshing, where the wheat was beaten with a flail to loosen the chaff from the edible grain.  The next step was called winnowing, where the loosened chaff was removed from the grain by throwing the grain in the air.  The lighter chaff would be blown off by the wind and the heavier grains would fall back to the ground.

God will sometimes allow Satan to sift us by bringing pressures and difficulties into our life to try and show us to be chaff, instead of grain.  But, God has the opposite goal in mind – to remove the unnecessary chaff and leave only the valuable grain.

We all know what happened to Peter.  After denying his Lord, scripture says Peter wept bitterly.  I’m sure he was overcome with an overwhelming sense of guilt and failure.  After all, he rejected the person he loved most.  But as Jesus foretold in Luke 22, Peter turned back to Him (aided by the prayers of his Lord) and went on to become a world changer.

If you are faced with difficulties and challenges, don’t allow Satan to beat down your faith and show you as chaff.  Instead, be encouraged that Jesus is praying for you to not fail, but to come away stronger.  He will use the enemy’s sifting process to blow away the unnecessary chaff in your life and reveal the precious grain.  We just need to partner with Jesus and keep our eyes firmly fixed on the Him, the author and finisher of our faith (Hebrews 12:2).