Dragon Tales

Dragons. They fascinated me as a child. Fire-breathing dragons, beautiful damsels in distress, brave knights in shining armor. I loved those stories. Then someone told me – and I just HAD to believe them – that dragons are fictional, they don’t exist. So I chalked it up to yet another childhood fantasy ruined by the growing up process. I resigned myself to the fact that dragons don’t exist.

But as I have grown older, I have been enlightened to the REAL TRUTH – dragons DO exist! Maybe not the scaly, flying kind, but they exist nonetheless. And what’s worse is that I have been burned by them on more than one occasion. These modern day dragons breathe the fires of criticism, sarcasm, and negativity out of their mouths. They burn with their words and the manner in which they use their words. Consider what the Bible says about these dragons:

The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell. – James 3:6

You know the kind of dragons that I am talking about, in fact you probably encounter them yourself quite often. You may even have a face in mind as you read this. They criticize what others do while doing little themselves. They spew the flame of insinuation and innuendo. Their words blaze with bitter sarcasm. I have felt the singe of their fire and so have you. Whoever said “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me,” never encountered a dragon.

So what can we do about these dragons? We are not called to be dragon-slayers, that job belongs to God. But we have been given the shield of faith in order to quench all the fiery darts of the devil – including the stinging burn of the dragon’s words. The shield of faith reminds me of WHOSE I am. James reminds us that the fire from the mouth of our dragons originates from hell itself and anything that emanates from hell is nothing but a lie. The shield of faith reminds us that we are children of the KING. He is the One we aim to please, not the dragon. What the dragon has to say to us and about us is inconsequential to what God thinks about us. If we let the fire burn us, if we begin to believe what those dragons say about us, we are in danger of becoming dragons too, and using our words to hurt others.

So the next time a dragon breathes fire at you, just take a moment to remember where that fire originated – the home of all lies. Turn that fire around and use it instead to ignite a sacrifice of praise on the altar of your heart. Thank God that what that dragon says is a lie, but that what God thinks about you is the TRUTH. Here is one little dagger from God’s sword that you can use to stab the next dragon you encounter:

The LORD your God is with you,
he is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you,
he will quiet you with his love,
he will rejoice over you with singing. – Zephaniah 3:17