Let's Learn From the Salmon

 

I’m Duane Matz and welcome to Today’s Living Word.

Let us learn from the salmon. The God-given homing instinct (ability to return to their original location) is inherited by all salmon. Even a salmon’s run timing (internal time mechanism that determines what time of the year they will return to the river) is inherited through their genetic makeup. God knows when to bring them home!

 

Have you ever seen the salmon swimming upstream and leaping over, or attempting to leap over any obstacles in their way? Their dogged determination to get home is a sight to see!

The salmon are a beautiful picture of you and I. God has put an instinct to return home to Him in every human being. Ec 3:11 tells us, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts,”

The problem is, the effects of sin, the work of the devil, and our own foolish flesh have often encrusted this instinct in our hardened hearts. It’s there, it just needs to be uncovered! It gets uncovered by the grace of God and the work of the Holy Spirit through God’s Word.

Ro 10:17 So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

Some seek to get home relying on their own strength to overcome the obstacles, they think they can be “good enough” to make it home, but truly, the only way to get home is by relying on God! Eph 2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, 9 not of works, lest anyone should boast.

Take heart from the lessons of the salmon. Use the fact of the homing instinct being present in your unsaved friends, loved ones, and neighbors as your starting point for prayer and witnessing. Pray that God will uncover that homing instinct and by His grace bring them home!

 

I’m Duane Matz and that’s Today’s Living Word.