Can a man scoop fire into his lap without his clothes being burned?

Proverbs 6:27

Ralph Parlette tells of an event that happened when he was three years old. He was sitting in his high chair at the table where his family was eating breakfast. The coffee pot was close by and little Ralph started to reach for that pot. His mother, whom he said had never allowed him to do one thing in his short life without some sort of interference, told him to stop. He didn't. You can imagine what happened next.

Ralph did live, however, and he was to later reveal that he got a lap full of the reddest, hottest coffee that a bad boy had ever spilled on himself. 

In reflection, he said that it seemed like every time that he ignored his mother's warning that he got some sort of hot coffee poured into his lap. These were the needless "bumps" in the University of Hard Knocks that he was later to write about. He pointed out that there were two types of bumps in life - those that were needful, and those that were needless. He said that a wise man would only have to get one bump before he learned his lesson. The "naturally bright" man kept getting bumped over and over for the simple fact that he never seemed to learn his lesson.

I think we can all relate to this, for we have all had times in our own lives that we just had to learn the same lesson over and over again. Of course the fallacy in that statement is that the lesson was never actually learned - we were just in the same room when it was given. It's kind of like my high school and college days in some of my classes. Lessons were certainly being taught. This was made evident because so many of the other students were passing the tests. I, on the other hand, was indeed in the room when the lessons were being taught, but I wasn't paying very good attention. Like Ralph, it seemed that I had to have that same pot of coffee poured into my lap over and over again until the lesson finally set in.

This a a hard way to go through school, but it is even a harder way to go through life. God's Word is so clear on the lessons that He wants us to learn and, when we do learn them, life is pretty good. But when we fail to learn the lessons the easy way, the only way left is hard. And the hard way is always more painful than the easy way. It's like Solomon indicated in the verse above: If you scoop hot coals into your lap, you are going to get burned every time.

When we are kids we often think that our parents are there only to interfere with our having fun. But when we are older, we realize that this simply is not the case. They warn us to prevent us from having to go through painful experiences - some so painful that neither they nor we could bear them. It's the same with God. He does not hover over us trying to interfere with our fun. He is simply trying to prevent us from being burned.

One of the reasons that we read the Bible is to get these lessons in advance, so that we don't have to get burned in the future. God wants us to be with Him forever, but He will allow us to get burned if we insist on doing so. So, here is the question for today: Wouldn't it be easier to learn at the feet of our loving Father, rather than having to go to the school of hard knocks? It's something to think about, isn't it?