Our pet beagle, Scot, had been with the family for slightly more than 13 years and on reflection, I would say I have learnt many usual lessons on relationships with my Lord and Savior. You will notice from the title of this post that this is only Part 1 and so there will be a continuation as we go along.
As a puppy, Scot was a very playful beagle. As our son Adrian would phrase it, Scot had been redeemed from the cage and having tasted freedom from bondage, he (I use this pronoun as Scot is a male beagle) was pretty wild and for the first three months, managed to 'chew' at least one pair of Alice's (my wife) sandals and was onto her second pair. Not wanting to lose more shoes, we decided to engage the services of a trainer to come and 'discipline' him over ten sessions. This trainer is very experienced as his father used to work for the police dog unit and trained many German shepherds and alsatians.
Indeed, after ten weeks, Scot immediately became better mannered and kind of knew his boundaries.
And this reminded me of how our Lord would allow us His children to be child-trained so as to remove all the bad behaviors and encouraged to pick up good ones. The ten weeks of training reminded me also of the need for a young believer to be discipled (followed up) to ground him/her in the faith of our Lord.
Indeed, the training was at times painful for Scot but the end result speaks for itself - he became a 'domesticated' pet. A believer in Christ, after having been followed up with proper training and guidance would be in a better position to take on the world and prosper.
So the first lesson I learnt was the need for discipleship training for the new believer.
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