“Many of you have become so busy that I have been apportioned second place. In some cases, you have even minimized the need to seek Me with all of your heart. Have you learned nothing? Where is the heart of first love? Where is the weeping at the altar for the souls of those who are perishing? In your foolishness, you have determined that My ways are not the way to live and you have reclaimed the lordship of your lives. You have left My refiner’s fire and have entered a fowler’s snare. It is sure death to the purity of life to which I have called you.  Your indictment is business-as-usual religious activity, striving to find My power to replace My presence. Soon, you will not even care that My presence is nowhere near your abundance of religious activities. You will have been given over to the freedom you so longed for. You must turn now! Repent while you can.”

Psalm 106:12-15 AMP

12) Then [Israel] believed His words [trusting in, relying on them]; they sang His praise.

13) But they hastily forgot His works; they did not [earnestly] wait for His plans [to develop] regarding them.

14) But lusted exceedingly in the wilderness and tempted and tried to restrain God [with their insistent desires] in the desert.

15) And He gave them their request, but sent leanness into their souls and [thinned their numbers by] disease and death.

A fowler’s snare is designed to entice a bird toward its own death. The fowler would take a vine with long thorns and weave a tube-shaped trap, placing all of the one-to-two-inch thorns facing inside the trap. He would then leave one end open and place a morsel of the kind of food his prey would consider delightful at the other closed end.

Looking only at the food at the closed end of the snare, the bird would weave its way around the thorns to get to the delicacy. Deep inside the tunnel of thorns, it would eventually wake up to the dangerous protrusions, then panic, flail about and impale itself, causing either disabling harm or death.

So many of us are unwilling to allow the Lord to put to death the desires of our flesh. We never realize that submitting to its passions and desires is a death trap, causing great harm to our representation of Jesus, and eventual death to any form of intimacy with the Lord.

Oh Lord! Keep my mind off the morsels and only on You,

Jim Corbett