There was a man who owned a Great Dane. Now this Great Dane was an extremely large and ferocious dog – definitely not the king of dog you want jumping up in your lap. One day, as the man was walking his Great Dane down the street, he saw another man across the street who was also walking his dog – a little bitty dog with short legs no tail and no hair. It was an ugly dog and, very frankly, looked sick.

But the little ugly dog turned around, bared its teeth, and when the Great Dane attacked, that little dog proceeded to grab hold of the Great Dane at the foreleg and began to eat that big dog up. It ate right up the leg, right up the throat, ate its head, right down through its body, right across the tail, right down the back legs, spit out the bones, and smacked its lips – and that was the end of the Great Dane, just like that.

Well, the owner of the Great Dane was absolutely astonished by what he had just witnessed. “Man, what kind of dog is that?” the man exclaimed. “I’ve never in my life seen a little dog that could do something like that!”

“Dog? Dog?” the other man said. “Before he got his nose run over by a truck and his tail cut off by a train, this used to be an alligator!”

Appearances can be deceiving. Sometimes we judge people by how they look, but we fail to realize that on the inside, they are quite different. “Man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).

You may feel like a puppy dog on the outside, but inside, you’re an alligator. You have the power of God at your disposal to do mighty things. “I can do everything through him who gives me strength,” wrote Paul (Philippians 4:13). When you are under attack by the Great Danes of the world, you can eat ‘em up with the power of Christ that lives and dwells within your heart.