Gardening the Heart

This last month I've spent a lot of time working in my garden. Setting up a container vegetable garden (a goal I've had since we first moved here) and expanding our front flower bed has given me a lot of time to think about plants, weeds, and the various steps necessary in preparing the soil to be fruitful.

I've hoed and dug out weeds and grass, raked soil smooth, and covered it with pine straw to prevent further weeds. I've transplanted various plants around the yard to the new flower beds. I've drilled holes in my containers for drainage, filled them with dirt, planted seeds and watered them faithfully (which for someone as absent-minded as me is a big deal! 😁), all in the hope of growing vegetables for our family to eat and pretty flowers for us to enjoy.

I've put a lot of time and hard work into preparing my garden, and, like any other gardener, I expect a good return on my labor in the form of flowers and food. But in order to see that return, I have to continue to devote time and labor to my plants--watering them, weeding them, making sure they have protection from insects and disease, etc. God has ensured that the plants will grow if they have the right growing conditions; my job is to make sure that they have them. The process is gradual and slow, but ultimately, worth it.

Have you ever considered how much our spiritual lives are like a garden? God has planted a seed in us --the seed of His Word--and if we accept that seed, we are responsible to water it, weed it, and nurture it so that it can produce fruit in our lives (the Parable of the Sower, Mark 4:13-20). But all too often, I think we who call ourselves children of God allow the seed to falter for various reasons. The stumbling block I've personally been dealing with lately is WEEDS. 😝

Weeds are invasive. They can be native plants or from foreign locales, but they are unwelcome because they get in the way of the plants the gardener wants. They grow quickly, springing up in the most unlikely places, always when you seem to least expect them. They grow prolifically, easily taking up all the space and nutrients in a garden unless they are stopped, and stopping weeds is not accomplished by simply cutting them down or pruning them. No, for a garden to grow as it should weeds must be pulled out by the root and burned or thrown in the trash. It takes work--hard work--and the process can be painful (especially if you're dealing with thistles!), but it is absolutely necessary in order for a garden to produce fruit. I bet you're already thinking of the parallels to a Christian's spiritual life! 😉

What are the weeds in a Christian's life? Well, in His Parable of the Sower, Jesus said they were "the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things" (Mk. 4:19 NIV). And in Jeremiah 3:24 the prophet said that the people's idolatry had robbed them of everything of value in their lives, just like a weed does to other plants, stealing their nutrients and water. Simply put, a weed in a Christian's life is anything that gets in the way of his or her relationship with God and thereby impacts his or her growth and fruitfulness. 

So often, this world can be a siren song, enticing us with promises of wealth and pleasure, pressuring us to achieve and perform as well as or better than so-and-so, distracting us with too much information, too many things to do, too many goals to accomplish, too much fun to have, that it can be easy to forget that our primary purpose on this planet is to live for Jesus (not ourselves) and to share His truth with a lost and dying world around us. We are too busy to remember Ps. 46:10, "Be still and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations; I will be exalted in the earth" (NIV, emphasis mine). We are too distracted to devote the time and attention to the things of God that they deserve. And we are too lazy and comfortable to address the weeds in our lives when God reveals them to us through His Word. I say "we" because this is exactly the area of my own life that I've been struggling with lately, and chances are, you've been dealing with it, too. (If you haven't, God bless you; I wish I were more like you!)

So, what's to be done with the "weeds" that crop up in our lives? Wholesale slaughter? If I'm honest, I shy away from such extreme measures, but I can't help but wonder if it's because I'm not yet ready to give up the sins that I'm holding onto. But again, I'm reminded of Jesus' words: "If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away! It is better to lose one of your members than to have your whole body thrown into hell. If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away! It is better to lose one of your members than to have your whole body go into hell" (Matt. 5:29-30, NET). 

No, I don't think Jesus literally meant that we should cut off parts of our body because of sins related to those parts; I think He was trying to get us to understand how extremely seriously God views sin, how dangerous it is, and how important it is to remove besetting sins from our lives. It's easy for us to rationalize and say, "Oh, it's really not such a big deal! So what if I (insert your particular struggle here)? It's not like I'm some serial killer or something!" 

When we think things like that, we are forgetting two very important truths: first, that with God, there is no gradation of sin. What I mean is that in His eyes, sin is sin, and it's all bad. He doesn't have some huge scale of wickedness that rates cannibalism as a 10 and wasting our time as maybe a 1; all sin is the same to Him. And that is because, second, all sin--"big" and "little"--separates us from Him. Sin creates a wall, a barrier, between us and God, and, no matter how innocent it appears, all sin ultimately leads to death. 

That's why it is so important to view sin through God's eyes--once we fully understand its destructive power in our lives and the lives of those around us, we become much more motivated to deal with it according to God's Word. That means weeding out bad habits we've allowed to creep into our lives, immersing ourselves in the pruning, fertilizing study of the Word of God, and joyfully producing the fruit of a godly, Spirit-filled life. Then we can be like the seed that was sown on the good ground in Jesus' parable: producing a harvest 30, 60, 100 times what was planted in our lives (Mk. 4:20)! Then we can make a difference in the lives of those around us! Then we can truly bring glory to God! Deep down, isn't that what every Christian really wants?

Get rid of the weeds in your life. You won't be sorry you did.