Ellie and I have been working in the garden a lot the past 2 weeks. We started with these raised planters that were filled with fall leaves, debris, and weeds. It took us several days to just clean up the beds and get them ready for planting, but it gave us ample opportunity to talk. I've been reading through Hosea and Matthew and it dawned on me how much we can miss in our modern era because we are no longer an agrarian society. God's word is overflowing in word pictures whose penetration into our hearts is directly related to our understanding of those ideas. Take gardening (God's first employment of man), unless you grow something from seed it's hard to understand how fantastic and difficult that process really is. Ellie is in the process of witnessing how a tiny seed can grow into a fruit producing bush that by the end of the summer will be as tall as her.
Our planter beds have been a great word picture for us because although the beds looked clean and full of rich soil when we planted our seeds I knew they were not. You see our beds are badly corrupted with a noxious weed called Morning Glory. It's this horrible tuber vine that lies beneath the surface of the soil and sprouts it's fast growing vine sporadically, choking anything in it's way. The kids and I were discussing how much that weed is like our sin and the soil is like our hearts. You can't ever completely eradicate the weed. There are only 2 lines of defense unless you want to completely destroy the beds.
-Daily hand picking every bit of vine that you see.
-And crowding it out with other good plants.
What a perfect image of sin in our lives. If we are to prevail and produce fruit for the Lord, we must be willing to daily pull the morning glory out of our hearts. We can also be encouraged that as we bear more fruit for the Lord there will be less room for the morning glory to take hold.
Hosea 10:12, Matthew 13:24-30
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