Summertime—the earth is alive again!
One of the activities I thoroughly enjoy this time of year is planting flowers—lots and lots of flowers. It gives me such pleasure to look outside and see bright-colored blooms adorning our yard (although admittedly, mine doesn’t look like the picture below). The thing is, weeds can also grow in gardens, and some of those are not quite as pretty or fun. It is tedious and time-consuming work keeping the drab growth from overtaking the beauty of my plants.
The same can be said for my life. Sometimes it seems like all I’m doing is pulling weeds, and it is wearisome work. I gossiped; yank that one out. I lost my temper; pull that bunch up by the roots. I misjudged; dig it out and get rid of it.
Weeding out sin is painstaking at times. We also need to remind ourselves that planting something beautiful is just as important as uprooting the ugly. If we never replace unacceptable behaviors with anything good, we’ll spend our entire lives pulling weeds without having much Christ-like effect on our world.
We could make better use of our time by planting and growing our character to be more like Jesus—more of him and his hope, less of the world and its despair. Sinful qualities will diminish in the middle of a thriving garden of righteousness. There isn’t room for both to grow equally. The garden we tend will eventually win out and take over.
We’ll never achieve perfection here on Earth, but we can certainly influence beauty to flourish and help weeds diminish. In time, our blossoms will show forth love, peace, kindness, and joy. When we plant and nourish our souls with God, he produces characteristics that reflect his goodness. We become bright, colorful displays of his glory in a dreary world.
“But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!”
–Galatians 5:22-23 NLT
“I said, ‘Plant the good seeds of righteousness, and you will harvest a crop of love. Plow up the hard ground of your hearts, for now is the time to seek the LORD, that he may come and shower righteousness upon you.'”
—Hosea 10:12 NLT
0 Comments