The
Lesson of Weeds and Vigilance:
In
the last lesson, I mentioned the first two rules of weeding a
garden. Third rule is to avoid allowing particularly virulent
weeds even get a start in your garden, as they will create disaster.
We are pretty good with the first two rules on this list, but one
failure in our second or third garden out this spot has given us no
end of weeding to do. Several years ago, I allowed a spot of
the garden to be planted by a friend, and then did not keep after the
weeding. The result was that morning glories took root.
If you know morning glories, then you may know that they have a long,
deep tap-root and spread via their roots. This is problematic,
because you cannot pull out the root once morning glories are
established. In theory, one can dig out the root, but that
could take you six feet down (my pastor tried it once), and you might
not get the side roots sufficiently. Herbicides do not even
work well on morning glories. Unless you are prepared to tear out
everything from your garden that is in the path of the roots, morning
glories ought best to be pulled out the best you can and otherwise
minimized quickly, lest they strangle out your plants. The
worst of morning glories is that if you are a naïve gardener, they
actually put out an attractive, small white flower that makes them
seem to be a vine-like garden plant. If they are in the right
place, this would be fine. In your garden, however, it is a
deception you must watch for.
This
leads to the scenario of sins that root in us very deeply and then
permeate throughout, even looking attractive superficially and
externally. Like Satan, who disguises himself as an angel of
light, so sin masquerades as a bringer of life and light, when in
truth it wants to choke out the life from you. However, like
Cain in Genesis 4, God tells us that we must master it, a task that
is wholly beyond our natural ability. However, He has given us
His Spirit and His grace to teach us to deny these sins. The
good news for us is that these deep tap roots and the tentacle like
spreading roots can be defeated by the power of God’s Spirit and
the working of His grace, but here is the catch. If I decide
that I don’t care enough to remove weeds from my garden, because it
is too much work, and so I only half-heartedly pull them out, morning
glories will spread like a disease through my garden. Likewise,
in my heart, sin will do the same. If I don’t desire freedom
from sin and pursue that freedom through God’s grace, and by His
Spirit’s power, I will not find freedom. I will be trapped
like my garden.
There
is yet another lesson from morning glories that is very significant
regarding sin. We may overcome sin after sin in our lives by
God’s grace, and yet if we are honest, we will continue to find
areas in which God’s Spirit reveals new sin and hardness in our
hearts. Thus, vigilance is required to continually be on guard
against sin in our lives. Also, sometimes we overcome some sin
and live for some time without falling prey to that temptation only
to turn one day and realize that we are looking at it again.
This is often how morning glories are. I have dug out the roots
in my garden many times in the spring, only to find that they grown
back in from the lawn beside the garden. You see, we live in a
fallen world and we are not a closed system. We have outside
influences upon us, and therefore we must maintain vigilance at all
times, continually pull out, digging out, and battling the sin in our
life, allowing God’s Spirit to permeate the deepest parts of our
lives reveal our hidden sin. As vigilance is required with
morning glories, so vigilance is required in regards to sin.
