Good Thursday morning! My hands are having a tough time typing this morning; sorry about that bit of alliteration there. I have bad news for us all: the curse is still strong upon the earth. Yup, pulling out weeds is difficult and frustrating. The flowers, on the other hand, fall over with but a slight, accidental push. Most of my flower seeds washed away in the half dozen big rains we had, so I am grateful to have any flowers at all. However, after pulling up the weeds there isn't a whole lot of green left in my flower beds. Now think back 20 years or so ago and imagine the jokes that would have been shouted out had I talked about flowers and seeds during my time in the Marines. Fortunately, you could say my dozen or so scraggly flowers are about what you might expect from an old Marine trying to plant a flower garden for the first time. In case you have not yet arrived at this conclusion: I don't know everything! Yup, most everything I try for the first time turns out rather, well, scruffy and scraggly. Guess that goes to show that I'm pretty much just like most of humanity that way.
Imagine if Jesus had to give it several tries to get it right. The master of ceremonies calls the bridegroom over: "Usually people wait until everyone has downed a few goblets of the good stuff to bring out the cheaper wine, but you... you have insulted me with this vinegar! We are so out of here!" The servants in the back quickly look around, but Jesus is nowhere to be found. Mary is quietly sitting alone with her face in her hands. Nope, didn't work out quite that way. We can read in the Bible that Jesus didn't cause any person's legs to fall off when he healed them. The water became the best wine at Cana. The demons didn't just laugh when Jesus commanded them to depart. Jesus did everything that God wanted done perfectly on the first try. Jesus didn't stumble over his words delivering the Sermon on the Mount even though he didn't have years of seminary training and two hundred meetings of the Toastmaster's behind him. Jesus didn't sin, didn't need to apologize, and didn't even make a mistake in his life.
Well, I guess he was just the perfect Son of God. How does that help me? Yes, we are correct that Jesus is the perfect Son of God, but that shouldn't be a cause for giving up on our own efforts. Instead we are invited to bring our efforts to the cross and place them in the care of our Lord and Savior. We know - okay, I know now - that you cannot toss a few seeds out and have a perfect flower garden come up. In this cursed world we have to pray and weed and tend and water and all of the other stuff that goes into making even a simple flower garden. You and I are much like that garden when we invite Jesus to become Lord of our lives. Before we come to believe we are like that vacant lot that has been allowed to grow unchecked for years, but that's another story.
As the Spirit moves in, he probably looks around and takes inventory. There are the seeds that Jesus planted, but there are also a lot of those sin weeds. The Spirit might even pause for a moment and say, "This is going to take a lot of work!" Of course, we know from the Bible that the work Jesus has begun in us will be completed. Praise God for that, because sometimes it seems even to me, let alone what the Spirit sees, that I have a lot of those sin weeds that keep on popping up in my life. The curse sits heavily upon all of God's Creation, but we know that God isn't going to just leave it that way. Any person can chose to stay that way, but you and I have chosen to believe in Jesus the Son. The 'sin weeding' in our life is going to hurt as the Spirit yanks that junk out of his garden, but one day each of us will be presentable to the Savior.
God's peace and joy to you,
Bucky
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