Have you ever worked in a garden? Have you put one around your house? You spend time placing the plants right where you want them, you buy the flowers that will last. You can even put down paper to try to avoid weeds growing in your garden. You take time to water it, tend to it and make it beautiful. Each day you may put a few minutes in it and each time you pull into your house you admire the work that you have put into making it look amazing.
Then life gets busy and you spend less time attending to the garden, you pull in and don't really pay much attention to it anymore, a few weeks go by and you have a free minute to look at the garden, but by this time the weeds have already crept in, in the flowers that had once been full of life is slowly dying because those weeds are tangled around the stalks, creeping into the leaves and making it look not so pretty anymore. You look at the damage that the weeds have done, but you don't have enough time today to pay attention to it, you don't even feel like pulling the one weed that is right there strangling the life out of one of your favorite flowers. You put it off till another day.
You say tomorrow I will put more time in it, tomorrow comes and you wake up and decide you are not in the mood to tend to your garden and you decide to do it tomorrow. The problem with putting it off you know that tomorrow never comes, because there always seems to be something more pressing, more important then what you once thought was important. Finally the weekend comes 4 weeks later, you have finally got a few minutes to go look at your garden, what once was beautiful is now full of weeds that are coming through all your hard work, it no longer looks like a beautiful garden anymore, just weeds that have over taken everything. The weeds have tangled in every bushy flower, it has consumed all the water that the plants needed to drink and you stand there in awe of how in a month that garden can go from beautiful to ugly.
You start at one corner of the garden, pulling the weeds, trying to make the garden look like it once did. There are so many weeds in the garden it is so difficult to do. A month ago you pulled every weed, because you wanted the garden to be full of life, but then you let it go. Now you are paying the price for what took you one minute a day, is now taking you all day. It almost seems not worth the effort to make it beautiful again, because it will take to much work, but you pull and struggle to make it right. After many hours of hard labor, the garden is back to almost what it was about 1 month ago, but yet it isn't the same. You have had to pull out some of the plants, because weeds had killed it or it was consumed by them, entangled into the very fabric of the good plants. The garden looks almost good, but not quite the way it once was.
Sunday roles in and you are feeling the pull to run every which way, instead of tending the garden, the garden that will take 5 minutes, verses almost a full day to get it back to how it once was. You have a choice to make, give the garden 5 minutes or have everything else take the lead to that garden. What are you going to do?
Our Christian lives is just like the garden. We can water it, we can read the bible, we can pray, we can put God first in all we do, or we can allow weeds to grow. Those weeds will suck the life out of everything good in the garden of our hearts. And when we finally have time to do the weeding, it is going to be painful, it is going to hurt and what is left might need some TLC. Today don't allow the weeds to grow in your heart, take time to water, pray, read, sit with Jesus and allow Him to help you maintain the garden that He has given you. Don't wait till it is too late. Seek God to help you clear the weeds and take the growing of your garden seriously, because good gardens produce fruit.
What does your garden look like?
One weed multiplies, don't let them grow. Pull them and allow God to plant new flowers. Don't wait till it is to late, take every chance and pull the weeds out. Weeds will destroy.
Isaiah 53:5-6 "5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all."
