Tuesday, January 30, 2007

The Garden

Many people view their lives like a garden. When they come to Christ their garden is full of weeds and dirt. When Christ comes into their lives he cleans up the soil and removes all the weeds and things are wonderful in the garden for a time.

Then one morning the new Christian takes stock of his garden and sees that it has become overrun with weeds as it was before he met Christ. In a terrified and distraught state the Christian goes to the pastor and tells him salvation has been lost. The pastor comforts the Christian by telling he that the weeds represent sin and while weeds are not desirable in a good garden (you want to have flat clean dirt), because we are human and have a propensity to sin, weeds come. He teaches the new Christian that in order to keep the weeds down he needs to do two things: first, he needs to maintain good dirt. The best way to do this is to have the proper theology. So the pastor loads the Christian down with good books about the Bible and about God.

Second, because he knows that clean dirt does very little about the problem of weeds, the pastor will tell the Christian about confession of sin and repentance from sin. He tells the new believer that he needs to take periodic checks of his garden and make sure he gets rid of all the weeds.

Every once in a while a preacher will tell his young gardeners to keep short accounts and to pay very close attention to the weed problem. They are to watch the garden all the time to make sure no weeds spring up and grow into huge trees. And so all the Christians in that church work very hard to maintain clean gardens.

Sometimes Christians are encouraged to help one another to keep their gardens clean. They ask their brothers and sisters to help them by telling them if they see any weeds growing. Sometimes their neighbors will volunteer the fact that they see weeds growing in their neighbor’s garden. The whole church is caught up in looking for weeds and pouncing on them when they find them.

But weeds are not why people have gardens. Keeping the weeds out is not the main goal of having a garden. Flowers, veggies, and fancy designs are why gardens exist. This reminds us to confess our sins.

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