1 John 1:5-9
5 This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. 6 If we say that we have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. 7 But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.
8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us.
I am sure that many of you know I enjoy gardening. I love watching things that I plant grow and bear fruit. But there was a time when I was young that I didn’t enjoy gardening. My parents always had a big garden and as soon as I was big enough to hold a hoe, I was expected to help out in the garden. You know, when you are 10 years old there is a million things more interesting to do than working out in the garden. Gardens don’t grow in nice cool weather, they grow in hot days when the sweat runs in your eyes and drips off the tip of you nose.
But now that I have a garden of my own I am rediscovering what I should have enjoyed as a child. But my nemisis then is the same as my nemisis now; Weeds!
Crab grass, nut grass, lambsquarters, Cocklebur, and morning glories. I hate morning glories. You can weed through your garden and the morning glories sprout under your heels as you weed.
Well the only way to get ahead of weeds is to get them out by the roots. You can use your roto tiller to get the weeds out of the middle of the row but for weeds growing near the vegetables you have to hoe them out or bend over and pull them. Sometimes it’s diffcult to see the weeds under the vegetables, sometimes they are very obvious.
Weeds are like sins in our lives. They choke our spiritual life and can even cause us to die spiritually. Sometimes our sins are where everyone can see and sometimes they are secret and no one sees them accept God.
I can look at my garden and see a few weeds. Then look at my neighbors garden and see his is overgrown and I think my garden isn’t so bad you can barely see any weeds. But the weeds are still there and they are growing. This is one way sin deceives us. We become blind to sin by not taking it seriously. We judge ourselves by the worlds standard rather than the word of God.
The only way to throughly kill a weed is to pull it out by the roots. Pulling weeds is like rooting out sin; we must get to the very bottom of things in order to win.
It does no good to just pull off the top of the weed -we must dig down deep to get all the root out in order to be able to hope the offending weed is gone, never to return.
Only constant attention will see a garden through to bear fruit. In the same way we must constantly be aware of our spiritual self and it’s condition, so we can grow to maturity and bear fruit.
Are we active in the garden of the soul? Constantly maintaining it to keep sin out?
We start our garden of the soul when the words of Christ are sown in our heart and we obey those words by being baptized into Christ.
yellowhammerforge 