There is something so amazing about a beautiful garden. It just refreshes and invigorates but at the same time calms and soothes. The picture to the right is from grounds at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in Los Angeles.
We (body, soul, spirit) are a garden. Yep, it's true - made from dust of the earth, water and other elements. And, we are made to tend and work in our garden. God gave us His very image, planted every seed of potential into our DNA from before birth and when we live into relationship with Christ we are able to live into the fullness of our original design. When we are born again - by the spirit - we can see, discern, and understand the things of God and His Kingdom. Now, from around conception in our mother's womb there have been some very nasty weeds and horrible things that have fallen on the ground of our garden, long before we received the tools and ability in Christ to tend it properly. They've created an almost wilderness forest of deeply rooted and wickedly thorny and tangled BLECK! That's the technical term :) With some of us there's more "BLECK!" than others. But don't fool yourself, we ALL have it and LOTS OF IT! It's most wickedly deceptive when there may be something that (on the face of it) looks beautiful, but on closer inspection is found to be deadly poisonous in nature. The serpent in the Garden of Eden was a deceiver. God originally made Lucifer to be a bright and powerful angel. He lead worship of God in heaven and was an amazingly beautiful angel of light. When he became bent in his thinking by believing he could actually take what was God's for himself - he fell, though he still has power to deceive with his light and beauty. We are so like him in some ways whenever we believe things that are not in line with God's truth. We are deceived and need to clear the deadly weeds!
The good news is that life in Christ is transformational. There is an ongoing change that comes about when we are intentional to live into alignment with God, detecting, rooting up and weeding out those unwanted things that do not belong and are not only NOT fruitful, but are deadly, ugly, painful, draining and take up space and light in our garden. As we grow in discovering and nurturing those amazing and beautiful plantings and features that God has put into our garden - the fruit and real beauty becomes outrageously fragrant and abundant! The raw good materials for this garden, each component and all of the plantings and features - these have been originally given (put into us) by God. We co-labor with Him (by His spirit) in creatively weeding, tailoring the landscape, putting in the features, tilling the soil, tending the beautiful seeds and seedlings Papa has given us. That takes commitment and work! Really, there's no denying it. But, let's face it, we are going to engage our energies and attentions into something with our life. We all know that's true. Why would we grouse and complain when anything God has for us is far far better than anything we can think up for ourselves! I mean, He knows the true good desires of our hearts, He made us! And as we stay really close to Him, He reigns (rains) light and life in our garden and it GROWS. It makes perfect sense - He's the source of everything!! I always get this image of people who deny God or ignore Him - like a person in a tree at a deadly height, sawing for all that they are worth (living life their way) only to find, startled as they fall, that the limb they were sawing was the very one they were standing on (severed by their own hand). How do we sever our very life? Through deception and ignorance. Real life, joy and transformation can't help but be everywhere we are when we purpose a gardening lifestyle. Funny thing, how God designed it so that our own transformation transforms everything else too. Mmmmmm...so Kingdom!
.jpg)