Hosanna Restoration Church

When we recently discussed the existence of the garden, I knew we would need to discuss weeds as well. Yes the promises of God are true. We know God cannot fail. We know that we are destined to win. We know all about this, but what about those trials? What about those weeds in the garden? It is simple. Take care of them!

James told the believers to consider it an opportunity for joy! Oh we really love to hear that one don’t we? Well, it is good advice. In fact, the more we know the Lord the more we see the wisdom of that. The closer we come to Jesus, the more we realize that the trial is going to be swallowed up in victory because no weapon formed against us can prosper.

It is like this. We can consider it an opportunity for joy and take care of it, or we can fall apart and it will take care of us. If you have ever planted a garden, you know that weeds don’t just automatically decide to leave that space alone and grow somewhere else; so when they come up, you better take care of them. If you were to just throw up your hands and decide there was no hope, it would not be long until the weeds just took over.

One way to take care of those weeds is to go out with your hoe and scrape them away every day. If you want even more exercise, you can go along and pluck each one up every day. Each of these methods will keep you pretty busy and even though there is a certain sense of satisfaction in seeing that nice brown dirt weed free, the next day there will be more! Personally, I like the way mulching the garden works. It smothers the weeds and you rarely see one again, unless there is a thin place in the mulch. If that happens, you just pluck those up and pack on more mulch.

This is not intended to be a lesson in gardening but rather an illustration of how to handle the weeds or the trials. There is a place of rest (a garden) that the Lord promises for every circumstance. God would not have told us about this place unless He knew we would need it.

We can either allow those things to keep coming up and tormenting us and dig them up or pull them up everyday, or we can mulch them. I don’t want to go out and survey the garden everyday to see what new weeds have come up, nor do I want to ignore it for a long period of time and then suddenly find it is a mess. (Actually my wife pays the most attention. I just till and supply the mulch.) In the same sense, I don’t want to fight the same spiritual battles every day or ignore my spiritual life and suddenly find myself overwhelmed. Instead, I wanted to mulch or saturate my life with all that God has given me so that when the trials or the weeds appear, I know just what to do with them. It is best to cast them over on the Lord. He can easily smother the problem! Keep yourself mulched!