Weeding My Heart
We have been blessed with a house on a good-sized lot, and since the first year we lived here, I have had a vegetable garden and some fruit-bearing plants. Fruitful? Indeed! Beautiful? Hmmm…maybe not so much. For a while. I have been asking God to give me what I needed to release the beauty in my yard.
With all the rain we have had, the weeds are taking over! Many of them are edible, (and we ate them), but now they are tough and bitter. When they were small and tender, they furnished a soft, green backdrop to every scene. Then they became towering, prickly bushes, threatening to take over the yard. It has been so satisfying to pull them, chop them down, dig them out and generally take back my land from them. I began to wonder: Is there some internal weeding that would be as satisfying to the eyes of my heart?
The Spirit sent me to 2 Corinthians 10:5.
We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.
I use this verse often in my daily battles as well as in prayer-counseling. I felt drawn to dig deeper for Paul’s intentions in choosing the words he did. The picture is a violent one: wrecking balls, prisoners of war, opposition and forced compliance!
Well, maybe not wrecking balls, but at least battering rams and other siege machines! The outcome of my research sounds like this:
We, with violence, throw down our own calculations and reasoning, everything that has superimposed itself on our knowing God — our perception, understanding and awareness of God — and we take, as a prisoner of war, every perception we hold and force it to listen to and comply with Jesus Christ.
I must not unquestioningly believe my own thinking, especially when it disagrees with what God has clearly said.
So when fear rises, for example, and God has said not to fear because He is with me (See Isaiah 41:10), I need to examine that fear, see where it comes from, compare it at its roots to what God has said, and do not let that thought go un-captured. Finally, I can exercise authority over it, and command it to listen to what Jesus says.
If I am stressing out, and inflicting stress on other people out by trying to manage everything and everyone, seeking to control my circumstances, and I remember that God is the One who is in charge of all the circumstances (See Psalm 115:3), I need to take as a prisoner of war that desire for control, and bring it into compliance with God’s word.
This is the not-so-meek-and-mild-mannered part of following Jesus in the everyday!
Weeds be gone! Battle on!
Christi
0 Comments