The gospel of Jesus Christ is a gospel that endures the cross for the joy that is hidden on the other side. The cross precedes the resurrection. There is a death between old life and new life. I am reminded of a song by David Crowder, The chorus says, "Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. "How can we invite people to believe in a gospel that we don't believe in ourselves?
Every Christian I know wants the joy of the Lord, the fruit of the Spirit, the power of the resurrection in their lives. The irony is that as we long for these realities to manifest in our lives we do our best to avoid the pain, the suffering, the cross. The problem is that suffering is an unavoidable part of the journey. So, we veer off the path that would bring us to our desired destination. Death is interwoven with life and process of growth.
This was brought to my attention recently through my garden. I have never been a gardener. I mowed the lawn when I was a kid, but that's about as close as I have ever come to tending a garden. When we moved into our current house, we inherited a wonderful garden. It had been thoughtfully planted and arranged so that in every season there is something new blooming and sprouting throughout. It has been a wonder for me to observe, and a steep curve for me to learn how to care for it.
It is a very low maintenance garden, but still it requires some work from time to time. The most nerve wracking part for me is the transition between seasons. That is when the cutting happens. I am a far cry from a horticulturalist and have a hard time telling flowers and weeds apart. I can pick out the familiar ones but do get confused. Some of the weeds here actually have pretty flowers, and some of the flowering plants look suspiciously uninviting until they bloom. Then there is the real danger that I will kill a bush or plant when I am trying to help it. I might prune too much or too little and actually cause more harm then good.
We have now been here a year and I am please to see the results of the pruning that I did a year ago. It appears that I have only significantly damaged one bush, the rest of the garden is really healthy. Last summer when I was brutally hacking away at the garden I was pretty sure that I was doing irreparable damage, despite the guidance and advice of my expert gardening neighbors. When I finished with some of the bushes they were all knobs and bare branches. They continued to look ugly and bare for most of the year, but in the last month they exploded with life and are now full and beautiful. The new growth more covers for the old wounds and would never have happened without the cutting. The new blossoms push the cutting and death of the pruning to the distant recesses of my memory.
There was real cutting. There was real death. There were wounds and barrenness for a season. These painful realities where not only unavoidable, they were preferable. So it is with us. It is not by accident that scripture is full of agricultural metaphors. The life of the Spirit, in the Spirit, is organic. We must choose to enter into and endure the pruning, the suffering, the seasons of death in order to experience the joy that comes only on the other side. This requires an unnatural and patient faith. A faith that trusts the gardener and that looks beyond the season of ugliness, trusting that there is a purpose to the pruning and that beauty will follow brutality.
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I heard someone say recently that the idea of heaven as a place to be in God's presence has been replaced in current thought as a reunion with family and freinds. As I have listened to people speak since I heard that, i think it is true. I believe that being with our Lord will be so awesome that I will forget all else.
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