Any good gardener knows that beautiful roses require careful pruning. Pieces of a living plant have to die. It cannot just grow wild. We cannot simply "celebrate growth." It is more than to be regretted, it is tragic that we seem to have lost the insight that growth in Christ requires careful pruning. Pieces of us by our intentional action need to die if we are to become the person that is in God's vision. We are not cutting away a cancerous growth, but making room for intended growth. -- Urban T. Holmes III in Spirituality for Ministry. Christianity Today, Vol. 32, No. 2.
This past weekend I was looking out at our back porch and I noticed the once beautiful, full and green Ivy that my wife had grown. It had just gone through a night of freezing temperatures and now it was limp, pale and dying. When I asked my wife about it she said that it would be just fine, that all she had to do was to trim the long runners off of the plant and it would grow back with even more fullness and beauty.
Just like a gardener trims the dead and dying from a plant in order for it to continue to grow, God trims away the dead and dying in us so that we will grow new growth that is pleasing to Him. In the same way that the dead parts of that ivy plant needed pruning in order for it to re-grow into a wonderful new living plant, we have to let parts of ourselves die, and be pruned in order to continue in our Christian growth. Only when we die to all about us, do we live to God above us. We must consider ourselves dead to sin.
“Consider yourselves dead to sin” means that we should regard our old sinful nature as dead and unresponsive to sin. Because of our union and identification with Christ, we no longer want to pursue our old plans, desires, and goals. Now we want to live for the glory of God. As we start this new life, the Holy Spirit will help us become all that Christ wants us to be.
Most of us had a “life” before we became Christians. Our lives were in one way or another wrapped up in the many different things of the world. Some of the things were worse than others, but as we found later, they were all nothings compared to the “true life” that we now enjoy through Jesus Christ.
Have you come to the point in your life when you feel like your Christian growth has come to a stand still? Perhaps your growth never really began. You just never got those roots started, and you are not firmly planted. No matter how much you try, you never seem to attain that closeness with God. Today is a good day to put that “sinful nature” to death. What the caterpillar calls the end, God calls a butterfly. It's a good day to die.
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved
Copyright 2002 Steven R. Ridenour
