A Healthy Harvest

If you are like I am, there are a couple of times of the year that you just love: spring and fall. I’ll have to admit, I really like spring for a couple of reasons: the fresh, new, beginning of all things blooming, and Daylight Saving Time when we get to “spring forward.” I love the freshness of everything! It’s like new life is available every morning with the sunrise. Everything that was dormant begins to spring forth! 

You know, that is really a picture of how we all would like to live our lives. We have thoughts and dreams of waking up each day with newness of life. We hope that with each new day come undiscovered aspects of our lives that may have been dormant, springing out and causing us to be the best version of ourselves. No one wakes up and desires to put out on display a life full of weeds for all the world to see. We want to produce good fruit, beautiful blossoms of God’s handiwork in our lives. 

But the reality of it is, we are born self-centered. We have this sin nature to deal with. However, we are born again Christ-centered. Christ-centered living produces continual beautiful growth, but self-centered living brings weeds and briars that choke out beautiful fruit. 

There is an unusual verse in Deuteronomy 22:9. “Do not plant two kinds of seed in your vineyard; if you do, not only the crops you plant but also the fruit of the vineyard will be defiled.” There is a spiritual implication here. 

If we hope to produce the kind of good things in our lives that we desire as Christians, we must plant, or sow, the kind of seeds that will produce what we want. To do that we must center our lives around Christ by planting the seed of His word in our lives. In John 6:63, Jesus says, “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” When we center our lives around Jesus, we receive the seeds that produce a life of spiritual growth. 

When we live self-centered lives, fulfilling our desires, we end up planting two different kinds of seed in our soil. This will eventually cause our lives to produce “weeds and briars” that will choke out the good seed. 

Have you ever noticed that weeds grow faster than good grass or flowers? What happens next is remarkably similar to what many Christians do in their walk with God. In our gardens or flowerbeds, we spend all our time trying to remove the weeds. We are so focused on the weeds that we neglect tending to good seed. We pull up some weeds only to have some remnant of them remain. 

The best practice is to not sow those bad seeds in the first place. I like how Paul says it in Galatians 6:8. “Don’t be misled: No one makes a fool of God. What a person plants, he will harvest. The person who plants selfishness, ignoring the needs of others—ignoring God!—harvests a crop of weeds. All he’ll have to show for his life is weeds! But the one who plants in response to God, letting God’s Spirit do the growth work in him, harvests a crop of real life, eternal life” (emphasis mine). 

God has placed in our care these lives we can use to grow good fruit that brings Him glory. Let’s steward them well. Make a practice of waking up each new day and planting seeds that will produce a beautiful life, an eternal life.