Last week I went into our backyard and saw that the roses had  exploded with flowers, seemingly overnight.  It was amazingly beautiful, with blooms everywhere.  When I commented to my wife, she told me that a few days before, she had deadheaded the roses.  As I looked slightly puzzled, she reminded me that deadheading is the process of going in and cutting off old blooms.  Somehow, the process of cutting away old, dead, and unproductive rose bush leads to explosive growth.  All the plant’s energy that was going to that old part of the plant, was now being used to grow, bloom, and produce.

While this is not a blog on gardening, Christ clearly used the process of plant growth as a direct comparison to spiritual growth.  For example, he used the parable of the seeds, where seeds fall on rock, thin soil, soil with weeds, and fertile soil to show how people receive the word.  He also talked about how a tree is known by it’s fruit, and he even cursed a fig tree that was not producing figs.

So what’s the point?  The point is that much as the roses bloomed after they were cut back, so do we.  The problem is, we don’t like to be pruned.  We want to hold onto our old, unproductive selves.  In our finite wisdom, we refuse to believe that God in His infinite wisdom knows better than we do.  In John 15:2, Christ says that God cuts off unproductive branches (that should scare you, it seriously scares me) and that “every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.”  Notice that “every” branch that bears fruit gets pruned.  Pruning is not a spectator sport.  It is literally cutting something off the plant.  In our lives, it is God literally cutting something off or out of us.  Maybe it’s material, maybe it’s relational, maybe it’s vocational.  It is loss.  It is painful.  And right now, we don’t see the whole, we don’t see the purpose, we only – in the moment – feel the loss.  Where we really get sideways is when we dwell on the loss, when we live in the “why” of loss.  When we are hanging on so tightly to something that it really really hurts to lose it.  There are times that God has to cut something off, because we are holding it so tight.  We are holding it so tight that we can’t even open our hands and hearts for what God has next for us.  And we are so quick to forget that God is a jealous God, and the only thing He wants us to hold tightly is Him.  Everything else is straw.

Some of you may be in a season of pruning.  I pray that you are, as I pray that I am.  Because pruning reflects that fact that we are being fruitful for the kingdom, and that God himself is actively working in our lives to make us even more fruitful.  For His glory.  Grace and peace.

Know Him.  Make Him known.