Fruit Bearing and Pruning

After installing a new wood floor throughout most of my home in 2013, I am now having to tear it out again and replace the whole thing, due to water vapor emission from the slab (which insurance doesn't cover).  In addition, I have a nasty mold situation under the wood flooring. 

Searching for some discipleship materials, I came across the following article that I had written for MTS back in November of 2013.  It fit my current situation so well that I thought I would share the article with you......

So many times reading a verse of Scripture, the Holy Spirit will open up a deeper understanding of the verse than we have had before.  That happened with me a few days ago with John 15:2b:  “He cleanses and repeatedly prunes every branch that continues to bear fruit.” 

The verse doesn’t say “He prunes us so we will bear fruit.”  Rather, it says, basically, that if we are bearing fruit, we will get pruned.

Obviously, you and I want to be in that classification of “fruitbearers”, but…….with that calling comes cleansing and repeated pruning – in other words, suffering, struggles, problems, pain, persecution – repeatedly, continually.

The last part of the verse gives the reason:  “to make me bear more and richer and more excellent fruit.”    It’s like a cycle – suffering and struggles = bear more fruit = more suffering and struggles = bear richer fruit = continued suffering and struggles = bear richer and more excellent fruit……and so on.  We can’t have one without the other.  He says so.

Sunday in church the pastor was talking about the burial of Joseph’s father Jacob and how all the officials of Pharaoh – a huge entourage of nobles and elders and guards – went with Joseph and his family to Canaan to bury Jacob.  There, at the threshing floor of Atad, they mourned loudly for a whole week.  (Genesis 50)  Listening to the pastor talk about mourning in our own lives, I suddenly started to cry and had to really struggle to stop.  Life had been tough for a long time, years and years and years, seeming like an endless barrage of problems and pain and rough situations.  Just the last month alone had included a nasty flood (including a new wood floor) when bathtub plumbing broke, evacuation of my commercial building because of a gas leak, a broken foot, unfixable AC condenser, etc.  Pruning….pruning….and more pruning.

But then came Monday noon.  I had been praying much Sunday about a specific situation, asking God for a very specific thing.  And Monday noon He answered that prayer in an unbelievable,   awesome, truly miraculous way!  And so quickly!!   My mourning turned to dancing as He lifted me up in glorious praise to my God!

And this week has been one of truly unexpected opportunities to witness for Him – opportunities just falling into my lap – and more reason to praise.

As I stopped and thought about the years of tough things, I realized that all during these tough times He has been continually pulling me back up to praise with His love gifts - to show He is there, involved in my life second by second, loving me intensely and totally and unconditionally.

 “I will allure her and bring her into the wilderness (suffering), and I will speak tenderly and to her heart and make the Valley of Achor (troubling) for her a door of hope and expectation.  And she shall sing there….”  Hosea 2:14-15          

 

What have you done with my time?

In our Women’s Bible Study last night, we studied Genesis 2, the awesome account of the creation of man and woman.  We read how God placed them in this unbelievably beautiful garden, where the wild animals were all frolicking around together, weather was perfect, there was no disease, no death, no suffering.  But best of all, God walked in the garden with them!!!   He talked with them FACE TO FACE.  I imagine for Adam and Eve, it must have been like it was for Moses:  “The Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend…”  Exodus 33:11-13.   We  talked about what it really means to “walk with God”, as the Scriptures also say Enoch and Noah and Abraham did, and how we need to determine to make our relationship with God the number one priority in our life.  Following is a poem God gave me 30 or 40 years ago concerning that priority that you might like to think about in your own life.  It still convicts me...….           

            TO MY CHILD
Don’t tell Me you have no time for Me;

Don’t tell Me you have no time to put My Word into your heart.....
  To listen to Me,
  To converse with Me.....              
 FOR THAT IS WHY YOU WERE CREATED!

All of time is given to you to learn to know Me.....

  To receive My love.

If you think you have no time,

  Then there must be one thing.....two things.....
  That you can cut out and discard from your life.

I, an all-wise God, would not create you to love Me

  And learn to know Me
  And then not give you the time to do so.

Search your life and see.....

WHAT HAVE YOU PUT THERE
       IN PLACE OF YOUR TIME WITH ME?        

All your busyness, all your service, all your successes,

  They are as nothing to Me;
  I want YOU.

I want to talk with you and listen to you

  And teach you to love Me
  In preparation for the eternity we’ll spend together.

Don’t tell Me you have no time for Me.

I gave you the time;
It is mine to take back.

You were created to love Me and to receive My love.       

What have you done with my time?

 

                                                    All My love,

                                                    Your Father

jonah

For my time in the Word one morning, I was on my way to Colossians and somehow got stuck in the little book of Jonah.  Reading it through, I noticed an interesting fact:  after they finally chucked Jonah overboard (at Jonah’s insistence), everyone on the ship became a follower of the One True God!  The hour of Jonah’s greatest distress – being dumped into a violent sea with no hope of ever seeing daylight again – was also the hour of salvation for the whole ship!  “So they took Jonah up and cast him into the sea, and the sea ceased its raging.  Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.”  As Jonah finally gave over his will to God’s will, the hearts of those watching the drama also turned to God.

What really struck me was that God actually took Jonah’s SIN (fleeing in the opposite direction instead of preaching to Ninevah as commanded) and used it for Kingdom glory!  In the same way, He uses not only our troubles and trials and tribulations for His glory, but He also uses even our mistakes and, unbelievably, our sins.  THAT is how big and awesome God is and how perfect and interconnected and all-knowing His plans are!

While I was reading Jonah, I got a call about a signature-required delivery coming in a few minutes, with a replacement for a leaky kitchen faucet.  So I prayed that God (as He used Jonah’s disobedience to save a shipful of people) would use the hassle of a leaky faucet for a Holy Spirit work in the heart of the deliveryman.  When he came, I told him how the timing of his delivery was an answer to prayer for me.  He answered with, “Yes, it’s a wonderful world, isn’t it?”  - not the answer I was expecting.  I couldn’t think how to pull the conversation into sharing the Gospel from there.  So I signed the paper, and he went down the steps.  The Lord, however, kept him at the back of the truck for a good 5 minutes rearranging packages, and then gave me a swift kick out the door.  I went tearing down the steps calling out, “One more thing…..it’s a wonderful world if you have Jesus as your Savior!”  That opened the door for a “divine appointment” with the deliveryman, whom God had already brought from being an atheist to believing there probably was a God – but a God Who only deserved his anger and contempt.  Quite a bit later, he left with a “Why Me, God” brochure in his hand and a new understanding.  But you see, the awesome opportunity to meet this man at his point of need in his journey toward God would not have come to me if not for the leaky faucet (a small tribulation).

When Jonah was in the belly of that big fish, He prayed:
…“For You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the floods surrounded me;
all Your waves and Your billows passed over me….
the waters compassed me about….even to the extinction of life,
the abyss surrounded me, the seaweed was wrapped about my head…”

The last 3 years of my life have sometimes felt like that, with one calamity after another after another.  And the 18 years before, dealing with Steven’s TBI, often brought both of us close to despair.  I imagine many of you have felt and still do feel that same way – sometimes every day, day after day.

But listen to the end of that same prayer of Jonah’s – before deliverance - still spoken from the terrifying, stinking belly of the big fish:
“But as for me, I will sacrifice to You with the voice of thanksgiving!
I will pay that which I have vowed.  Salvation and deliverance belong to the Lord!”

As we proceed into 2015, we can go with the assurance that (1) no matter what circumstances God brings into our life or allows to stay in our life, (2) no matter how many times we fail, and (3) even in spite of our sin failures that will come in 2015......... God is still big enough and great enough to not only carry us through each circumstance, but to also use each of those circumstances for our good and His glory.  Like Jonah, we need to remember to give the sacrifice of thanksgiving and praise, right in the middle of those hard times to come.  And we need to try to walk with an air of excited expectancy for how He is going to use those tough situations.

Have a new year daily filled with His peace and the sense of His presence.