Another great blog my hubby sent me!
July 30, 2011
Tending to Your Soul
by Josh Thiessen
When my wife and I bought our first home this past year, it came with a spot tilled for gardening, so we thought to ourselves, “Why not have a garden this year?” We thought it would be a great experience together. So we planted in the spring and waited. My first reaction was one of amazement. How could life come from something that looks so dead? Yet, that is exactly what happened. From the seemingly lifeless seeds, sprouted green plants.
But then something else happened. As the plants grew, weeds began to crop up and crowd out the other plants and then pesky critters began nibbling away at the plants. In one case, our beans didn’t even produce. So I began to learn that I must vigilantly tend to the garden. It wasn’t going to produce a lush harvest if I didn’t come in and take the weeds out and even shoot (scare) off the bunnies in an Elmer Fudd kinda way.
If I was diligent, my lettuce and other plants would flourish unharmed by the rabbits and weeds. But if I forgot to tend to it for a few days, sure enough there would be traces of rabbit fur and no lettuce or strawberries left. Both the weeds and rabbits posed a daily threat.
This is not unlike our own spiritual life. Christians face a different but similar daily problem: sin. It crowds out godliness and spreads like a plague. Then slowly, we tend to the sinful weeds and begin to grow again until we again forget to tend to our souls and the weeds creep back in. How do we avoid this as Christians? The truth is that we can’t completely avoid it, but the Bible does gives us the tools for tending to our soul. This tending is tedious and is so easily neglected that we must remain on guard at all times.
I remember thinking as a younger christian that people were legalistic when they would tell everyone that they must read their Bibles and pray every day to be godly. Now I realize that it wasn’t so much that they thought you could earn favor with God by doing it, but that experience had taught them without the consistent pruning effect of Scripture and prayer , no one will ever grow spiritually. The bottom line that I was trying to avoid was that those people were right about one thing: godliness takes hard work. Paul put it this way:
Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather train yourself for godliness; for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come (1 Tim 4:7-8).
The idea here is that it is going to take effort. Realizing that even sanctification is a work of the Spirit (2 Thess 2:13), we are charged in Scripture to train ourselves towards godliness. Remember training for a sport or music concert? It took determination and dedication towards a single goal. For a Christian the reward is a life pleasing to God that is characterized by godliness and one day hearing those amazing words “well done, good and faithful servant.” The flip side is living a lazy spiritual life that leads to uselessness in the here and now and holds little hope for reward in the life to come.
I don’t know about you, but I want to have a life characterized by the former. Even if it means getting up earlier and staying up later. The hard work of tending to a garden or to your soul will reap a bountiful harvest. And the daily tending to your soul through the disciplines of reading the Word and praying are worth it even if it costs blood, sweat and tears. But then again, discipleship always does (Lk 9:23).
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