God is my Landscaper

He must increase, but I must decrease.  He must grow and become more prominent; I must grow less so.  John 3:30

When we look at a beautiful, manicured garden we see all the colorful flowers growing and blooming.  We see some of the beauty and wonders that God has done here on earth.  This is the final stage, the beautiful, manicured garden but the beginning isn’t so beautiful.  The beginning is hard work.

My Nan loved to Garden, she would take every opportunity she could to get her hands dirty and “play in the dirt” as she called it.   It was not unusual to pull into her driveway and see her bent over doing something in her yard.  She tried, probably my entire life, to get me to like it and to this day, I still don’t.   When I bought my house, one of the things I loved was that there wasn’t a lot of grass and only two small flower beds.  My Nan came with me to pick out flowers and helped me create my first flower bed. 

I would see her yard, and could admire the flowers that she had so tenderly cared for, but that was about it.  When we got down to actually starting the process of planting the seeds we had to dig in the ground, which I hated, pull the rocks, and weeds out of the soil, and then decide which flowers would go where.  I left all of that up to her.  I knew that she was the one with the experience, so I was basically at her service for the day.  We watered the seeds, walked away dirty and hoped they would grow.  She told me what I needed to do to take care of them, and if I did my part, I would surely have a beautiful garden.   She was right. 

My Nan went to Heaven almost nine years ago now, and every time I see a flower in my flower bed, I smile and think of all we did to produce a harvest.  I think of the time that we spent walking around picking out the perfect flowers, that would need as little care as possible, because of her understanding of gardening I now have flowers every year. 

When I read John 3:30, this made me think of my Nan, and her gardening.  He must increase, but I must decrease.   We could have done all of that work to plant flowers, and if I wouldn’t have tended to the flowers, by pulling the weeds, watering them, they wouldn’t have flourished to leave a part of her here with me, almost year round.  

For my flowers to increase the weeds had to decrease.  I know I have heard sermons about weeds before and the weeds in our lives, and I whole heartily believed each sermon I had heard.  This time it’s a little different.  God showed me, how if my Nan wouldn’t have been so diligent in tending to her gardens the flowers wouldn’t have prospered.  By her hours of weeding, trimming the plants and weeds, she allowed growth in her garden.

For our lives, God is the flower, he is the colorful, beautiful, Lily in the sun and my flesh is the weed trying to stifle the flower.  We don’t do it intentionally, most of the time, but we are raised to live by our emotions, or the weeds, of our daily lives.  We are asked, constantly, how you feel about this, what are you going to do about that, and it causes us to listen to our emotions to dictate how we feel about everything.   This is opposite of how we are supposed to live once we are born again.  We are not to live by our emotions.  We are to rely on God for everything we need and know that even if the situation is not promising, we can still have joy in the midst of it. 

When we are born again God begins the pruning process of removing all the weeds in our lives.   He has to remove them so he can change us.  If God would try to change us and allow us to still be directed by our emotions, we would be in a constant battle internally.   This would be torture, so something has to go and it’s going to hurt! 

Weeding is a very violent act.  If you have ever watched someone weed you will see that they dig, pull, tug, or whatever they can, to rip the weed from the ground.  Usually the roots are pretty firmly planted in the ground, so you have to dig deep to make sure you get all of the weed, or it will just grow back again.  This is exactly what God does with us.  

Say I have a problem with Patience, which I do but it’s getting easier every day, so I pray and believe for God to do something in my life.  When I pray, like tilling the ground, I am preparing God to work in my life.  The prayer is heard, and that’s like planting the seed in the Ground, now when I walk away from the prayer, and leave it to God this is when the seed is working under ground, very much like God.   God will work in secret, where we can’t see his work, and then suddenly here is the manifestation of our prayer.  Every day before you see the flower burst through the ground, you water it and keep an eye out for weeds to suffocate your flower. 

The weed of Patience, is that time between releasing your prayer and the manifestation of the prayer.   That is the time that the enemy will start to say, I told you your prayer wasn’t heard, you can’t really expect that God’s going to do that for you, or wow, it’s been weeks now and nothing… he must have forgotten about your little prayer.   These are just some of the things that the devil will try to say to you to steal your peace and your patience.   The hard part is not listening to that voice and standing firm and believing that if God has this for you it will be, but in his timing, and in his way.  Patience is cultivated by waiting.

I sincerely wish there was another way to get patience, but I haven’t found one yet!  Patience, or your attitude while you wait, comes by going through the process.  God will start you out on small things to grow your patience.  He will give you small tests and you will pass those tests and most of the time you don’t realize it and your patience grows.  We have now killed the baby weeds and that was easy, nothing to it! 

As you get older and mature in God, just like a flower bed, your weeds get bigger and stronger and harder to remove.  You will start to believe God for bigger things.  Some of these things you might want, and some of them you never thought of once that God has put in your heart to desire.  These tests take more time.  The process is still the same but the patience is stretched and the pain is deeper. 

We will look to our past, at the things that God has already done for us, and hopefully that gives us endurance to push through this test.   I will give you a little secret now to hopefully help you, but if you don’t remove this weed the first time around, God will camp out here, until you do!  Remember he’s faithful!

Once you have found your way through this test, there will be another one down the road but you have some time to take in the beauty of the finished product.   This is the time when you stand back and look proudly at your accomplishments and the beautiful flowers that are growing and sharing their beauty with the world.

You see if we don’t decrease and allow God to increase in our lives, we will always be a messy, untended flower bed, and that will be the representation of God in our lives.  If you stay still and remain the same, without allowing God to change you, and transform you into his image no one will look at you and want what you have.  You don’t go up to the messy flower bed on your street and ask them how they got their flower bed to look like that.  No, and no one is going to come up to you and admire your life and ask you how you got like this, which means you can’t glorify God with your testimony.  You won’t be able to bring people to God with an untended life. 

What will bring people to God is when they see the messy flower bed slowly becoming a beautiful creation.   When you allow God to increase while you decrease, you start to change slowly.  People around you will see the difference.  They will see your good fruit!  They will ask you what’s going on with you, something is different with you and that’s when you get to say, God!  You get to glorify God and bring his name and his goodness to the people around you.  This hopefully and prayerfully will lead people to God and at the same time it will encourage you to keep going in God and allowing him to prune your weeds one at a time!  Remember… He must INCREASE, but I must decrease John 3:30.