The Pull Challenge

The Thailand team has been in full swing with the building project. Then the surprise of a lifetime came: the garden. Yes, the garden. We were assigned to gardening duty for a couple of days and our main goal was to remove all the grass between the plants. So, at first reluctantly, we took on the challenge of pulling out grass. With extremely hot days in the sunlight we were pulling here and pulling there, while sweat was pouring down your body. A lot of mixed emotions and feelings were formed about the grass challenge. We were so excited to build and felt a bit disappointed to be pulling out grass for three days. But on the third day God showed me two things that he wanted me to learn during these days.

The first was that even though it seemed senseless and way too unimportant for us to do, that God will trust you with bigger things as soon as He can trust you with the little things. How can God trust us with bigger and more important things, like working with people or building houses, if we can’t handle the smaller things? As I was pulling out grass and really working hard to get hold of all the roots and be sure to remove the grass along with all the roots, God showed me that it doesn’t help to remove the problem if the roots of the problem are not removed. If we don’t remove the roots of the grass it’s just going to grow back within a couple of days. But if you go to a little more trouble and remove the roots, the grass won’t grow back. And without all the grass overgrowing and smothering all the plants and flowers, they can now grow to their full potential and carry beautiful flowers. At times I really had to dig deep to find the roots and use garden tools to be able to reach it. They’ re not all just beneath the top layer of soil. In the real life, when a person is growing bad fruit it’s not effective to just remove the bad fruit. You have to find the roots and remove the roots along with the bad fruit. Sometimes you have to dig deep and struggle with the roots for a while, before you can find it and remove it. Sometimes you need help and just as the garden tools made it possible for us to remove the roots, God can help us to remove the roots. When the roots are removed, the bad fruit won’t be able to grow anymore. The bad fruit, the fruit of the world, are: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness and wild parties, an so on (Gal 5:19-21). But when these fruit and their roots are removed, the Holy Spirit can produce good fruit in our lives.

In the book of John God warns us about not remaining in Him and His words, and to grow good fruit.