Then he told this parable: "A man had a fig tree growing in his vineyard, and he went to look for fruit on it but did not find any. So he said to the man who took care of the vineyard, 'For three years now I've been coming to look for fruit on this fig tree and haven't found any. Cut it down! Why should it use up the soil?' "'Sir,' the man replied, 'leave it alone for one more year, and I'll dig around it and fertilize it. If it bears fruit next year, fine! If not, then cut it down.'"
Luke 13:6-9 (NIV)
Here, Jesus is teaching a group of people that just learned that Pilate allowed his militia to enter the synagogue and kill a group of Galileans who were offering sacrifices to God. This tragedy highlights the depravity of the human condition, shown in Pilate’s dispassionate permission of this act. It also highlights the providence of God in allowing this to happen.
This forces Christians to ask, “Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?” Jesus tells this parable to direct the attention of this tragedy away from Pilate’s cruel leadership and turn it instead to God’s desire that in spite of fault or crime, God is always after human repentance.
When God allows things to happen, He does it to inspire us to become better and lead more faithful, purposeful lives. Jesus illustrates this by showing the slow, spiritual pace of people who should have grown far more than their lives have shown and, He shows how we can be judged if our lives do not bear fruit.
Jesus shows that the same principles of the vineyard are to be transferred and applied to the human experience. Jesus teaches that our God is a patient God. God does not just cut us off when it is warranted. Instead, He overrules His own judgement and patiently waits in grace. God takes great efforts to take what is fruitless and help it to grow, even if it means to give it special attention. God is willing to do all of this to develop fruitful lives.
Every one of us is a beneficiary of a God who decided not to cut us off in our fruitlessness. Jesus is using the gardener in the parable to teach us the need to repent. Every one of us sits with Jesus under a fruitless tree, the unfulfilled ambition in our lives. We tell Jesus in our embarrassment, “Just cut it down. There are plenty of other trees that have grown.”
However, Jesus tells us, don’t give up on things in your life that are not yet producing fruit. When you offer Him faith, hope, and repentance, Jesus will help the fruitless parts of your life produce. Then, we will receive what God has for our lives in due season.
Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.
Matthew 7:24-25 (NIV)
In the passage above, Jesus is concluding his sermon on the mount, where he taught how to live after God in praxis, not just theology. For Jesus, the best practice is to do much more than just surrender to the inviting presence of God. Spiritual growth and strength are about surrender, certainly, but it is also about making strategic, early decisions that will prove to be wise over time, or as the bible calls it: being shrewd.
To illustrate how early these decisions need to be made, Jesus paints a picture of two home builders. One is wise and the other is foolish. Both with to build a house. Both have heard spiritual words spoken. It is as if they both attended the same class and listened to the same professor, but one is going to be called wise and the other is going to be called foolish.
We are going to focus on the wise builder because he starts with a foundation. He knows that nothing that he puts in the house, be it beautiful décor or lavish carpets, will matter if he does not anchor the house in the right foundation. So, he looks for a rock on which to build and he builds out from there. He doesn’t build his life and then find a foundation to rest it on. He finds the foundation first, and then builds strategically from there.
In other words, walking by strong faith starts long before worship, surrender, or the exercise of your gifts. Joy and happiness start long before outer actions and public ministry. Spiritual power and strong Christ-like living is about strategy. Right after surrender to conversion, strategy becomes critically important.
If we want to live strong, we have to decide to exercise our faith around certain strategic choices. The first choice we have to make is to find that solid rock. We cannot exercise our faith in response only. We cannot simply wait on God and fall more in love with him. We need more strategy than that. We have to answer specific questions: How do I want to live? How much space in this world do I want to take up? How do I want my presence to affect that space I live in? How hard am I willing to fight?
Faith is not just responding to God. Faith is about being strategic about our response to God. We don’t want to simply live, but we want to live a strong life. Faith is not just existing, it is making a difference. Only then can we live a life of greatness and introduce others to a great God. Then we create a great atmosphere and shape a great environment.
However, we cannot tell if a house is built on a rock or in the sand if we only evaluate it in good weather. Everyone’s life looks good until a storm hits it, but once the storm comes, we can see who built their life on sand. If we are good weather Christians, we need to change our lives and take a strategic approach to rebuilding our lives from the foundation.
So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be awake and sober
Thessalonians 5:6
Imagine Paul running up and down the streets of Thessalonica, and imagine that he is doing so like a panicked herald, reminding saints that they have to shape their decisions and content of their lives by never forgetting that Jesus is coming back again. Paul doesn’t want them to fear Christ’s return, but it is his aim and ambition that instead of fearing Christ’s return that they live everyday with the hope that He is coming back again.
This expectation ought to consume our minds and spirits and impact the way that we think and the way that we relate to other people. Jesus mirror’s this teaching when He discusses the parable of the virgins (Matthew 25:1-13). In this parable, the women didn’t forget about the bridegroom coming, but they forgot to make preparation for His arrival.
Often we live our lives like we will live forever. We try to delay death like death can be delayed forever. However, scripture teaches us that when Jesus comes, He will come like a thief in the night. Only those of us who are prepared will make the trip across time to eternity when the Lord returns.
In chapter 5 of Thessalonians, Paul addresses three traditional antithesis to illustrate his point. First, he juxtaposes light against darkness. Second, he juxtaposes being awake and being asleep. Third, sobriety and drunkenness. This is called apocalyptic dualism. Our lives are always being pulled on by opposite forces, light and darkness, being awake or being asleep, remaining vigilant and sober or pulled into drunkenness.
We need to make sure that we are alert and sober in anticipation of the Lord’s return. It is easy to stop being alert when we live in a thrilling and exciting culture. We are in a world of extreme human communication and connectivity. We are in a culture that is growing at a rate beyond what we can understand.
How can’t we be tempted by the excitement and thrill of these times? Isn’t it true that we wake up excited to see the latest political scandal or misstep every morning? Isn’t it true that we’re enamored by the fast-paced development of new technology?
But here we read Paul who says, “Don’t get too stuck on the things of this world because Jesus is coming back again.” It may sound old fashioned to talk about Christ’s return, but this is an important part of our faith. We don’t live as Christians to simply get material benefit. We live as Christians so that we can prepare ourselves for Jesus. We need to take note of our lives and determine if we are living every day as if it is the day that Christ is coming back.
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is-his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Romans 12:2 NIV
Paul lays out in Romans 12, foundational doctrines for a passionate and victorious Christian life. To live out this life, Paul starts by teaching the Romans how to defeat their personal insecurities. If we cannot deal with and defeat our own inner insecurities, we risk compromising our Christian life.
Spiritual insecurity prevents us from accessing all the power that comes to us through our relationship with Jesus Christ. Through our relationship with Christ we have access to the kingdom of God, and we have power and spiritual gifts. We have the channel to eternal possibilities. We live in Christ’s forgiveness.
But the worst thing that could happen would be for us to be insecure about who we are in general and who we are in Christ. It will frustrate and limit our journey. It will make us look at ourselves in narrow ways, and we will miss the benefits of living with the Spirit’s enablement. We will think that the scriptures are motivating, but not realistically possible.
Insecurity is not just lacking self-confidence. When we are insecure, we are dangerous because we want others to give us security. So, we put too much pressure on others, when God is the one who has the answers. When we are insecure, we create unsafe emotional spaces for ourselves and those around us.
Paul’s answer to the threat of human insecurity is to choke out what feeds insecurity: feeling the need to conform. When we make the choice to stop living with the need to conform to the pattern of this world, we can defeat insecurity. When the thoughts, opinions, and impulses of our culture no longer hold us down, we are free to live a Christian life.
When physical beauty and material wealth are no longer our goals and ideals, we can live a life that is transformed and renewed. Then, insecurity will fall away, and we can begin to understand God’s good, pleasing, and perfect will.
Why has my pain been perpetual
And my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?
Will you indeed be to me like a deceptive brook
With water that is unreliable?
Jeremiah 15:18 AMP
Chapter 15 of Jeremiah is an exchange between God and Jeremiah regarding captivity for Israel. Jeremiah is bold and transparent as he speaks with God. He complains about how lonely he is, and he talks about the pain that he lives with, feeling the pain and fear of his fellow Israelites. Jeremiah hates having to prophesy such things, and he is about as sad as a man can possibly become. Jeremiah has no one to share his experience with, and no one to talk to. He feels hurt by what is going on around him and by God.
Everyone of us knows hurt and pain, and what Jeremiah admits is that his pain and hurt caught him off guard because he is God’s prophet. Some of us have the impression that God ought to exempt us from experiencing hurt because we are saved. Jeremiah believes this so much that he uses the image of God being a dried up, deceptive brook.
While we might not call God deceptive, all of us have been hurt enough to wonder if God lied to us when He told us about grace. We often remember how powerful God is in the midst of our pain and we believe that He has been unfair or dishonest because He does not shield us from life’s many arrows, even when those arrows come from other Christians.
However, many times our hurt takes us to places that we’ve locked away instead of dealt with. As long as no one pushes our buttons or says the wrong thing, that old nature is suppressed. But, every so often people will get to us, and we prove to those people that we haven’t been totally sanctified.
Instead of allowing hurt to take us back to our old nature, we should bring our hurt to God, but we need to be willing to wait for Him to answer. Just like Jeremiah was transparent with God in verse 18, we need to stick around for God to answer us like He does for Jeremiah in verse 19: “If you repent, I will restore you that you may serve me; if you utter worthy, not worthless, words, you will be my spokesman” (AMP).
There is life after hurt. We don’t have to live with hurt suffocating us like a blanket. We can live on after we’ve been hurt. There may be lingering pain or wounds, but the fact that many people have been hurt in life-shattering ways and continue on proves to us that there is life after hurt.
We can take God’s words to heart and address hurt. To do this we need to stop feeling sorry for ourselves. There is no value in feeling sorry for ourselves, and God makes it clear to Jeremiah that worthy, not worthless, words are what will help Jeremiah. What God implies to Jeremiah is that He is not going to work on Jeremiah’s heart in this season, He is going to work on his attitude.
Our hearts are strong enough to get hurt and keep on ticking, so when we are hurt, we need to check our self-pity at the door and take that time to examine our attitude towards the situation. When we approach these situations with love and healing in mind, only then can the hurt be dealt with.
