John,
Your reminder below about apologies vs repentance and just having an appearance of good but unclean inside goes along with a conversation I had with my neighbor Mr. Patterson. He told me about his peach tree that he grew in his yard. He nurtured it, gave it special attention, applied special fertilizer and after several years it began to bear fruit. And for the following two years he got beautiful delicious peaches. But the tree became infested with insects on the inside. Outwardly the tree looked normal but inwardly it was being eaten up by the insects. That year the tree still bore what looked like the same beautiful peaches as before. But when the beautiful looking peaches were cut open, they were rotten on the inside. He could not restore the tree after the infestation and eventually had to cut it down.
And there is a part two to the digging up roots lesson. Yesterday (Monday) we had the heavy rains. So today I went back to dig up another root. This root was bigger than the previous one and had more tentacle branches. But because the soil was damp and pliable after the rain, the bigger root came up much easier than the previous one when the soil was hard and dry. If our soil is well watered and we are pliable, it’s much easier for roots to be taken out of us. Or if we are hard, closed off, not willing to receive admonishment or be corrected, then it’s much harder to dig out what needs to be gotten out.
Richard French
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Thank you, Richard. This is a great lesson. I counseled the parents, some years back, not to train their children to think that an apology was repentance. Making an apology is like cutting off the sprigs that are above ground. It is a matter of the heart. We don’t want to become “whitewashed sepulchres”, as Jesus said, having a good appearance, but unclean inside.
Pastor John
What could be seen on the surface were just stumps; the remains of what were once beautiful trees. In various spots along the ground around the stumps were little green shoots of new growth springing up. I decided to dig up the stumps and roots to clear them away for the new shrubs and trees which I planted. With shovel and pick axe I dug, chopped, and pulled at the stumps and roots. It was hard work digging up the stumps and roots; repeatedly swinging the pick axe over and over, then digging around the roots and stumps with the shovel, then back to swinging the pick axe. Sweat dripped in my eyes and off my brow. More than once I thought “This is too much work. Why not just leave them alone?” But I would take a break, catch my breath, get a drink of water, enjoy a cool breeze which Jesus would send and then go back to digging.
After much hard work on one particularly tough stump, the roots were finally out of the ground! That small stump had some very large roots; larger than would be expected for the size of the stump. The main two roots from the stump were twisted and turned in 90degree bends. They spanned at least six feet out from the stump. All the new sprouts that were visible above ground came from the buried roots.
This experience brought back memories as a youth working on my grandfather’s farm. I chopped and hoed many weeds in his fields. My grandfather would say that it’s not just enough to cut off the top of the weeds with the hoe as the roots will re-grow a new plant. And even pulling up the roots leaving them partially in the soil or even touching the soil would not do. You had to pull up the weeds with the roots and flip them over so the roots were exposed to the SUN in order to dry up and completely kill the roots. That feels like what the LORD is wanting us to do. Dig up the long-buried roots in ourselves and fully expose them to the SON so he can completely heal us!