Cultivating a garden is often a work of patience, but also a great deal of maintenance.
When a garden is cared for and nurtured, it can grow into a beautiful sanctuary of peace.
However, if that garden is left neglected and abused, it becomes a place of death and decay. One of the more telltale signs of an unattended garden is excessive weeds. Weeds come into a garden when their seeds are spread from other outside sources like; air, people, or animals.
Some weeds are more invasive and absorb more of the vital nutrients that a garden needs for survival.
While others cause less damage, they still cause damage. Without tools, rooting weeds can be a very painful process, so tools are necessary.
This is especially true with weeds that have prickles or thorns. Just know, your fingers will thank you later for preparing. Then we set out on the job of ridding our garden of anything that’s harming it or making it anything less than perfect.
This process can be tricky if you don’t know which plants are weeds. Not all weeds are easily identifiable and accessible. Some will intermingle themselves with flowers and plants to blend in. While many others develop deep root systems that make them difficult to remove them. No matter how difficult the process, we do it for a garden we’re happy to call our own.
Caring for our hearts requires us to get rid of anything that makes our garden undesirable for the Holy Spirit to dwell in. The process is as painful and painstaking as actual weeding and tools are just as important.
The whole armor of God protects us during spiritual gardening just like our earthly tools.
Spiritual weeds invade our spiritual gardens and hinder growth and cause decay in that we don’t move how God wants us to. In the spirit realm, weeds can range from people to bad habits. It’s important to identify our “weeds” and get them out.
The people that represent weeds in our lives are on assignment from the enemy to keep us off task.
In 1 Corinthians 15:33, Paul tells us that evil communications corrupt good manners. Did Paul really mean that communicating with any form of evil would corrupt the good in us? Yes! That’s exactly what it does to us.
Think about how a computer acts when it gets a corrupt file, crazy right?!!
Just like those weeds in a garden we have to identify the people that are corrupting our spiritual garden. Some are buried deep and have to be pulled up at the root. Paul gave us the rule of measurement in 1 Corinthians chapter 5.
He told us the types of people that we were to get out of our lives. Keeping these people in our lives will cause the same damage to a spiritual garden that earthly weeds do to an earthly garden. If we’re careful and take as much care of our spiritual garden as we do our earthly ones, we can see how beautiful they become as well.
This blog post was written by our amazing contributor Tiffney Smith.
January 7, 2022