Weeding

THIS WEEK I worked in the garden with my mom, pulling weeds. Weeds are awful because they are not only bad for the plants that you want, but they're also very hard to get rid of completely. They're tricky, because once you get rid of the big ones you see there are all these smaller ones that popped up while you were blinking, and when they are gone there are all these little seedlings, and you just know there is no earthly way you will keep these weeds from growing back.

Once you've taken care of them, your garden looks beautiful and healthy. It looks like the person it belongs to has really spent time caring for it. But if we take its beauty for granted, the weeds whose roots are inevitably just below the surface will just spring up again.

I realized that sin is the same way. Just when we think we've taken care of our bad habits and nagging guilts, something pops up that shows us that we just aren't as righteous as we'd love to think we are. We find out we are proud, or that we are weak to some temptation, or that there's something we do that isn't done for the glory of God. This reminds us of our need for God to continually clean us up.

I think the most assuring think there is to know is that God does not change. His love does not change. If He was here yesterday, and He was trying to grow us up into everything He envisions for us in Christ, that guess what He is doing today? He's still here, still working on us, still loving us. I don't understand how He does that, how He just keeps loving. This week I'm starting to better understand that nothing we can do can make God love us any less or any more.

 In Luke 17:3-4 Jesus gives us a challenge and a promise. "Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, 'I repent,' you must forgive him."

He says that if we forgive, He will forgive us. So in challenging us to forgive the sins of others no matter how many times they say sorry, He is telling us that this is how He acts toward us. How does a person get her mind around that, that the same God who made us loves us enough to forgive us every time we come and repent? That's such an encouraging challenge to grow, and to strive to be more like Him.

This week I read about David's big mistake with Bathsheba. He was a shining example in practically every area of his life. God called him a man after His own heart. But he slept with his friend's wife, got her pregnant, got his friend killed in battle and tried to cover it all up. Needless to say, God was angry with him, and through the prophet Nathan He told him the punishment that was coming.

2 Samuel 12:13 "David said to Nathan, 'I have sinned against the Lord.' And Nathan said to David, 'The Lord also has put away your sin; you shall not die.'"

David really messed up. What he did was really evil, and God wasn't about to overlook it. But because God is love, and because He doesn't change, David's stupid mistake couldn't change His love. He repented, and before the verse was over, he was forgiven. God took away his son, but He soon provided another whom He nicknamed Jedidiah, which means "beloved of the Lord." I'm amazed at how completely God forgives.

But even when we are doing fine, in an easy season of life, when we aren't struggling too badly, what can we say God thinks of us? I'd say it's in those parts of life that it's easy to start thinking we are good, and demoting other people. There's a weed. But the only sense in which we are good is that when God made us He called us "good," exactly how He planned, made for His glory. It doesn't mean we're perfect.

Luke 12:9-10 "Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? So you also, when  you have done all that you were commanded, say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have done only what was our duty.'"

God's love is better than a love that remains when we do wrong and increases when we do well. God's love is one that sees us for what we are and covers us with His own righteousness. He's a gardener who will help us weed our gardens when we acknowledge the weeds are there and we need His help. But He's also one who remembers that the roots of the weeds are still in there, and He will keep tending it. The way for us to be beautiful is to always remember how much we need Him.