When God Begins Pulling Out Weeds

Suggested Reading: Luke 8:4-15

“Roger” was a man who was brought up in the church. He committed his life to Christ and was even planning on being a minister. But somewhere along the way, other concerns began crowding out his walk with Christ. Eventually, he ended up doing drugs, surviving multiple divorces, taking advantage of his elderly grandparents, and losing the only Bible he’d managed to hold onto. Roger spent more than two decades wandering out on his own, his relationship with God all but forgotten amidst the pleasures, worries and concerns that crowded out the word of God in his life.

Roger epitomized the third kind of soil that Jesus described in the Parable of the Sower.  As the farmer scattered the word of God, some seeds fell along the path and were picked up and carried off by birds. Other seeds fell on rocky places and sprung up quickly but never really grew roots and died in the heat of the sun. But the third place where seeds fell was among the thorns, which choked them and kept them from growing like the seeds which fell on good soil. When Jesus explained the parable to his disciples, he explained, The seeds that fell among the thorns represent those who hear the message, but all too quickly the message is crowded out by the cares and riches and pleasures of this life. And so they never grow into maturity (Luke 8:14, NLT).

The seeds that fell among the thorns have always fascinated me because they didn’t die like the seeds that fell on the first two types of ground and because, as I look at my own life, I see how easily I am distracted by the worries and pleasures of this life. I have often wondered what it would look like to do a little weeding, to begin pulling out those weeds and thorns that distract us from our walk with God and keep us from growing like we should.

According to Roger, he knows what that weeding process is like. You see, Roger was in an accident where nearly every part of his body was injured or damaged in some way. Roger was in a hospital bed undergoing multiple surgeries and, for months, was even unable to talk. I went by several times to see him and pray with him, but the first time he could speak he described how God had used his time in the hospital to remove all of the distractions of his life and put his focus back where it belonged. His first request of me was that I get him a Bible so he could make good use of the weeks in bed he still had to endure. Roger had months of recovery and rehabilitation ahead of him, but he felt certain that God had been engaged in a weeding process, pulling out the things in his life that had choked off his spiritual growth.

When I left that visit with Roger, I experienced a sense of urgency to do a little weeding in my own life so that God wouldn’t have to do it in a more painful fashion down the road. Ever since then, I have been seeing things that keep me distracted from my walk with Christ and I am taking the first steps to begin pulling them out of my life.

What are the weeds and thorns in your own life? What specific things hinder your spiritual growth and prevent you from reaching maturity in Christ? Wouldn’t it be easier to do the weeding yourself than to wait until God has to do it in a more dramatic and, possibly, painful fashion? 

There's Nothing Wrong With a Little Hero Worship

Suggested Reading: Psalm 135:13-21

There is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the Enterprise stumbles upon a ship whose passengers are all dead except for a small boy. The Enterprise's android officer, Lieutenant Commander Data, discovers the boy and soon becomes the object of hero worship. The boy is so impressed with Data and so grateful that the android saved him that he begins to imitate Data. He begins to dress like him and comb his hair like him. When people ask the boy how he is doing, he responds by saying, "All systems are functioning within normal parameters." The boy's fascination with Data would almost be cute if it weren't a response to the boy's tragic loss of his family and friends aboard the doomed ship.

The idea of hero-worship has been around for a long time. Children, have always tried to imitate those people that they think are the bravest and smartest and "coolest." I remember when I was a kid dressing up like Batman and getting on a little banana seat bicycle and "patrolling" the neighborhood because that is what heroes were supposed to do. As we grow up, hero-worship takes on a little more serious dimension. We want to be like a particular leader or businessman and so we read their books and try to develop some of the habits that they have developed. We want to be as good at parenting as our parents (or some other worthy parental role-model) and so we try to do things the way they would have done them. One of the most natural things in the world is emulating someone we admire.

Psalm 135:15-18 reads, "The idols of the nations are silver and gold, made by the hands of men. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but they cannot see; they have ears, but cannot hear, nor is there breath in their mouths. Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them" (HCSB). These verses describe the very phenomenon we have already discussed, but from an angle we don't often consider: we become more and more like whatever we worship. The phenomenon is very similar to the idea that we become like the people that we hang out with, except it is amplified and often much more difficult to notice because the things we worship (the focus our primary attention and strength) are often not even living things.

Sometimes, we focus all of our time and attention on money and we soon become cold and hard, caring only about the bottom line and whether or not we can obtain something. Sometimes, we focus on leisure time and relaxation, and we soon become laid back, lazy and unmotivated by anything but enjoying ourselves. Sometimes, we focus on work and then nothing matters to us except being productive and avoiding distractions that could lower productivity, like family or spending time serving and loving people. Sometimes, we focus all of our attention on a particular person and we begin picking up that person's habits and we hear people who care about us worried that we are "losing ourselves."

Whatever we worship, whatever is the focus of our attention and devotion, will shape the people that we become. When God is the focus of our worship, we develop more and more the character of Christ. If our character is developing in other ways, chances are pretty good that we have set something else up as a god in our lives, possibly without even realizing it.

What habits have you seen develop in your life? How has your character evolved recently? Answering those questions will give you a good indication of where your heart is focused. If you don't like what you see, change your focus. Intentionally place your attention and devotion on the God who gave his Son to save you. Keep your mind focused on who God is and what God is doing in the world. The more hero-worship of God that we engage in, the more we become like Christ.

Becoming MacGyver Christians

Suggested Reading: Luke 4:1-13

One of my favorite television shows when I was growing up was the original MacGyver. If you aren't familiar with the show, it centered around a man known as MacGyver who was continuously sent on covert and sensitive missions and used common, every day items to create what he needed or to solve problems. Once he used chocolate bars to seal up an acid spill and another time he used a paper clip and a stick of bubble gum to disarm a nuclear weapon. MacGyver never had to worry about the supplies he didn't have. Whatever MacGyver had was enough to save the day. And he had a pretty catchy opening theme song too.

Christians have a lot to learn from MacGyver about how to look at what we have versus worrying about what we don't have. As Satan was tempting a very hungry Jesus , he suggested that Jesus should turn a nearby stone into bread in order to deal with his hunger and thus prove that he was the Son of God. The temptation was multi-faceted and a masterful stroke, not only did he attempt to goad Jesus' ego by saying, "If you are the Son of God…" but he played on Jesus' hunger and tried to focus Jesus on the fact that he had no food. Jesus' response to Satan was "It is written: 'Man does not live on bread alone'"(Luke 4:3-4, NIV).  Rather than allowing himself to focus on his lack of bread and be drawn in, Jesus reminded both himself and Satan that he had other things at his disposal that could sustain him, referencing Deuteronomy 8:3 which tells us that we can also survive on "every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord."

So my question to you today is: what do you have? So often we focus on the things we don't have. We don't have enough money. We don't have enough time. We don't have enough help. We don't have enough experience. We don't have enough space. We don't have enough opportunities. It is very easy to focus on the things we don't have. But as people who claim to trust in a sovereign God who provides for all of our needs, we spend a lot of time focusing on what we don't have rather than, like MacGyver,  looking around at what we do have and finding that we have exactly what we need.

Sometimes, our focus on what we don't have is a result of simply being narrow-minded - we are so convinced that only this thing will meet the need that we don't even consider other options. But ultimately, focusing on what we don't have demonstrates a lack of trust in God. If we really believe that God provides for all of our needs, our reaction to coming up short ought not to be to moan and groan about not having enough but to look around at what God has given us and believe that, whatever we have at our disposal, God has given us exactly what we need to deal with the situation while we place our trust in God.

If you keep thinking about what you don't have, find an old episode of MacGyver, get some inspiration, and then look around to see what God has given you. You never know when the little you have will be exactly what is needed for God to save the day.