“Be sure your sin will find you out.”
Numbers 32:23
We moved into our new house. A cute little ranch style house, complete with an octagonal wooden structure encircling a fire pit. The wooden posts stood out of the ground, with another wooden post laid horizontally over it and then wooden seats hung from the top one and hanging down between the other two posts. Growing up each post was a lovely vining plant with a cute little orange bloom known as trumpet vine because, well, it looks like a trumpet!
We were delighted with our lovely fire pit area, especially with the trumpet vine in all its blossoming glory. That is, until we started seeing shoots of trumpet vine way over on the other side of our house, completely separate from the fire pit area. We mowed it over and did not think much of it. Then I started seeing shoots coming up between the boards on our front porch…and sticking to the side of our house….and trying to climb underneath our siding… That vine was no longer pretty! The next spring we hacked down all the remaining trumpet vine, spraying the stumps of the vine with weed killer. It mostly worked, new growth still sprang from the edges of the stump that hadn’t been sprayed, and we looked out before mowing to our grass….and standing twice as tall above our grass, we saw new shoots of the trumpet vine.
The battle against our trumpet vine is still ongoing, we are slowly making progress. But it never ceases to amaze me how throughout the natural world God has sprinkled metaphors for the spiritual world as well. Our sin if left unchecked manifests itself in our hearts, spreading and taking over faster than any good traits do. We think it’s ok because we are the only ones that know it is there. However, if left unchecked we start to see signs of the sin popping up in unexpected ways- why did we snap at our coworker? Was it really because we are still bitter over a similar situation at our last job? We can hide the sin, pretend it’s not there, only to have something happen, and then we realize that the sin we thought we had pruned back, safely out of sight from the world, has sprung up anew in a place we least suspected. Instead it needs to be pulled out of lives by the root- a job only God can do.
We think we have killed off all the trumpet vine and then we see a new shoot trying to take over and strangle the life out of plants and shrubs that we want very much to survive! So we go again and try to eradicate any trumpet vine that is still lurking about in our yard. I am so sick of spraying and fighting with the trumpet vine. How glad I am that God does not tire of pruning the sin in my life. Does He grow weary and say to me as I do the trumpet vine, “You again? I thought we just went through this!” No, He gently and patiently shapes me and molds me so little by little I start to resemble more and more of Him and His nature.
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