Gardeners are constantly pulling weeds. You don’t want them to spread and you don’t want their roots to take hold in your soil or pot. So, it is important to gardeners to pull weeds. But if you don’t replace them with something else or you don’t root them out completely they will return and can become an even bigger problem. Gardeners know that just pulling the weeds isn’t an enough. You got to replace them with something else. You’ve got to completely removed them. You’ve also got to be constantly on guard for their return.
Jesus tells a parable about the dangers in cleaning out your house but not filling it with positive things and not watching out for evil’s return. In his story, He says if you clean your house of an evil spirit that’s great but the evil spirit is going to go looking for a new home. Well, it looks and looks and can’t find one. So, it returns to you and finds that you’ve cleaned your house, swept it, and put everything in order. It is so excited that it goes and invites more evil spirits to come live there too and its friends are more evil than it is. So, it and its friends move back in to your life. Jesus tells His disciples the last state of that person is worst that the first.
So, what’s going on here in Jesus’ parable. It’s just like what we discussed about pulling weeds. You’ve got a person who has pulled weeds and cleaned out their area. But the problem is this gardener assumes that’s all the work she or he has to do and stops being vigilant and doesn’t fill their soil or pot with actual good plants. And then wakes up on day to find weeds have taken over again.
Jesus is telling us it isn’t enough to just remove a sinful activity, practice, or influence from our life – we must replace it with something positive and godly otherwise, the sinful activity will return aka we will be tempted to do it again. If we haven’t found a godly replacement and aren’t vigilantly watching out for the return of that temptation, then it is much more likely we fall back into that sinful activity. And because we’re failed to truly removing it we may give up or stop trying which will only lead to us down a road of more sinful activities. Jesus says the last state is worst than the first.
So…
🧑🌾 Clean out your life and remove sinful practices.
🧑🌾 Replace those activities and influences with godly ones.
🧑🌾 Stay alert and on guard for those sinful practices or influences to try to return.
It isn’t enough just to remove sinful activities from our lives, we must replace them with godly ones otherwise they’ll come back with a vengeance. And that state is worst than the first. #lessonsfromthemastergardener
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