Our thought lives can be redeemed by the Lord to be a glorious garden, but we will need to get rid of any weeds when they first pop their nasty little heads through, or those things will take over. Too many weeds are much harder to get rid of, and our inner garden can get quickly overgrown – because our faith is being strangled by the weeds we tolerate. At those times, I pray like this: ‘I am overwhelmed by my own carelessness regarding my relationship with you, Lord. Please forgive me, help me to identify and throw out the things that have distracted me. Losing Your company isn’t worth it.’ Amen.
We can’t do this kind of weeding in our own strength, no matter how hard we try. We deliberately choose to live by His Grace – by taking it in and giving it out. Sooner or later somebody is going to annoy the living daylights out of us, and what they have done can take over our thoughts and spread like crabgrass. Then we will become so focussed on not being overrun by that, we can lose sight of the Lord. The best way to get rid of thought weeds is at the beginning. Don’t let them take root. Blast them with the word of God, it’s a great weed-killer.
Let’s not assume that this or that verse doesn’t apply to me, instead let’s ask Him to show us where we are falling short. We can’t afford to dismiss God’s Word and lean on our own understanding. Proverbs 3, says: …”Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him; and He will make your paths straight.” A careless path can be directly attributed to ignoring what He says, and it quickly gets covered in WEEDS. It is like sticky-weed, which gets all over your clothes, the dog etc.… it needs our attention.
Our transformation process is stalled when we choose to snooze away, letting weeds flourish. The safest place to learn to hear the Lord is by reading the bible. You read and read, and then something strikes you and you go off and look it up – then you ask Him to show you how obey it. Ignoring His instructions is like not seeing a climbing weed that takes over and smothers everything.
Here’s a funny story about paying attention to important, necessary things… Years ago, I had a friend who was blind as a bat and definitely needed to wear her glasses. One day she came to pick me up in her car to take me to the shops, and I noticed she wasn’t wearing them, but I thought perhaps she had bought contact lenses. Her glasses had pretty thick lenses, but I dismissed my thoughts. Silly me. It was very busy on the roads, but we safely arrived at the shops, and then something odd happened, she drove by a large number of empty parking spots that suited our purpose.
She paused the car, and said something like: “We might have to go home I can’t find a spot.” I’m like: “What? Are you blind?” Suddenly she began to laugh, “I forgot my glasses,” says she, 😱!!! That’s when she added: “I can’t see anything without them!” I’m like: “Lemme outta here please, I’ll walk home thank-you!” My friend did not notice she didn’t have her glasses on, and she ignored something incredibly important she should have paid attention to. Praise God we survived!
We need to be protective and vigilant about our relationship with the Holy Spirit, or our spiritual lives are in danger of being easily distracted, or choked out by weeds. I’ve learnt that the Holy Spirit withdraws from us so quietly, and slowly, bit by bit, that we often don’t notice His absence. Then we can quite quickly become used to life without Him in it as we go back to doing things our own way. Like my semi-blind friend we get busy with other things and so we forget the most important things! The Lord fades into the background, and becomes a concept, not a living reality.
Like it or not, our daily decisions prioritise what we pay attention to – so if we keep fitting the Lord Jesus in around everything else we will have trouble hearing and seeing Him. That carelessness becomes a weed! Just like my zany friend without her glasses we won’t actually know what we are missing, until we’ve gone somewhere and then we realise we need to get back! We’ve become so used to making our own way and filling up our heads with all sorts of other things. However, prioritising Jesus, deferring to Him, eliminates so many problems. Our failure to do so is another hard-to-eliminate-weed.
Pre-conceptions are another one. We think the Lord is like this and that, based on our own limited experiences, but He is so much more than we think. We cannot afford to limit Him. Engaging with what He has said in the bible is like regularly pulling up weeds. We learn to change our minds. When we weigh up the cost of ‘doing my own thing,’ against doing this life, His way, those scales must come down heavily on the side of: ‘I need the Holy Spirit to guide me or I am sunk.’ Spiritual weeding is worth the effort. We need to be aware that these things can effect our relationship with Him.
“You ask [God for something] and do not receive it, because you ask with wrong motives [out of selfishness or with an unrighteous agenda], so that [when you get what you want] you may spend it on your [hedonistic] desires.” James 4:3. Our motivation matters. We can be equally, if not even more passionate about getting the things we want – and ignore the ever-present weeds smothering our faith. Weeds are the things of this life that choke out the life of God in us, let’s be aware of errant patterns of thinking and weed them out. Bye. 👋.
