Ephesians 3:17 "So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith - that you, may be rooted and grounded in love."
We have a large private English flower garden behind our home. It is absolutely glorious in the summertime, and it is one of my favorite places to spend time. It is also something we inherited when we purchased our home almost seven years ago. It is full of perennial flowers and bushes, and we always add some annual flowers to it every year. It is a peaceful and wonderful place to have a meal, read a book, listen to music, or just sit quietly and marvel at the beauty of God's creation. I love every minute I am able to spend there, and I am grateful.
This large garden, however, does require many hours of work to keep it looking and feeling like a place someone would want to spend their time. There is the cleanup after the winter months. I cannot express how many maple seeds rest there, or how I pull so many maple shoots that we could start a forest with. There is the daily watering, which thankfully my son has taken on. Then there is the constant weeding, and because I have OCD that is often difficult for me to ignore. Last summer, after we got our puppy, I largely neglected the garden, and it became over grown. One issue was a thistle weed that took hold, and although it was pretty, it got out of control. Just today I was able to pull up part of it, but even this small plant had roots that went deep. Unfortunately, the larger ones are going to require quite a lot of work to extract. Again, we have this issue because of neglect.
I got to thinking that it is the same with our sin. When we face it and deal with it right away, it will not overtake us. However, when we neglect our sins and let them run rampant in our lives, the roots will be difficult to remove. Even if we try after a while, we may not get it all out of the soil of our souls, and it will just grow back again. Thankfully, Jesus is the gardener that never neglects us, His children. When we confess with all contrition and submit to Him, He will extract the deepest roots of our sin. Then we can be firmly rooted in God's love and mercy.
The roots, sin, the negative, all of those things are so anchored in our souls it makes it difficult for people to live freely. If we could only hold onto the Lord, and his promises, and scriptures, and the words of encouragement we have heard. Instead, we tend to hold onto the negatives and the longer we do, the deeper the root burrows.
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