On Pruning

On days like today, I want to ride my bike to the ends of the earth through rows of changing trees. I love the seasons that this world undertakes, and, more with every season of life, I see the way that through all of nature, God reflects what He is doing with us.

Lately, I feel like so much of His teaching, his showing, has been by way of trees. He wants us to be His trees. He makes us His trees. (This is not a hippie post!) Trees are rooted in one place, but experience changes all the time. They are met with sun and rain and snow, through seasons of green leaves and beautiful fruit and seasons of barrenness and branches falling off. But they are rooted.

Jesus talks about us as His trees quite a bit. For example, in Matthew 7:18

"A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit."

My tendency is to think, "Oh crap, if I'm not bearing good fruit (i.e. patience, kindness, self-control, goodness, faithfulness), then I am not a healthy tree."

But Romans 11:16 says this:

"If the dough offered as firstfruits is holy, so is the whole lump, and if the root is holy, so are the branches."

Jesus is the root. If we look on Him and see the way that He lives as undeniably beautiful, if we look on His life and His sacrifice and His resurrection and find the truth that we have been searching for in it, if we know that we can turn nowhere else besides to Him, He will be our root for us. He takes on all of our mess-ups, our insecurities, guilt, shame--and begins a new thing in us, begins transforming us into His image. And because He, the root, is holy, so are we, the branches. I am holy because the branch is holy. I am declared not guilty in Jesus. We so often focus on the fruit and we try to create it in ourselves, but we can't. A good tree is a tree that is planted and its roots go down deep.

Jesus talks more about us as His trees in John 15. He tells us,

"I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing."

So what is the pruning He's talking about? If we are His trees, he prunes us so we can be more fruitful. Good trees need pruning. If a tree is bearing fruit, it needs pruning. And pruning is not cute. It is ugly. It makes a tree look like it's been massacred.
Hebrews 12:6 says :

"For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives."

This, to me, is that pruning. The Lord ordains for His loved ones to be disciplined sometimes. But as a father, it's because He loves us. When we are turning to our own successes or other people or good times to satisfy us, and not the source of all good things, He lets us know. And we need to fall so He can build us back up again.

We have been born again. It takes a lot of time and a lot of falling down to be able to walk. That's the only way our muscles are strengthened. "You can't go straight from lying down to walking. It doesn't happen. We can't run an olympic marathon when we're still crawling."

A few girls and I have been studying the book of Daniel. Daniel 4 has especially stood out to me. In this chapter, Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, relays to Daniel a new dream he has had:

"The visions of my head as I lay in bed were these: I saw, and behold, a tree in the midst of the earth, and its height was great. The tree grew and became strong, and its top reached to heaven, and it was visible to the end of the whole earth. Its leaves were beautiful and its fruit abundant, and in it was food for all. The beasts of the field found shade under it, and the birds of the heavens lived in its branches, and all flesh was fed from it.
"I saw in the visions of my head as I lay in bed, and behold, a watcher, a holy one, came down from heaven. He proclaimed aloud and said thus: 'Chop down the tree and lop off its branches, strip off its leaves and scatter its fruit. Let the beasts flee from under it and the birds from its branches. But leave the stump of its roots in the earth, bound with a band of iron and bronze, amid the tender grass of the field. Let him be wet with the dew of heaven. Let his portion be with the beasts in the grass of the earth. Let his mind be changed from a man’s, and let a beast’s mind be given to him; and let seven periods of time pass over him. The sentence is by the decree of the watchers, the decision by the word of the holy ones, to the end that the living may know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will and sets over it the lowliest of men.'
Daniel 4:10-17

Daniel tells Nebuchadnezzar that the tree of this dream is his highness himself, Nebuchadnezzar. Who has been prosperous, but who has worshiped himself instead of the Most High who rules the kingdom of men. But he adds, "And as it was commanded to leave the stump of the roots of the tree, your kingdom shall be confirmed for you from the time that you know that Heaven rules" (4:26). And Nebuchadnezzar does experience this time of being cut down to a stump and losing everything, and he does come to praise God because of it, saying "Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and extol and honor the King of heaven, for all his works are right and his ways are just; and those who walk in pride he is able to humble"(4:37).

Sometimes the children of God need to be cut down to stumps. It is only there in complete brokenness and humility that we can be brought back to Him who we need to restore us and guide us. But He does cover us with a band of iron and bronze so that our roots may not be taken from under us--our kingdom is still confirmed by Christ. He will complete the work that He starts in us.

This pruning, this consecration work, is similar to the work of a silversmith, who continually scrapes off impurities of the silver as they rise to the surface. He does this until he can see his own face in the silver. For all of this life, until we see Jesus' face, He will be allowing our impurities, our pride and malice and anger and greed, to rise to the surface of our lives where He can scrape them off, where He can cut off those branches. He will continue doing this so that He can see His face in our lives with increasing measure.

"The life of consecration is dying little deaths to ourselves so that the life of His Son can be made manifest in us. We have this idea that consecration takes place in holy halls and in noble moments and in safety, but it doesn't. The christian life is dangerous and it's messy. Consecration involves persistence and pruning and separation and surrender. It's the wrestle." --Brooke Fraser

Francis Ridley Havergal, a hymnist from the 19th century, writes about the life of consecration in her book Kept for the Master's Use:

"Yes, for Him I want to be kept. Kept for His sake; kept for His use; kept to be His witness; kept for His joy! Kept for Him, that in me He may show forth some tiny sparkle of His light and beauty; kept to do His will and His work in His own way; kept (it may be) to suffer for His sake; kept for Him, that He may do just what seemeth Him good with me; kept so that no other lord shall have any more dominion over me, but that Jesus shall have all there is to have—little enough, indeed, but not divided or diminished by any other claim. Is not this, O you who love the Lord—is not this worth living for, worth asking for, worth trusting for?

This is consecration, and I can not tell you the blessedness of it. The Lord Jesus does take the life that is offered to Him, and He does keep the life for Himself that is entrusted to Him; but until the life is offered we can not know the taking, and until the life is entrusted, we can not know or understand the keeping. All we can do is to say, 'O taste and see!' and bear witness to the reality of Jesus Christ, and set to our seal that we have found Him true to His every word, and that we have proved Him able even to do exceeding abundantly above all we asked or thought.

...it never occurred to us what good fruit might be grown in our straggling hedgerows, nor how the shade of our trees has been keeping the sun from the scanty crops.

And so, season by season, we shall be sometimes not a little startled, yet always very glad, as we find that bit by bit the Master shows how much more may be made of our ground, how much more He is able to make of it than we did; and we shall be willing to work under Him and do exactly what He points out, even if it comes to cutting down a shady tree or clearing out a ditch full of pretty weeds and wild flowers.

As the seasons pass on, it will seem as if there was always more and more to be done, the very fact that He is constantly showing us something more to be done in it, proving that it is really His ground. Only let Him have the ground, no matter how poor or overgrown the soil may be, and then He will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord. Yes, even our desert! And then we shall sing, 'My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies' (Song of Sol. 6:2)."