Most folks who know me, know that we live on a farm and always have a huge garden every year.
We can, freeze and preserve from this garden to feed our family for the next year (and I sell a little, too, to help pay the costs of the garden seed and plants).
As you can imagine, a garden this size requires a lot of work – and that’s before the canning starts! This morning I was pulling weeds out of the beans and came across a “parable”.
Can you tell the difference between the morning glory (a weed) and the beans in this picture?
Maybe this picture makes it a little clearer.
Much like Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares, the morning glories and beans look very similar. The morning glories are the more pointed leaves, and the beans are darker green and more rounded – but as you can see, you have to look closely (discern) which is a destructive weed (of which morning glories most definitely are) and which is the food giving bean plant.
If you aren’t a gardener, you may actually buy morning glory seeds to plant for flowers – and they are very pretty – but they also can choke the life out of other plants. This is a picture of a morning glory in bloom from last year’s garden.
In the early morning, in the dew and fog – they are absolutely beautiful, but morning glories are a lot like sin and false teaching. It is very pretty, and very difficult, at times, to tell from the food giving plant (or truth). The morning glory is also very invasive. One morning glory plant left to itself can wrap around several food plants – and wrap in such a way that it is nearly impossible to remove it from the food plant without breakage or damage (and although weeds, broken off, grow back profusely – a food plant, once broken, dies).
The only way to remove a morning glory plant is to pull it out by the root – which is also hard to do because it is hidden among the plants. What you have to do is trace it out – back to the source (root) and pull it out.
Sin and false teaching is the same way. It must be traced back to the source, and pulled out – and destroyed. There is no other way. It cannot be allowed to live alongside true teaching, for no matter how “pretty” it is – it will destroy everything around it.
I love living on the farm, and I even love working in the garden – but I especially love it when God shows me truth in the midst of my daily life!
May God bless you today! Amen!
