Friday, February 3, 2012

What Kind of Lawn Do You Have?

"The Lord will give [unyielding and impenetrable] strength to His people; the Lord will bless His people with peace." Psm 29:11

Do you exercise His PEACE and His unyielding and impenetrable STRENGTH throughout your day? Or do you give in to worry and weakness?

I challenge those who count themselves among His to CURB the complaining and the fretting by guarding your heart as you actively FILTER your thoughts, which means YOU actively select the "seed-thoughts" you plant into your being. Then allow Him to rain on those selective seeds by CHOOSING to praise Him with your mouth.

Have you ever noticed that weeds do not grow easily, if at all, in a healthy lawn? A healthy lawn is thick with good blades of grass that came from good grass seed. A lush lawn usually has trimmed shrubs, is mulched, and has nice growing trees. It all around says, "I am well-tended!"

Secondly, have you ever noticed you don't have to plant weed seeds? Weeds seeds just blow in, and if they find bare spots, they root quickly without invitation. Weedy-thoughts are like that too. They don't require active planting. All they have to do is blow in, find bare spots, and root uninvited.

The careless or complacent gardener has an unkempt lawn with overgrown shrubby and mangled trees. It is full of bare spots and weeds. Here in the south, usually the bare spots in a physical lawn are the result of parasites, such as brown patch. Brown patch spreads with rapid pace if not treated. In the spiritual scope, bare spots are caused by the parasites of complaint and worry, and they too spread rapidly if not treated.

It is amazing what our CHOICES unleash in our lives. If you unleash worry, fretting, or complaints, you unleash the multiplication of those very elements, which shrinks your capacity to hold God and His overcoming power. If you unleash praise, thanksgiving, and Godly-focus of thought, you multiply those elements in your life, which then increases your capacity to hold more of Him and His overcoming power. The more you choose Him over life's worries, the greater His overcoming power will pulsate through your days!

A wise child will inspect their spiritual lawn regularly. They will quickly identify areas of parasites and treat them with a good "wash" of the Word and praise. A vigilant gardener produces a lush lawn. A careless or complacent gardener produces a weed infested lawn.

Isaiah 30 lays out a prerequisite to the ability of sowing well. It reads:

"Although the Lord has given you bread of privation and water of oppression, He, your Teacher will no longer hide Himself, but your eyes will behold your Teacher. Your ears will hear a word behind you, 'This is the way, walk in it,' whenever you turn to the right or to the left. And you will defile your graven images overlaid with silver, and your molten images plated with gold. You will scatter them as an impure thing, and say to them, “Be gone!” Then He will give you rain for the seed which you will sow in the ground, and bread from the yield of the ground, and it will be rich and plenteous; on that day your livestock will graze in a roomy pasture."

Did you catch the prerequisite? The prerequisite is to cast out all impure things.

What are impure things? Anything that exalts itself equal to or above Him. It could be YOUR plans. It could be YOUR desires. It could be your thirst for the "easy-life." It could be your envy of what someone else has. It could be lust and sexual habits that you have given place to. It could be pride in your own ability to make something of your life apart from God. It could be many many things. I ask you most sincerely to ask the Holy Spirit to shine His light on the impure things in your own life and then courage-up, casting them far from your life with a declaration of "BE GONE!" Only then can He enter in and rain on your field, producing substance of beauty and provision.

The kind of life you live is YOUR choosing. Recognize God has empowered you to SOW wisely. Whether you do so or not is a choice He has granted to you. He has laid out the results of both the vigilant sower and the careless sower.

Which one are YOU?

Your "lawn" and the product from it will testify for all to see. Does it testify that you are His, wisely stewarding over the life He has gifted to you? Or does it tell a different story?

Make no mistake: it does tell a story!



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