Sin and the Art of Flowerbed Maintenance
On either side of our front porch, my wife and I have flowerbeds. Think of the lowest-maintenance flowerbeds you can conjure, and you’re probably close to what we’ve got. In each bed, there’s a layer of black mulch interrupted by a perennial shrub or two at each foot. We had these beds put in to give us some curb appeal and to brighten up the front of our house without requiring a whole lot of maintenance from either of us. Joke’s on me, because every week after I mow the lawn I spend another hour or so in these very flowerbeds pulling up weeds despite the industrial grade tarp we put under the soil to avoid precisely this situation.
If you spend this much time with weeds, a few things about them start to really stand out. More than just being unwanted and unsightly, they’re really striking analogs to a few elements of my own life (and probably to yours too). In fact, I think I see more of the nature of my own sin in these weeds than in most anything else in the created world.
Obviously, there’s a sort of overarching metaphor in which the Christian life is my pristine flowerbed, and the weeds are my (or our) own sin. It’s an invader into my life (and yours — and yet the soil of our fallen hearts is just so good to them), just as those weeds are in the flowerbed. They’re not supposed to be there, they’re a deviation from the perennial shrubs, and their impact is by far a net negative on the flowerbed as a whole.
But here’s the thing about these weeds: the problem isn’t just that they’re existing in a place they shouldn’t be. The problem is the way they’re existing. If you see the narrow, slick, green shoot of a weed just barely cresting over the top of all that mulch, you can be certain that that particular weed goes much deeper into the bed, sometimes rippling several inches into and across it. A barely visible weed doesn’t betray a small and inconsequential issue in the flowerbed. Rather, it’s indicative of an issue that goes down into the core of the bed. You can’t just clip the top of that weed off and call it a day. You have to get down on your hands and knees and drive your fingers deep into the mulch and the soil under it to find the root of that weed. Sin operates in much the same way — if it’s manifesting itself visibly, it’s because its root has found favorable soil in which to grow strong deep within your own soul. Jesus said that it’s out of the overflow of the heart that the mouth speaks, which means if you’re quick to anger or impatience, and quick to verbalize that feeling angrily or impatiently, there’s a root that goes much deeper than the words you’ve spoken. There, you’ve got yourself a narrow, slick, green shoot that needs to be dug out of your own soul. It’s hard, dirty, far-from-glamorous work, but it sure is necessary.
Another thing these weeds do is nestle up closely to the apparently healthy shrubs. To find them, you have to move the limbs of those shrubs to one side or the other so you can see the weeds that might be hiding in the shade and shelter of these plants. It’s a helpful visual that sometimes what seem to be the best parts of us, our greatest gifts, are in fact the things hiding some rot in our souls. Are you a great preacher, writer, or leader? Then there’s an even greater propensity to try to make up for an anemic inner life by relying on your own proficiency. Those skills and gifts can easily become little band-aids which cover up spiritual gunshot wounds.
There is no weed-free flowerbed just as there’s no sin-free Christian life, at least on this side of Jesus’s return. As long as it’s called today, those weeds will be poking up out of the mulch. That being said, the plants in a flowerbed can only thrive when the weeds are being pulled regularly. Similarly, the full and solid spiritual person is one who recognizes where the weeds are and does the hard work of pulling them up at their roots. They’re the one who looks at their own spiritual life through the lenses of Scripture and godly friends and mentors who know the person well. The spiritually healthy person is the one who looks to the Lord Jesus for grace and acceptance when those weeds rear their heads, and who asks him, the True Vinedresser, to remove those very weeds.
