I am a fan of having a great looking garden.

There’s nothing nicer on a sunny day than looking out on a well looked after garden, filled with life and colour. It looks neat, cultivated, and you just want to be in it, to smell and see it’s goodness. There’s something about it that connects me to God.

The problem is that to have a garden like this you have to work hard to achieve that it doesn’t happen by accident, and to add to my initial point, I am not a fan of working on a great looking garden.

My work in a garden is very sporadic. I’ll have moments where I ‘attack’ it in a weekend flurry of activity but other than that its had to learn to fend for itself. Poor thing! The truth is over the years we’ve actively tried to reduce the amount of garden we have to work on. We put down flags, extended our driveway, and put down artificial turf in the back. That has cut down the work a lot, but it hasn’t eliminated it, even in the artificial back garden.

I’m arriving at my point! Because there’s one big reason why the work hasn’t been eliminated

WEEDS!!!!! Yes you heard me.……WEEDS!!!!

They will grow anywhere! They can squeeze their way up in and around anything. They can fight their way through stones, concrete, dump proof layers and fake grass. They are opportunists! They wait in the dark while I am looking at my nice garden and then when I turn around they jump out of the ground like a thief!!!! They pop up in weird cracks and shapes, they seem to enjoy arriving in spaces that are hard to reach. I am not a fan!!!!!

Why am I telling you about weeds?

Because today I read a phrase about the nature of sin that made me think of those pesky weeds.

Sin is a word that at its simplest means to miss the mark ofwhat God has for us. Paul, one of the early church leaders, is writing to Jesus followers in Rome about the nature of sin and the commandments of God. After talking about the benefit of the commandments he says the following;

But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead. Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death. So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good Romans 7:8-12

That phrase ‘seizing the opportunity’ is the phrase that jumped out to me.

Sin is just like those weeds. It is relentless, it is persistent, it is tireless in its pursuit to grow in our lives. It will take any gap or opportunity to show itself, and just like a weed we are incapable of stopping it from growing completely. The fact that we will never fully experience freedom from the presence of sin in our lives until Christ returns makes this a truth. However, if we regularly attend to, and remove the sin that is trying to grow up in our lives we can stop it from taking over. In the same way an untended weed will soon take over, the same principle applies to sin.

We must tend to the weeds in our lives.

The best way to do this is through a relationship with Jesus, rather than focusing on sin itself. Just like in a garden we don’t focus on the weeds but on the beauty that is set before us, the same goes for our relationships with Jesus if we have them. Christ is the most beautiful form of anything we can become. He is the garden on a sunny day which doesn’t have a weed in sight. Keeping Him in our focus keeps our focus off the weeds. Our desire to behold Him will compel us to remove and tend to the weeds but it will keep our focus off them. It’s incredible how this change in perspective helps us in the pursuit of freedom.

Sin will seize any opportunity we give it to grow. It is therefore vital for us to keep increasing the role of Christ in our lives. Let’s keep Him front and centre. Let’s enjoy hanging out in that garden. Lets not allow sin to seize any opportunity in our lives!!!