At the beginning of summer I decided I would take my time reading through the book of Isaiah.
Here is what caught my eye today....
Isaiah 17:10-11
"Why? Because you have turned from the God who can save you.
You have forgotten the Rock who can hide you.
So you may plant the finest grapevines
and import the most expensive seedlings.
They may sprout on the day you set them out;
yes, they may blossom on the very morning you plant them,
but you will never pick any grapes from them.
Your only harvest will be a load of grief and unrelieved pain."
Talk about depressing, huh?
But really - it just reminds me that everything in the world (but God) falls just short of fulfilling us.
If we live off of the earth, our seedlings will blossom... they will come up bright and beautiful; giving us certain hopes of a bountiful crop. We will run to our friends and neighbors and invite them over to see what our fields have in store for us. We will boast and brag and feel generally high inside knowing that our labor has paid off.
Then, hours, days, months, years later... we will look out our window to see that our once-promising crop has given us false hopes. What we assumed would bring us full stomachs, fortune, glamour and fame has turned its back on us... all our eyes see now is withering disappointment and all we can feel is our spirit crushing our already-heavily-labored backs.
It happens - (in real life) - to Christians all the time. We wonder why life is so hard, why our work never pays off, why everything is so busy, why we keep falling into temptation... but, perhaps, the thing we should really be wondering is what right we thought we had to wander out of the Lord's vineyard in the first place??
What were we in pursuit of that we couldn't find growing to perfection in that very field?
If we live off of heaven, feed out of the very hand of God, trust the labor he has done for us rather than pursue our own, then we will be fed exactly what we need on a daily basis. We may not always have more than we need - but we will have the essentials.
We don't have to go creating our own agendas and toils when God has already selected our very course of work. The course he has chosen will certainly not always be easy, but at least we will have a return of choice grapes and the heart of God hovering over our lives.
What, in my life, is proof that I am planting my own vineyard with imported seedlings?
What, in my schedule, proves that I put myself before the Lord?
In what areas am I finding disatisfaction and unfulfillment? How can I remind myself, everyday, that those areas are turning up void because I have turned from the God who has saved me?
this is amazing.
ReplyDeletei was going to say somethink like 'where do you come up with this stuff?' when i realized...'duh! it's in the bible!'
thanks for yet again pointing out and critically discussing something that most people would have just taken at its confusing-to-us-westerners face value.