I was listening to an online sermon yesterday morning and God blew my mind with the lesson He had for me.
The title of the sermon was “Don’t Fight Your Future.” The main thought of the sermon dealt with when we feel like Satan has us pinned down and we just can’t get out from underneath something that’s really heavy.
The passage of scripture that blew my mind was: Deuteronomy 20:19 – “When you lay siege to a city for a long time, fighting against it to capture it, do not destroy its trees by putting an ax to them, because you can eat their fruit. Do not cut them down. Are the trees of the field people, that you should besiege them?”
The context for this passage is that the people of Israel have been in the wilderness for 40 years. It is now time for them to cross over and take possession of the land God promised to give them.
This is a completely new generation which has grown up in the wilderness. So before Moses passes away, he is re-teaching them the Law, and giving the people final instructions.
In Deuteronomy 20:19 Moses is telling the people that in their conquest of the land, not to destroy the very things that will be life-sustaining for them going forward. Don’t destroy their future food supply, just to build siege works.
As I was listening to the online sermon, Pastor Steven made the profound statement: Don’t cut down what God has created to grow you.
Have you ever been through a really painful season in your life? It feels like you are pinned down and can hardly breathe.
When you finally come out of that season … you wind up realizing there are a lot of things which now have a very negative association because they are directly connected to that painful season.
And so you purge! You throw things out! Normal things … perfectly good things … things which wouldn’t strike anybody else as needing to be thrown out. But the negative painful association is just so strong! You can’t look at it without all that pain and ick washing back over you in a flood-wave!
So into the garbage it all goes!!
Deuteronomy 20:19 spoke straight to my heart … don’t throw it all out! In purging the pain, don’t throw out everything.
Here you can see my clerodendrum. It has just come through a hard difficult season as well.
Perhaps you might remember it from when I wrote about it this past Christmas. It was our “Christmas tree.” It was bright and vibrant and loaded with tons of new growth!
But alas, this past season just about did it in. Almost all of its leaves turned yellow and fell off. Part of me wanted to take pruners to it and just cut the entire dead-looking vine back completely. But deep down I knew there was still life in it.
I didn’t dare cut the vine back completely because if I did, that would probably be the end of it. So, in a salvage attempt, I repotted the clerodendrum, burying all of the vine! All of it! The entire dead-looking vine with no leaves I stuffed down in the pot and covered it all with dirt.
And lo and behold! … there was indeed life still in it! Here you can see all the new little green life sprouting from the tangled mess of dead-looking vines.
This same thing is true when we come through painful seasons in our own life. Just as I thought about completely cutting off the dead-looking clerodendrum … so also, we want to “cut off completely” those things about that painful season that seem so “dead.” Get rid of it!
But wait … … Deuteronomy 20:19 speaks straight to our heart: don’t cut it all down. Don’t throw it all away! Don’t cut it off completely! There’s still hope for the future. There’s still life in there.
As Pastor Steven said in the sermon: Don’t cut down what God has created to grow you.
Give the clerodendrum a chance to heal … and recover.
And also … give yourself time. Don’t throw everything out. God is using it to grow you. There is still hope for the future … there’s still life in there.
Yes, purge the pain … but don’t throw out everything.
(And yes, in case you were wondering, this indeed is my “purge” garbage bag from my recent difficult season. Purging the pain from our heart though is another matter entirely.)
