THE WEEDS IN YOUR YARD

“You are tempted by the evil things you want. Your own desire leads you away and traps you. Your desire grows inside you until it results in sin. Then the sin grows bigger and bigger and finally ends in death.” (James 1:14-15 Easy-to-Read Bible)

On a day when a heat dome had settled over our geographical area; a day where meteorologists would explain in their forecast saying, “A persistent high-pressure weather system is hovering over us trapping a mass of hot air below it,” a father taught his sons a lesson about the weeds in the yard. Keep reading because in a minute or two, you can read about the weeds in your yard.

The father and his low-income family lived in a house that had no grass in the front yard. The yard had only a layer of dirt that covered the hard and hot ground. If you were to see a picture of this yard, you would think it was an old phot of a lawn in the Great Plains during the 1937 Great Dust Bowl, along the northern and southern fences that served as the property line between the father’s house and their next-door neighbors, weeds would grow ferociously, providing the only greenery in the otherwise barren yard. I suspect the intermittent or scattered rains that interrupted the sun-drenched days of summer, enabled the weeds to grow bigger and bigger. It was almost a miraculous sight to see. But this miraculous sight would not be allowed to stand as some type of memorial. No, sir! The father would send his two oldest boys out into the agonizing heat to pull the weeds out of the ground from the roots. Take note. The father was not just teaching his boys about stewardship, and he was not teaching them how be good yard-keepers who could compete with their neighbors who had bountiful lawns. About now, you may be asking, “Then what was the father trying to teach them?” Let me tell you. The father was teaching his sons that when you have weeds in your yard, and by “your yard” he meant “your life,” you need to pluck them out completely so they will not keep growing and eventually producing great ruin in “your yard.” The boys would not understand this life lesson until much later in life. But when they became young men, they understood that the weeds represented sin, sin of any degree, and they recognized that the father wanted them to know that if sin is not uprooted in a timely way, it would grow and make its presence very visible in their lives.

Now, if you are reading this meditation, you are most likely an adult. Great! That means that you have been blessed to see many risings of the sun and the going down of the same. However, since the scripture points directly at our failings, “All sin and fall short of the glory of God,” then you, me too, must focus on removing the weeds in our yards. The writer in Hebrews labels these weeds, “the sins that so easily entangle us.” Dr. Jeremiah Wright used to call our sinning, not practiced sins, but our occasional mess-ups, a failing.

Therefore, as an individual believer, you must be diligent and dutiful in pulling out the weeds in your yard. A failure to do so can lead to a disastrous consequence or consequences. Think on what you have read. Pull some weeds in your yard today, and I will, too. Be blessed!

“A little yeast can change a whole batch of dough,” (Galatians 5:9 Contemporary English Version)

Committed to the climb,

Mark L. King