Bearing fruit in the Christian life requires pruning and cutting. When you endure hardship and pain, do not lose heart. God is using your suffering to prepare you for a great harvest!
I’m Joni Eareckson Tada, and I wonder if it’s spring yet where you live.
Welcome to Joni and Friends, and I don’t know about you, but I am ready for springtime to come. The early blossoms on some fruit trees are beautiful right now, reminding me that soon the warm days of bud and blossom are going to arrive, and I can’t wait.
Around this time of year, we used to pack up and head up to western Maryland near the little town of Hancock where my Uncle Don and Aunt Emma had lived. They have a small little apple farm. Uncle Don’s house nestles on the top of a ridge where you can see his apple orchard spreading below like a wide skirt. In early spring there are row after row of trees laden with the most beautiful, fragrant white blossoms. You smell the perfume; you hear the busy bees.
It is a beautiful orchard, and to me personally, it holds a deep secret about God because early spring is grafting time. Uncle Don would find just the right place on the bark, peel it away, and make a slanting cut into the heart of the wood. He would then take a small branch, whittle its end, then push the graft into the damp center of the tree, covering that union to keep the graft cool and moist. And later that spring, new life would emerge from that branch – blossoms to buds to fruit. But it does not happen without a wounding, without a cutting in both tree and branch.
An old saint once wrote; he said, “Conversion is not the smooth, easy-going process some men seem to think...It is wounding work, this breaking of the hearts, but without wounding there is no saving…Where there is grafting there will always be a cutting, the graft must be let in with a wound; to stick it onto the outside or to tie it on with a string would be of no use. Heart must be set to heart and back to back or there will be no sap from root to branch. And this, I say, must be done by a wound, by a cut.”
Well, never would I have dreamed, wandering through that orchard as a kid, watching my Uncle Don graft branches into the bark – never would I have imagined that my conversion process to Christ would be as hard as it was. I was to learn through my broken neck, that there is no saving grace, there is no saving work apart from a wounding – yes, a wounding of Christ on his cross; but also, a wounding when you and I suffer, and, as a result, are set; we are let in; we are cut – cut into the body of Christ through affliction and hardship. The Bible says, “Many are the sufferings of those who enter the kingdom of God.” My Christian life became a wounding work. My heart was set to God's, like a grafting cut into the bark of an apple tree, and whether I liked it or not, it was heart-to-heart, back-to-back – so much heartache and tears. It was definitely not a smooth, easygoing process.
God talks about grafting in John 15. For it was there that Jesus told his disciples – and he tells you today: “I am the vine; you are the branch. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; for apart from me you can do nothing.” Friend, you may be going through a time of wounding, and, if you are, take heart right now because your heart is being set to God's, and there is no saving work apart from pain. Your life will produce so much more fruit from it all – fruit that you probably won’t even see or know about, because for those God loves, he grafts.
Just remember what I have learned: apart from Christ you can do nothing – but in him, you can do everything.
© Joni and Friends