Recently I looked out at the front yard of my house and looked at the large amount of weeds that have sprung up in the gardens out there. While looking at the large task before me, God spoke to my spirit and said “What is reflected in your natural surrounding is what is happening in your life spiritually. This is just like your life at the moment. There are a number of things that if they had of been dealt with earlier, have sprung up and are chocking the life out of the good things sown into your life.” He then revealed that it is not the individual weeds that are the problem but the large number of them that causes the issues.

If I had of dealt with the weeds in my garden on a regular basis it would not have been such a big job. In fact, it took me a couple of weeks to do!! And I’m still not completely done. Isn’t that just like our life. If we don’t deal with the things that God pinpoints straight away, they multiply and grow and take over the whole area until they make a big mess. The Bible talks about this in 2 places. Firstly, in Song of Solomon it talks about the small foxes as being the ones that spoil the vine. This speaks about each little thing adding up together to ruin everything. Little things by themselves don’t make much of a problem. But when they add up, you soon find that it is a large problem that takes a lot of time, effort and energy to remove.

The second place which the Bible talks about weeds is in Mark 4 – the Parable of the Sower. It talks about the word being sown where the weeds were, and they choke the results of the good seeds. Jesus went on to explain that “the seed cast in the weeds represents the ones who hear the kingdom news but are overwhelmed with worries about all the things they have to do and all the things they want to get. The stress strangles what they heard, and nothing comes of it. (Mark 4:18-19 MSG) Doesn’t that sound just like us today? I know it does me. I have let the word be choked because of worry and the stresses of life. Recently this has been really been laid home to me. The stresses of life have caused things in my life to become chocked. They have lost their ability to produce life – specifically God’s life of peace, joy and contentment. As such, it has caused me to become frustrated, tired and sick. Stress does that to you. And it one of satan’s most effect weapons to stop the Word taking strong root in our lives.

So how do we overcome these weeds? Well one of the things that I had to do to thoroughly weed my garden was to pull them out! Sounds simple but it isn’t, especially when the weeds have had time to burrow down deep into the soil of the garden, get established and spread out. The other thing that weeds do is to sap all the water from the surrounding area, making the ground tough. When I was tackling the weeding, it was after a number of days of rain, plus it was when the ground was soft. This helped with me pulling out the weeds. But don’t you know it I could get all of them out. But as usual God spoke to me about that too!! He said that it takes time to get rid of things that have been able to establish themselves in our lives over a long period of time. Is that just like a God of Grace! He knows that we need correction and to deal with things, but He also knows that somethings take the time, patience and effort to pull up once, then again and again and again until you finally get to the root of the situation!

Weeds love to get in and are do so easily. It is up to us to identify them quickly and then to pull them out before they spread and do some real damage.