God Wants Us to Grow – October 13, 2023

I will sing for the one I love a song about his vineyard: My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside. He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest vines. He built a watchtower in it and cut out a winepress as well. Then he looked for a crop of good grapes . . . The vineyard of the LORD Almighty is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are the vines he delighted in.
Isaiah 5:1,2,7

God Wants Us to Grow

God isn’t kind to us because we were first kind to him. He’s kind to us because being kind to us is what God delights in. The prophet Isaiah compared God’s kindness to what it takes to build a vineyard—digging the land, removing all the stones, planting the vines, building a watchtower and a winepress. All of that takes a lot of work. And it took an extra amount of work in Palestine (where Isaiah lived at the time).

The Palestinians have a legend that goes like this: When God created the world, an angel flew over it, carrying a bag of stones under each arm. As he flew over Palestine, one bag broke so that half of all the stones in the world were in Palestine.

The point of that short story is to say that there are a lot of stones in the dirt of Palestine. And if you have ever been given the task of removing stones from a field or a backyard, then you certainly know that this isn’t a delightful task. But it’s the kind of task that God delights in if it takes care of you.

Your life is a labor of love for God. He is glad to invest whatever amount of time it takes to strengthen you spiritually so you produce a bumper crop of spiritual fruit. He even gave his son, Jesus, as a sacrifice for your sins so you could be in a right relationship with him and spend your life serving him. What are ways you can do that today?

Prayer:
Lord God, help me to guide my life according to your Word and ground my faith on all that was accomplished for me by Jesus. Amen.