How do we do it?
How do we truly grow better at tending the garden that is our life to bear beautiful and desirable fruit?
The words that come to me on this topic are always, “ He must increase, but I must decrease.” John 3:30.
The other words that also come to me?
Cover crops.
With farm and gardens you have guaranteed tasks:
Fertilizing and weeding.
Without the proper nutrients in a soil, you won’t get the desired harvest.
Without removing the competition for said nutrients (light and water too) your sowed plants will never succeed.
Thus anyone who has ever farmed or gardened knows how necessary it is to routinely weed and feed one’s plants-an needing and often trying but necessary labor.
Enter cover crops.
A cover crop is a plant or mix of plants that can be used in lieu of fertilizing and weeding.
They are a species that is designed to grow in the off season, like a winter wheat, OR amongst your plants during the growing season, like buckwheat or hairy vetch, in order to protect the soil, input nutrients and prevent other undesirable plants from taking hold.
There’s an art to using cover crops and different species are used in different seasons, manners, geographical locations for and different purposes, but in essence with gardening you have two choices.
You can commit to weeding aconstantly and fertilizing often OR you can nurture a cover crop that will do it for you.
The cover crop will competitively exclude (squeeze out) weeds while also putting nutrients (like nitrogen) into your soil and all you have to do is focus on allowing it to flourish.
That is in essence what God has called us to do-not to weed out everything that is bad in ourselves but to let the cover crop that is Him and His spirit, push everything else out.
If you can for a second, picture in your mind the act of retrieving a hoe and shovel from the gardening shed, putting on your gloves and kneeling in the dirt for hours of weeding in the sun only to wake up tomorrow morning to see a whole new crop of weeds have taken seed.
Feel the frustration of your work coming to nothing.
It’s back breaking work but a requirement if you are going to keep the bad out and allow the good to continue growing.
Then picture for a moment something else.
Awaking in the morning early spring to spread seeds in your freshly prepared garden beds.
Scoring the earth with a rake to make the soil ready to receive the seeds.
Imagine watering them and checking on the seeds as they quickly sprout into seedlings and soon into full grown crops.
You’ve provided them the space for them to expand and take over, to cover all the bare earth so the weeds won’t come in and the ones that are already there are squeezed out.
You’ve significantly reduced if not eliminated your work load on the weeding and feeding front in the garden world, you will periodically turn over the cover crop and re-seed or introduce another species, but it’s nothing compared to the work of weeding, tilling, killing and fertilizing.
Where you once had a scraggly unruly jungle of weeds you now have a lush lawn of cover crop watching over and tending your garden for you as the buckwheat seen here (little white flowers) is doing in this garden.
***
I don’t believe scripture tells us we have been called to a life of personal weeding and fertilizing but rather of cultivation of love for our Maker.
God is the weeder and the fertilizer and He does such things by way of growing His Spirit in us.
For if you live according the flesh you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.
Romans 8:13
Yet in all things we are more than conquerors through HIM who loved us.
Romans 8:37
As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith as you have been right, abounding in it with Thanksgiving.
Colossians 2:6
But how, HOW?
How does He do it?
How do you get fit? How do you learn a language? How do you become an artist?
You FIRST become aware of your deficit, your need and desire to change.
Then after that?
Time spent.
Energy spent.
Minds focused.
I know that ight still feel fuzzy to some so I asked God what are the steps to growing the Holy Spirit as a cover crop to push out the bad?
And He said:
You don’t.
That’s not why you do it.
The bad being pushed out, like the cover crops being present, is simply an outgrowth of Holy replacement and in going improvement following the initial sanctification.
As you are filled with and by Me, there is less room or need for the rest.
The Fruits of my Spirit appear because you are like a weaned child, content and calm in Spirit.
The part people miss is to desire Me.
To desire to spend time with Me.
They focus on Me as a means to better their life here on earth instead of realizing that I am life.
I am all.
And everything that is beautiful in this world, comes from me.
Don’t worship the blessings which can be torn away in a moment, but the Creator of the blessings.
Why?
Because that’s your design and in that and only that will you be found complete.
To know Me is to know My word.
To love Me is to praise Me in all things.
To obey Me is to love Me with all your heart, soul and mind.
This is why the “rich” who have lovely things in this life find it difficult to find me for they care more for the things of this earth than they do I.
“It’s easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
Don’t try to earn your way to good.
Once you confess me as God and Jesus as your savior and Lord, you are saved.
The purification process?
That comes from life spent in and with and through me.
I want it all.
I told you I was a jealous God.
~
Forgive me for any mistakes or missteps, I am a student not teacher and simply sharing what the Lord is teaching me.
❤️
Such a good post, Sarah. I had never heard of cover crops — this analogy is awesome. I have been the person you described in your last post, and striving comes easy for me. In the last 5 years or so the Father has continually brought me back to this simple theme: intimacy. Seek Him first, delight myself in Him, desire Him, pursue closeness. It’s so simple and yet very counterintuitive when you’ve operated in a striving, perfectionist, critical, religious manner for many years. I too often forget and act more like a Pharisee than a daughter. He is so good and faithful! His response to your question (thank you for sharing!) was a reminder I needed and makes my heart burn with desire for greater intimacy!
Beautiful ❤️