Pruned for Joy

If you’ve ever experienced the joy of gardening, you will appreciate the wonderful benefits of pruning off all the dead leaves and twigs after a hard season of winter.

When we ourselves experience God’s pruning in our lives, we assume that He too is cutting off all the dead things in our lives.

However, I recently heard an insightful sermon that gave me a different perspective to God’s kind of pruning and His purpose for it in our lives. Unlike winter pruning, God also prunes us during Spring and Summer seasons by thinning out our growth to help our fruits grow better and bigger. By fruits, I’m not only referring to our fruits of the spirit, but our Christian growth in general.

All pruning is painful, but we need to understand that God’s purpose for it, is to help change us so that we can better fulfill our purpose and destiny, this enabling a more joy filled life.

We can see this kind of pruning throughout the Bible, through the testimonies of men like Joseph. So often we experience testing times after a spiritual victory, which is God’s way of snipping off our ego and keeping the glory on Him instead of on ourselves.

Much like plants, God’s pruning builds character by removing over-mature, weak, problematic & excessive growth, so that we can produce a bigger yield of better, longer-lasting, more durable fruit.

Our fruit is not only for our benefit, but also for the building of God’s kingdom. When we allow our growth to remain uneaten within us, it becomes overripe and inedible, and will be pruned from us.

When we submit to God’s pruning, we inevitably become better, more mature Christians with better, bigger more life-changing fruit (growth).

If you are going through a tough time right now, I challenge you to ask yourself what is God trying to prune out of your life? Is it people, like aphids that are eating away at your growth; is it securities and things that you have become too dependent on; or is there pride, ego or offenses that need to be pruned out of you?