GOD WANTS LIVING FRUIT, NOT POTTED PLANTS

A potted plant can get root bound, which is unhealthy for the plant. It can’t get the proper nutrients from the soil and so it eventually dies. People can get root bound as well when they remain potted. People get potted and feel safe and secure within the boundaries of doing things the way they have always been done. This leads to spiritual mediocrity. Confined to a pot the roots have nowhere else to grow except around each other and then they start strangling one another. Roots need space to grow. People need space to grow. Potted plants and potted people need pampering. They are no longer free in the natural world where God provides for them. They need other people to water and feed them, and to nurture them.

One peril of a provided for people is that issues of control will always enter in and people respond to that control by often acquiescing to it. The trade off for the provisions and the care is a loss of freedom of being who you are. You are obligated to be who others think you should be. To remain in the supposed safety of the pot, or community, you may say and do things you don’t believe, just to make other people happy. You start hiding your beliefs so you will look the same as the rest of those in the pot, or community. You begin to kowtow to everyone and never take a stand on anything if it goes against the group. Phil Gulley writes in Life Goes On, “Once you get in the habit of forsaking your convictions in order to be liked, it’s hard to stop. I will catch myself nodding my head in agreement to things I haven’t believed in years, then later despising myself for my cowardice.” Eventually you will become crushed down, robbed of dignity and hope and the life will be strangled out of you.

I love indoor plants but I know that pots are not their natural God given habitat. People aren’t meant to be spiritually potted either. The Spirit can’t be captured by one group, one set of doctrine, or one set of beliefs. The Spirit is like the wind and while it has various patterns and waves it does not succumb to a static system.

Jesus makes us free to be all that we are meant to be in God. He is the giver of life and we are to be rooted in him, not potted in doctrine, rules, human philosophies or theologies. When we are rooted in the Spirit of Jesus, we have the freedom to grow into who we are and the freedom to worship God in the way God seeks to be worshipped, “in spirit and in truth.”