“Pruning Our Past to Produce at Present”

Monday, April 20, 2020

Yesterday we considered the parable of the two sons (Matthew 21:28-32) which reminds us that God prioritizes our production over our position, our past, and our promises. Because God values fruit-bearing above all else, we must endeavor to bear fruit in our lives. This was the biblical way of talking about living a changed life (Isa. 5:1-7; Matt. 3:1-10; Gal. 5:16-26) which had social, moral, and theological consequences.

As we considered this parable we drew out the following principles of production. If we are going to be productive:

1) We must stop being okay with today. Fruit-bearing is necessarily a forward-looking process and thus, we are not contented with today’s position but are preparing to head in tomorrow’s direction.

2) We must cut off our pasts to produce in the present. Like the vine that carries all the cumbersome weight of past growth, our past can be a hindrance to production (more on this below).

3) The final production principle we discussed was that we must shut our mouths and open our hands. God is not pleased with our pretense or our empty promises. He doesn’t want an outward show of compliance, nor does He care for us exhibiting the surface level marks of productivity. We must stop talking about it and be about it. We must stop promising God, others, and perhaps most of all ourselves that we will change and start taking steps toward growth.

If we apply these three principles we will begin to produce the kind of fruit God is wanting in our lives.

Let us return to our 2nd principle in order to stretch the point a little bit further. We must cut off our pasts if we are going to be productive at present. Our pasts can either be a prison from which we feel we can’t escape, as could have been the case with the tax collectors and prostitutes that Jesus commends, or a pedestal as was the case with many of the religious leaders to whom Jesus was speaking. They relied on their pedigree and felt as if that put them in a position that was pleasing to God (Matt. 3:7-10). And so, some pruning of our past life is necessary. But once cut off, is our past completely useless? Can it help us to grow at all? I believe it can. If we can continue stretching the vineyard metaphor let’s think about those dead branches that we cut off. They are no longer weighing down our fruit-bearing branches or leeching necessary nutrients. This is good but they can help us further if we compost them, add them to the soil and allow them to function in a new way. In this way, our past can fuel our growth by:

1) giving us the necessary motivation to change. We are not that person anymore and don’t ever want to be that person ever again.

2) reminding us of how far we’ve come, or perhaps better how far God, the master gardener, has brought us.

3) steering us away from the unproductive paths in which we once walked and guiding us to new ones in the future (the composting metaphor probably starts to really break down at this point but you get my point, the past can still be useful when rightfully applied!)

Let us prune our past so that we might use our pasts in order to be more productive for the Father!

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