I have this flower bed in my front yard, and every February my husband prunes it back hard. By April it explodes with flowers and color, but in February I hardly even want to pull into my driveway. The plants look ugly. Sparse. Uninspired. 

They have to be pruned so they can grow. They have to suffer for a minute so that they can bloom. 

We could skip the pruning—in fact we did one spring. And a few blooms emerged through the scraggle and tangle of wild branches. But the growth wasn’t all that great. 

Sounds kind of like us, doesn’t it? We’d rather skip the pruning. We know it’s going to hurt. Cuts do. But Jesus tells us why pruning is so necessary. In speaking of His Father, He says:

“He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.”

John 15:2 NIV

Friend, do you see it? If He’s not pruning you He’s not anticipating new growth in you. God only prunes what He expects to grow. He is either cutting the dead stuff away or He’s pruning to bring even more fruit out of you. Either way shears are involved. So wouldn’t we rather submit to the ones that lead to better growth? He knows how to cut us without killing us. He knows how to cultivate a life marked by more.

And yet we cling to so-so growth through the scraggle and tangle of wild branches, assuming that the slightest little step back means God is mad at us. We say “ouch” and feel like we’re in time-out while He sees glimmers of new growth that will glorify Him!
 

Here’s what this might look like:

·       If we’re offering something good to Him and He has something better in mind, He may remove the good thing to undeniably direct us to the better thing.

·       If we’re reliant on a title, He may strip the title until we’re ready to use it to glorify Him. 

·       If we’re arrogant about “our” talents, He might limit the growth they produce until we’re willing to let Him deal with our pride.

·       If an old relationship sets us back in our new relationships, He may force us to deal with it—even if through a breakdown—to get to counseling, boundaries, and better patterns.

 What has it looked like for you? Pruning is so different for everyone. It’s amazing evidence that we serve an intimate God.

Why even bother?

Why does He care so much about this process anyway? Why doesn’t He let us just kind of do our best and work it out?

He’s too invested in us.

In the famous “I am the vine you are the branches” passage—a few verses after the pruning one above—we’re told (without being directly told) that Jesus was cut so we could be grafted, or joined, into Him. Here’s what I mean: Vine dressers know that the grafting of a branch into a vine is achieved only through wounding. It’s traumatic to a vine. They also know that for the graft to take hold, the vine and the graft must be cut to fit each other and then wrapped tightly together for the graft to take hold.

God put His Son through this so that we could have life. That changes my view on pruning. Maybe it does yours, too. Yes pruning hurts. But with shears in His back pocket and love in His eyes, God will find branches that aren’t producing and cut them away. He’ll find the branches that are producing and trim them to get rid of the scraggles and tangles. And He’ll make in us a life marked by more.

You know, that one spring that we didn’t prune the plants? We were waiting for window coverings to arrive for our front windows. We felt like we lived in a fishbowl and we thought if we just left the plants alone they’d grow tall enough to give us a little privacy. They never did. We pruned them the next spring and they exploded to three times their height. We’ve never forgotten that lesson.

I hope none of us will.

Laurie Davies- ARISE Marketing Strategist and Content Creator