A Deep Cut
I have a beautiful Satsuma tree in my front yard and tons of wild blackberry bushes on our property. When we first bought our home and property, the Satsuma tree was so overgrown and untended to that
The blackberry bushes were equally overgrown and out of control. So we did what any good homeowner would do: we pruned both the tree and the bushes back ~ severely. Like serious pruning. Like ugly pruning. Like “I think we might have cut them back too severely, they may be dead now” pruning.
The year following our pruning, neither the tree nor the bushes produced fruit like they did in past years. In fact, we had not one Satsuma and just a handful of blackberries (out of potential thousands in previous years). Now I was certain that our pruning was the death of our once fruit producing tree and bushes.
Until this year.
As springtime came this year, I saw the white blooms of HOPE on both our tree and our bushes. As time passed, it was not just a few blooms (which will eventually become the fruit) but hundreds of blooms on our tree and thousands of blooms on all of our blackberry bushes. This year will produce more satsumas and blackberries than we will know what to do with ~ a year of abundant fruit!
Our deep pruning was necessary for abundant fruit to be produced.
This is true concerning our tree and bushes, and it is even more true concerning our hearts.
The deep pruning of our hearts will likewise produce the most abundant fruit in our lives. Even on the days when you feel like the pruning is so severe it might be the death of you… it won’t. It is just necessary in order for you to produce rich, abundant fruit.
Jesus speaks of this kind of pruning in John 15:1-2 (NIV): “I (Jesus) am the True Vine, and My Father is the gardener. He (God) 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.”
Do you see the point Jesus is making? We cannot escape the pruning process. If we bear no fruit: we get pruned. If we do bear fruit: we get pruned. One way or another, every one of us goes through the seasons of pruning.
Pruning is hard. Pruning is ugly. There’s nothing beautiful about pruning, whether in the natural or in our hearts.
I cannot even begin to count how many pruning seasons I have been through in my lifetime. Whether the pruning comes personally in my own heart, in our church or ministry… it is still hard.
I have often felt like my life has looked like our poor satsuma tree. Just branches. No leaves, no foliage, no blooms, no fruit. Just ugly, bare branches that look as if no fruit will ever be produced again. Deep, severe pruning (all by the hand of God) that I thought would kill me, with no hope of bearing fruit again, much less abundant fruit.
But the older I have gotten, and the longer I walk with God, the more I have come to accept that pruning is part of God’s process in our lives. To grow us, to stretch us, to tend and care for us, and bring us to the place of bearing the most abundant, rich, delightful fruit we have ever known. But that cannot happen without pruning.
I feel the blooms in my own life now. I am sensing the abundant fruit that is to come. And my prayer is that it is the most flavorful, the most beautiful, the most rich fruit that I have ever bore!
What about you? Are you in a season of pruning in your life? Do you feel like the ugly, bare satsuma tree? Having no hope of fruit to come?
Take heart, my friend. The deeper the cut, the more abundant fruit to come. The more severe the pruning from the Master Gardener, the more producing of wonderful, delicious fruit that you have yet to know is about to come.
We cannot escape the pruning process. But we must rest in the fact that the Master Gardener knows exactly what He is doing. This pruning will not kill you. You will recover from it. And it is absolutely for your best good! In fact, you will come back better than ever before… with more fruit than you have ever produced in your life.
You just have to trust the Gardener.
You have to trust the process of the pruning.
And you have to trust that God is working in your life even now to produce your greatest season of abundant fruitfulness!
A new season is coming for you!
