A Little Weeding

“For thus saith the LORD to the men of Judah and Jerusalem, Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns.” (Jer 4:3 AV)

 One thing I know about weeds is they end to grow faster than fruit baring plants.  The dandelions in my yard grow much faster than the grass.  Crabgrass grows in adverse conditions and out-grows my fescue.  It makes no sense to sow crops in a field filled with weeds.  Even after the ground is broken up and tilled, it is not prepared to efficiently produce a harvest.  There is some weeding that needs to be done.  Jeremiah, by the voice of God, encourages the people to soften their hearts to the work of God.  Let God break up their rebellious and hard heart. But that is only part of it.  Once the hard ground is broken, then there needs to be some weeding.  We can do this.  We can be humbled by the almighty God, repent of our sins, and desire to walk right, but the weeds remain.  The seeds of sin are still there.  They may have been turned over for the moment.  They may have been cut down at the root.  But the growth potential still exists.  There needs to be a total and complete eradication of that which offended so fruit unto God can be sown in the heart.

The first time I realized how important this was, was when I noted the field preparation a friend of mine applied to his farm.  In particular, one field had to be converted to a plantable field.  This field was committed to habitat reclamation.  That is, the government paid farmers to let their fields lay fallow for a decade or so.  After the term was up, they returned the land to productive farmland.  The thought was, allowing fields to law fallow encouraged wildlife to increase.  I hunted those fields.  The field in which I speak had ten years of growth.  There were locust trees and sumac bushes that had started to grow there.  When he told me he was converting it back to farmland, I wondered how on earth he was ever going to clear it.  First, he bush-hogged it.  That means for the unfamiliar, he attached a serious mower on the back of a tractor that could cut through small trees.  Then he tilled it with discs.  After that, he attached a rake-like tool that dug beneath the surface and brought up root systems as well as larger rocks.  They were dumped in the middle of the field and burned.  But he still wasn’t done.  The next application was something I had never seen before.  One spring morning, I was walking across the fields to get to the woods and turkey hunt.  The brown dirt looked white.  Being in the South, I knew this wasn’t snow.  What was it?  The farmer has spread some type of chemical that would kill everything that grew there.  This was done about three months before planting.  Even though my friend had raked out all root systems and weeds when preparing the wilderness for planting, there had to be something added to the dirt so weeds wouldn’t come back.

There is a lot of work breaking up fallow ground.  Weeding it is one of the easiest things to do.  In the old days, they would spread salt.  This would make a field implantable for a longer period of time, but when the salt dissolved deep enough into the soil, planting could resume.  What we need is a little salt added to our hearts.  We need something that kills the ability for sin to return.  Being humbled isn’t enough.  The cleansing operation of the Holy Spirit and His word must complete the project.  We need to get some weeding done.  We cannot stop at the dramatic breaking of the hardened heart.  There has to be a cleansing.  The stony heart has been reduced to smaller rocks that need raking out.  There are still issues remaining that make sin attractive.  The soil of our hearts needs more work.  Don’t stop at that revival meeting where God dramatically met you.  That was the beginning.  Not the fruition.  Don’t stop at the altar call.  Once arising, there is still work to be done.  God is not finished.  He just started.  Get that salt ready.  Spread it to kill the remainder of your rebellion.  Don’t let it come back or you will have to start all over again.