How is Your Soil?

May 27, 2017

How is Your Soil?

Exodus 3:17

"So I said, I will bring you out of the affliction of Egypt to the land of the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Amorite and the Perissite and the Hivite and the Jebusite, to a land flowing with milk and honey."

One thing most people do not know about me is my love for growing things. Since I was young I enjoyed growing a garden, planting the landscape and even trying to make sure things grow. As of the past several years though, it seems as if nothing has been growing or at least has been yielding fruit for the harvest.

As I was listening to a sermon tonight a thought hit me with the pastor’s message. He was talking about when you are a citizen of a given country you are a reflection of the culture of your country and when you go to another country and find an embassy representing that country it stands out as a representation of that given country, it’s culture and background and if you are away from your place of residence you can step into that embassy and have a sense of familiarity. He continued to talk about how the church is to be like and embassy and more importantly we as believers need to be like an embassy whereto when someone steps into our lives our home that they see that reflection of heaven in our lives.

So you may wonder, ‘How does an embassy relate to farming or growing things to yield a harvest?’ Plants need the right conditions in order to thrive. If the plant is accustom to a continued resource of water the roots will not grow in a fashion to where they go deep and strong and if it is moved from this common environment to a more dry soil the plant will die. With that said farmers and growers have learned that if you make the conditions more varied with the watering, nutrients and  soil and weather conditions you can expand the places where given things can grow, flourish and produce a harvest.

Thinking about this I could not help but think about a promise God gave Abraham and later repeated in a little more detail to Moses years later. God said “I am going to give you a land flowing with milk and honey.” Over the past 4,000 years or so this same land that was promised to the Children of Israel had found itself a barren desert. Most of us do not understand it as what is today is a far cry from what the land was even just 75 years ago.  There is documentation throughout history that the very land that Israel is on was a barren waste land several times as well as a land of blessing and flourishing. It was documented in Ezekiel as a land that was abandon. Daniel talks about it as a land war torn and deserted. Jeremiah (which many love to quote Jeremiah 29:11) talks about the land as a land wiped out and even historians talk about the area just within the past 100 years as a desert. The interesting thing is in every single case God’s promise never changed. He said it would be a land flowing with milk and honey and on several occasions it was and something happened to create a dry and barren land.

So why did the land of promise turn to a desert waste land and what brought it back from the dead? Let me take you back to World War II and the time just before, which will shed light on the same things that happened in prior generations. Prior to World  War II the Gaza, West Bank and areas up to Bethlehem were more like our abandon towns in the wild west or forgotten cities on old Route 66 in the Mid West with rundown buildings, broken down walls, land that hadn’t had anything grown on in years and a dwindling population due to the lack of work, wealth or promise so it just became an abandon land. As a result of Hitler many Jews fled to this land to escape the atrocities of Hitler and his henchmen. The only people living there at the time were some Arab nomads. It was thought that the refugees and the nomads could coexist, but the nomads did not want the limited resources wasted on them and would have preferred them to die instead. Long story short the Jews that fled to the land derived ways to bringing the ground to grow things again and become self sustained. When this happened it created the Arabs in the land to become jealous of the wealth and harvest where they wanted to drive out the Jews. In 1948 the UN established a country called Israel where the Jews and Arabs would live together, but it has resulted in much strife and blessings of the land they inhabited.

God calls us to be planted into regions where it seems like all hope is lost and a land that looks desolate. This may be a physical wasteland, but more importantly it is a spiritual waste land. Maybe it is our calling where God calls us into our physical struggles to grow stronger roots to prepare us for our transplant. Too often it is easy to question why God doesn’t allow for us to be planted near continued blessing but rather some type of hardship (health, finances, family, loneliness, trauma or any other thing) only to plant us around other people who are struggling with the same things that God has brought us through.

In order to have a harvest you must be able to cross pollinate. Very few plants can produce a harvest through self pollination. In order to get tomatoes one must plant a healthy tomato plant around others. It is by this simple reason why God allows us to struggle in a situation so we can cross pollinate others who are like us with our same experiences so we bring forth a harvest. It is never that the harvest comes alone rather with the help, strength and likeness of others. Unless we take account of our soil and realize it is God who has created our very sustenance to be healthy in order to bring a harvest in others. Additionally it should be our goal to be an embassy where others similar can find refuge and hope so that eventually they too can be transplanted to bring a harvest to another. It is in that safe haven of familiarity we bring the most important thing to others; HOPE. It is in that hope though we bring can make what was once a desolate and abandon land into a land flowing with milk and honey.

Jeremiah 29:11

“For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans to prosper you and not for harm, plans to give you a hope and a future.”

Jeremiah penned these words while he was in jail and the land was barren and the Children of Israel were in captivity and without hope. If Jeremiah could stand firm in adversity, where do you stand with how things look in your life today? In other words what is the condition of your soil?

CAL