Increase Your Bloom Ability:Day 5
Many of us easily recognize areas in our lives that need to be cut away. We stay in unhealthy relationships. We continue in our bad habits. We exploit our time and money. We battle bouts of selfishness, anger, or we completely lack forgiveness. Hands down. These are branches that need to be removed!
Sometimes, however, there are branches we think are healthy and good, but for God’s glory they too need clipping. For God to do even greater things in specific areas of our lives, there must still be some cutting.
But we are a stubborn people. We are happy with the status quo of our branches. We think they are pretty enough. We stop short of prolific and becoming profoundly fruitful.
How to Increase Your Bloom Ability Step #4
It’s time to let God clip what is good to make room for great.
It may be a job, a ministry, an opportunity, a relationship, an area of service or giving, the location you call home, or even the house where you worship. It could be where your kids attend school, your college, or anything that would take up time or space or resources in your life that could give Glory to God and be fruit-bearing.
For me, this is a difficult step in the process. These are not dead branches. They are vibrant, flowering and fruit-bearing branches. It often doesn’t make sense to my human understanding why these must be cut back, sometimes severely.
How do we recognize when God might be prompting us that it’s clipping time of this nature? Graciously, the Holy Spirit nudges our stubborn hearts. Other times, He uses circumstances, people, even our health, and most assuredly, His Word.
This is the kind of year I am having. I have streamlined my life to the bare bones as it is. The only things to cut were places I felt necessary. Places of calling. Important work. Dear people. Stuff I loved and ministries that excelled.
Allowing God to cut what looks perfectly fine hurts because with it comes a sense of purposeless loss. And how can we be sure it will be worth it? That’s the heart of our hesitation, isn’t it? Can we trust Him?
Maybe that’s why He gives us this word picture of The Vine. We know a severe pruning makes all the difference to a healthy branch. We’ve seen the effects. The call here is to trust His ability to know us well enough to make each branch more vibrant, more effective, and more fruitful—even when we can’t see it. Not only that, but the promise is to make this fruitfulness lasting.
Will you trust Him today to increase your bloom ability?
Cheri
Love to read need lots of support pray for me bless us all
Tonya,
I will absolutely be praying for you. This is one I am living myself. We are walking this one together.
Love this tree! Our pastor is preaching on fruitfulness and I would like to know if I can use this image on our YouVersion Event page?
Lisa,
I know!
Unfortunately – I bought the rights to use the one on this project and your pastor would need to do the same. If I choose to use it on a product to sell, there are additional charges. Images are sort of a big deal in this area. You are wise for asking rather than just swiping. This one came from http://www.istock.com. They have a great selection of images and they can be purchased individually or through a subscription. The cost of a particular image really depends on the pixel size. I always try to get the largest image I can afford.
But note there are other options today — I will also suggest a place you could check for free possibilities is http://www.pixabay.com — they offer a wide variety of quality commercial-free licenses. You just download and go. I have since moved to this resource for a lot of my images if I can. (Even some of the new YouVersion covers 🙂 !!)
Blessings!
and
Good luck!
Cheri