April 15, 2013
Weed Collection
A favorite pastime of
one of our local politicians is sowing seeds of dissention in the community. When
I see evidence of his half-truths starting to sprout I’m inclined to get out
the weed spray or try pulling them up by the stalk. In the Parable of the Weeds
there was a problem with being able to tell the difference between the wheat [believers]
and the weeds [non-believers]. Intellectually I understand the Lord’s reasoning
and His advice against pulling up the weeds, but personally I’d just rather not
be growing up among the weeds. “Let both
grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First
collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat
and bring it into my barn.’” (Matt 13:30 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----There’s nothing we can do about growing amongst the weeds. It’s the way the world is. Maybe worse yet, realizing the weeds are what gets collected and burned for traveling a course of destruction, there are far more of them than those who have humbled themselves to the Father through Christ, the fewer traveling to life. Yet, that just has to do with the company we have to keep, right?
-----Not so fast. It is just as hard to tell the weeds of deceit from the wheat of truth. It requires some amount of study, often quite a bit, and occasionally a tremendous amount of it. Study itself is hard to do. It calls for analysis which is also a process needing to be learned. And before anything can be analyzed or compared or categorized, one must have a sufficient amount of previously learned, relevant information. Most people give up on such difficult efforts before they begin. It would be nice of them to just pull off the social highway, admitting they don’t know anything, so then not propound any opinions to anyone, and better yet, stop voting.
-----But how often does that happen? The perception of knowing is part of ego. And we Americans are quite long on ego. Therefore we are emotionally compelled to give the perception that we know things even though we don’t. So, to keep up with the neighbors without being exposed by the failures of ideas we just make up ourselves, we believe opinions that feel right if we see enough other people believing them, too. It is a shortcut to gratifying the knowledge ego which bypasses the difficult process of actually gaining true knowledge. And there are plenty of prepackaged opinions being offered in the popularity market. All we have to do is turn on the TV and observe the latest pop icon spout off some slice of stupidity which would cause horrendous laughter and castigation for any one of us unknown lessers had we dreamt it up and spoke it ourselves. For far too many people in this world, those pop icons are social gold. The stand of weeds grows. Their proportion to wheat grows.
-----There is nothing we will do to stop it, although there certainly is something we can do. Fortunately for those who love truth because they love the Lord, they do part of what they can do. They speak the truth as far as they’ve come to know it, correcting the errors for anyone who is tired of the shortcut’s malnutrition. Beyond that they somewhat live the truths. But those spoken and lived truths gain little attention from any other than a few weary travelers of the deceitful freeway. Truths are just not popular, and are growing even less so. For the whole process of weeds in wheat is a spiritual one having spiritual entities driving it through the minds of the willing. And, as Christ will demonstrate for all creation to witness for a thousand years, when the source of spiritual deceit is cut off from the human mind and replaced with the source of spiritual nutrition, the truth becomes popular, not because masses know it, but because truth is so personally gratifying to know.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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