Every spring I come face to face with weeds in our garden. There are the little ones, easy to uproot and get rid of.
And then there’s quack grass.
In the early spring it looks beautifully lush, soft, and green. It is possible to pull isolated clumps out, the ones that started from last year’s seeds, and sometimes the roots seem innocent.
But sometimes the nasty truth shows even with an isolated clump: This weed has long, energetic roots that creep far underground and pop up in unexpected places. You need to dig deep, feel for that tough white sinew, and pull it up along with all the new little plants it has started.
If you let things go for even a few summer months, you end up with a tangled mess of roots going everywhere with aggressive energy. There’s no solution but to chop up the sod, shake the dirt from it, and feed it to the chickens, because the roots would flourish in the compost pile. And then you need to go through the dirt with your hands, pulling up all the remaining roots of which there are usually many. Inevitably, I miss a few and the cycle starts again.
I think of Jesus’ comparisons of weeds and sin each spring when I pull up quack grass roots. This is what sin is like. Even though sin may look good on the surface at first, it silently grows an all-encompassing underground web of evil which can—and eventually will—spread everywhere if it is not rooted up, year after year.
How do we deal with this mess in our own lives? We are able to fight it step by step, root by root, day after day because sin no longer defines us—Jesus saved us from that! Yet, sin is a far bigger problem than we can hope to manage even as Christians; its roots slip silently through our lives and surface in the most unexpected places. Thanks be to God for sending us his Holy Spirit. Thanks be to God for preparing good works, like footsteps, for us to walk in, and for promising a future where sin will be no more!
It is such a comfort to know that, now already, God leads us in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake! Amen, Lord, and thank you!