How many of you are lawn or garden people? Then you are going to get this analogy that came to me while mowing my lawn last week.

Our daily walk in The Word & with our Father is much like lawn care. Stay with me here. Just like we fertilize our lawns to help them stay green, grown in thick, & just plain stay healthy we need to be fertilizing our lives with God’s Word. Now when we don’t fertilize our lawns they do not grow weeds right away. It’s the same in our own lives. When we stray away from being in God’s Word daily our lives may not look that much different…right away. It’s after time that we start to notice our yards being overgrown with creeping charlie or dandelions. It’s after time that our hearts become filled with regrets, angers, resentments, etc. None of it happens overnight.

Here’s the cool thing though! Just like we can fix our lawns from weeds, Christ came to fix our lives of sin. We can begin fertilizing our lawns again and with some extra work to remove the weeds that have crept in we can once again have that healthy looking lawn. It’s the same in our own lives. Maybe you’ve strayed from reading God’s Word daily. Maybe you haven’t been in daily conversation with the Lord of your life. All it takes is to pick up The Scriptures and start reading & let God do the rest.

When I’m in God’s Word I make better choices. When I’m in God’s Word I’m able to be disciplined in areas of my life that I can’t be disciplined on my own. Again, when you drive by a house and see green you don’t know if it’s weeds or grass. All you see is green. It looks good. It’s the same in our lives. People around us cross our paths with so much going on in their own lives that they aren’t looking closely at ours. They see the surface. They see our outward appearance. God mows the lawn though. When you actually mow the lawn you see the weeds. God sees our hearts. That’s what really matters. How are your lawns? How are your hearts? While mowing my lawn yesterday I recognized I haven’t spent the money on fertilizer for a couple years now & now my lawn shows it. Again, you can’t see it from the street. My neighbors are constantly complimenting me on how green my lawn is. They are looking at it from across the street though. When I first bought the house I spent a lot of time fertilizing, weeding, & REALLY taking care of the yard. I got to a place though where I had to choose groceries or fertilizer so I hadn’t been fertilizing. It’s the same in my daily walk with God. There are so many things competing for my time that it’s easy to get pulled away from spending time daily in His Word & in conversation with Him. Just as we need to attend to our yards to keep them healthy we need to be attending to our spiritual lives. How many of us are spending the same amount of time & money on our spiritual lives as we are on maintaining our yards?