Making a Change for the Better is God Pruning You

People often tell me that I am nice person and I have a sweet personality.  This is not to brag on myself or to say that I am better than others.  But it is rather to make a point.  This may be hard for some people to believe, but I use to really have an anger problem.  I used to be explosive, to the 10^th power!  I use to be the type of person that if you so ever looked at me wrong I would have a problem with it AND have no problems telling you what my problems with you was.  But the thing is, somewhere along the line in my life, that changed.  It was not over the course of months, weeks, or days, but rather something that changed over my life time.  I had come to realize that I could not have heartily serve God that way.  I was going to be a Christian or I wasn’t, either I was going to strive to be like Christ or stay within the world.  I could not be both. 

If you are a Christian you should always be growing, and you should always be learning about God and His word.  Because if you read and know God’s word, you are then responsible for practicing the word.  I could not continue to read and recite “love thy neighbor,” and then go and curse my neighbor out whenever they said something that I did not like.  I could not continue to read, “do not let the sun set on your anger,” but carry grudges for weeks, months, to years on end.  So what I chose to do, was to conform.  I chose to read the word, follow the word, and before I knew it I was changed. 

This is what we call God pruning us.  When you think about the idea of pruning, you think of weeds growing throughout a bush.  That or either dead leaves that are growing from a bush, causing it to look and be ugly.  The weeds are some entangled in the bush so much so that the gardener then as to prune the weeds from the bush.  Sometimes hurting the bush and breaking parts of it in the process.  When the gardener gets to the dead parts of the bush, the parts that cannot produce anything and makes the bush looks ugly, the gardener then cuts those parts from the bush.  We never think of the bush as hurting, all we see is this beautiful plant in the end.

This parable I just ventured off into may confuse you.  But I want to compare it to the way God prunes us humans.  We were born into sin and are selfish by nature.  However, if you truly follow God then he will prune you.  He will remove all the ugliness and things from you that do not bear fruit.  This may consist of anger, jealousy, negativity, promiscuity, along with a billion other things.  It is going to hurt when he does it. But if you yield to the process.  You will become the person that God want you to be.  A better and more productive person, that is willing to go out into the world with a purpose.  When all the negative things are pruned from you, you will notice that you are a lot kinder to others,  a lot more positive,  you will be changes for the better, and strive to be more like Christ.  After all that is what being a Christian is right, striving to be like Christ.  So I say to you today, stop fighting God.  He is going to have his way anyway.  So either you can work with him and have the minimal amount of pain as he prunes, trusting he is making you better for the best.  Or you are going to work against him, making him hurt, cut, twist, and bend you along the way so that you can conform into his image of you.  It really is your choice, I but I recommend doing it the easy way and just going with God.