Roots

One last reflection on last Saturday in the heat clearing trees at the farm.

As we brought down the invasive, aggressive trees down, Keith walked around with a large bottle and a paint brush. He painted each tree stump with a thick layer of herbicide.

"If we don't kill the roots," he said, "in a couple weeks we'll have five new shoots of the tree going back up. All that energy is focused back down on the roots and it re-generates very, very quickly."

It made me think of my own walk with the Lord. How much of my repentance is really just behavior modification? How often do I see my sin and just try to cut down the outward action...and leave the root, heart issue un-touched? How does that set me up for failure on down the road?

In thinking about this whole behavior modification v. heart change issue, it leads me to some interesting tensions. On the one hand, clearly the Lord talks about the essential nature of the internal world and the need for a renovation of the heart.

But on the other hand, sometimes I just need to stop sinning. Sometimes it's not clear what the root, heart issue is, and I just need to stop doing something or start doing something that I'm avoiding. I could psycho-analyze my sin to death. But really, as long as I'm sinning I'm continuing to walk in death, in the darkness.

So there's value in the "cutting off" of the sinful behavior, even the ultimate goal is that my heart would be changed. It would seem here again that there's power in embracing the "both/and" rather than the "either/or." As much as possible, I desire to have sin up-rooted and destroyed from before it would corrupt and destroy me. But sometimes I don't know what the root is. Sometimes I don't know what that up-rooting would look like.

So I need to ask the Lord to show me how my heart needs to be changed. But in the mean time I need to do what I know to do: cut down the sin...and ask for the Lord to do the work of spreading the herbicide on the invasive, aggressive plant that would do damage to my soul.