TODAY’S DEVOTIONAL (Sunday 15TH August 2021)
“But when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared.”
“So the servants of the owner came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants said to him, ‘Do you want us then to go and gather them up?’
“But he said, ‘No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.” Matthew 13:26-30 NKJV
WELCOME TO THE 227TH DAY OF OUR YEAR OF HIGHER HEIGHTS!
Today we begin a journey into another week. Am glad that Jesus did not resurrect on the seventh day; Saturday. He resurrected on the first day of the week – Sunday. That is why the early church did not align their meetings with the day set aside for worship in the temple – the 7th day.
Celebrating the resurrection of Christ have been made an annually thing to be done during what many called Easter. But the early Church never had it that way. They celebrated His resurrection the first day of every week; Sunday. That’s is why we when gather in His name, He comes to inhabit our prayers, praise and worship.
May today not be different, even as we yield to the LORD to use us to send another Cry of His Spirit to the nations.
God has a word for us today. But to start with, I want to ask, where do blackmails or lies proceed from? Where do gossip and slander proceed from? Where do betrayal and murders proceed from?
Who is the best weapon men use in betraying another through confidential whispers? If the devil wants to invade your privacy, and have someone tell everything about you to the outside world, especially the bad things, who does he use? The answer is trapped in two words – WRONG RELATIONSHIPS.
Today we will be refreshing our minds on the consequences of wrong relationships! God likened wrong relationships to tares sown among wheat. He calls some sons of the evil one. They are usually used by the devil to hinder our lives in so many fronts.
Either you believe it or not, most of what we face in life are products of the wrong people we are either putting up with, or have put up with at one time in life! God want to stop the enemy from using wrong relationships to destroy us.
I trust that God will use whatever He wants to share with us today to grant us dominion over the menace of wrong relationships many sons and daughters of God are struggling with.
I WANT TO REPEAT A STORY I HAVE SHARED IN THIS PLATFORM OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
Between 1984 and 1993 my family was involved in a lot of farming in the then young City of Abuja then. When I say Family, I meant my Dad, My Mum and siblings.
My Dad was a police officer and had just being transferred from Calabar, in Cross River state South-south of Nigeria, to Abuja.
The government of the day was still trying to convince people to move from Lagos Nigeria to the young Capital city, Abuja then, so there was enough land to use in growing crops and dealing with hunger. Today most of those land have Estates and other fascinating buildings standing on them.
Then food was relatively cheap because most people were farmers.
With very little money you can buy a lot. But because we do not have even that little money then, we grew virtually every Nigerian crop you can think of. The only food stuffs we did not grow were onions, Oil, salt and water. It is really hilarious but true. You can grow water or salt. You may grow onions but not those two.
During those farming years I learnt a lot of lessons that are helping me now to understand God and His ways. Sometimes they help me to understand what God means whenever He says a thing that is related to farming.
They also help me, at other times, to understand the different kinds of weeds that grow around our crops. So in the days of weeding the farm to allow the crops grow, we will carefully remove those weeds. And when that happens you see the crops growing beautifully and producing bountifully in their seasons.
This holds a lot of lesson for a man or woman of destiny, because I have come to realize that the life of a man or woman of destiny is like those crops. And that Satan has a way of planting weeds around us. Those weeds are the many wrong relationships we bring into our lives either through false marriages, work place relationships, business connections, and related things.
I have come to discover that if the relationships are not weeded out of our lives, we will never grow beautiful or produce bountifully like those crops we grew many year ago in Abuja.
IF SATAN PLANTS A WRONG RELATIONSHIP IN YOUR LIFE, AND YOU TAKE HIM OR HER FOR A RIGHT ONE, YOU WILL BE SORRY.
There must be a periodic weeding exercise that you must be carrying out on your life to identify the weeds you called crops and take them out from time to time. You must understand that your life is a farmland that is carry seeds of destiny planted there by the LORD, and that you must be careful how you treat it.
Those seeds of destiny planted there by the LORD are to grow into beautiful crops, manifesting as glorious things spoken concerning you.
Sometimes the weeds are people in our lives, other times the weeds are destructive characters that threatens our future in appointed places. Irrespective of what they are, periodic weeding exercise will be required on your life if you will fulfill your destiny.
The wisdom I gathered from those farming years made me to understand that weeding is part of life. If you do not make seasonal weeding part of your life as a Child of God, you will never grow to become what God has called you to be.
Like we shared, some of the most dangerous weeds to take out of your life could be inside not really outside. We may be quick to be pointing our fingers externally, but the most destructive weeds most times, grow within us.
For instance, it was the weeds of greed, carnal ambition, disloyalty and treachery that took Judas from his appointed place through suicide to eternal damnation in hell. His appointed place was for him to be one of the 24 elders in Heaven. But the weeds never allowed him to make it there. If He had carried a periodic weeding exercise over his life, especially using the word of the LORD, the story would have been different.
At every point Jesus tried to point the weeds in his life to him so he could weed them out, but he was too blind to do so. The weeds overgrew reasoning and that was it. When Jesus said, “Someone is going to betray me” it was for him to take out the weed. When Jesus asked him, “Will you betray me with a kiss” it was for him to take out the weed at the last minute, though it was too late.
JESUS WILL ALWAYS POINT THE WEEDS IN OUR LIVES TO US, USING THOSE HE HAS PLACED IN OUR LIVES SO WE CAN TAKE THEM OUT!
He pointed Peter’s weed to him, and prophesied that He was going to deny knowing him. The reason was for Peter to take care of it. With the conviction of the Spirit and the prayer of Jesus, he took care of the weed but that was after it almost ruined his life and denied him his appointed place in the next life.
Now let go back to Judas. His internal weed made him an external weed in the life of Christ. The internal weed of someone can make him or her an external weed in your life. If the person is not willing to take that internal weed out, you are to either separate from the person or allow a special threshing time called TIME OF HARVEST to do it.
In GOD’s design, external weeds or wrong relationships are not to be handled the same way. There are some you are to allow a time of harvest to take care of. A major highlight in our devotional text says;
“But he said, ‘No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.”
Some wrong relationships or weeds are like tares among wheat that must be allowed to grow together until the time of harvest. The reason is because they have grown to be so attached to us that any attempt to remove them will remove us as well. In cases like that, the Bible made it clear that we must allow a special harvest time to manifest and weed them out.
That means we must be able to sense the time because most times we will be require to play a role in it. There is so much about this mysteries, but we can no go beyond this point.
I hope the LORD has spoken to us this morning. May every word written become a book of wisdom in your mental shelve in Jesus precious name! AMEN!
MAKE THIS SCRIPTURAL PARABLE YOUR MEDITATION TODAY:
“Another parable He put forth to them, saying: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went his way.”
“But when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared.”
“So the servants of the owner came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants said to him, ‘Do you want us then to go and gather them up?’
“But he said, ‘No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.”‘” Matthew 13:24-30 NKJV