Gardening the Soul: The Master Gardener

God is described as the Master Gardener of our lives. Listen to him sing about his garden:

Sing about a fruitful vineyard: I, the Lord, watch over it; I water it continually. I guard it day and night
so that no one may harm it. . .
If only there were briers and thorns confronting me!
I would march out against them in battle.
I would set them all on fire.
In days to come Jacob will take root,
Israel will bud and blossom
and fill all the world with fruit. (Is.27:2-6)

While God glories in a harvest that will "fill all the world with fruit," (v.6) he also revels in the dirty, daily task of nurturing his garden—“I, the Lord, watch over it; I water it continually. I guard it day and night." (v.2,3) God isn't an apathetic gardener who tosses a few seeds on the ground and hopes that something grows. Nor is he an aristocratic gardener who hires other workers to do his grubby chores. God plants and prunes and protects with his own calloused hands.

As a gardener, I am vexed by the agents of destruction that assault my garden—weeds, wind, worms. But God agonizes over a lack of adversaries! He moans like a war hero during peacetime: "If only there were briers and thorns confronting me. I would march out against them in battle, I would set them all on fire." (v.4). Amazing! We serve a God who aches to attack our foes. All we have to do is ask.

In the next few blogs I will focus on the shape of the Gardener’s work in His garden: What are his ways of watering? his patterns in planting? his hopes for a harvest? We must understand how God works—if he is planning a blizzard, but we are expecting warm sunshine, we can become dangerously disoriented in one of life's storms. But when we understand how the Master Gardener is tilling our soils, then we can coordinate our work with his work to produce a fruitful life.