Planted with a Purpose Read online

  Displacement

  The time when trouble comes, when you are displaced and disoriented, is no fun. No one wants to go through it. You’re tired and feel you’re almost at your end. You’ve been displaced and uprooted from everything familiar in your life, and you’re looking for anything to help you stabilize yourself against the uncertainty of tomorrow. However, I believe it is at this time, at this season, that you should stop looking for exterior assistance and allow God to develop and stimulate the dormant muscles of your core. This is the season when your endurance, resolve, and fortitude are enhanced. Though you’ve done everything you can to get the Master’s attention in hopes that He would relent from His plan to crush you, I assure you that He is not out to destroy you. On the contrary, He’s out to remake you, remodel you, and renew you. And He has given His word that your momentary discomfort will bring about the most profitable end.

  The Father hasn’t transplanted you and invested all the time and energy into growing you only to turn around and abandon you. He has placed you in the field that is uniquely equipped with the sunlight, rain, and even the dung you need to become a vine capable of bearing fruit. This field isn’t your cemetery. It’s the controlled environment the Master is using to cultivate you.

  If we truly see Christ as the first fruits of something new and wonderful in the earth, then are we willing to follow His example? Do we really perceive Him as the vine from which we spring and have life? If we, the branches, are reconnected back to the Father, who is the Husbandman, through Christ, our True Vine, in such a way that we now bear His image, it makes sense that we would undergo the same maturation process. If we follow that line of thought, we must be planted in life’s dirty places, because Jesus was planted as a seed—by coming to our world in human form—with the intent that He would rise and give new life to everyone who is birthed from Him. In order for us to be born again, Jesus had to be planted and die before resurrecting to new life.

  Unfortunately, we aren’t allowed the luxury of having clarified hindsight of the ordeals that befall us until they have passed. We have to trust that the Husbandman knows what He is doing. While accepting that my daughter was pregnant and my mother was gone, I still had a litany of questions that I asked the Father. He remained silent for a while, and that caused me to seek Him even more. I had to walk by faith and not by sight, which is what He asks of all of us.

  Please understand that it is from the depths of dark and dirty places in our lives that we scream for God’s attention and help while misunderstanding that, just like with a natural seed, it is the microbes in the soil of life that eat away at our efforts to protect ourselves from harm. Right when you’ve lost all hope, you see something you have never witnessed before.

  When you resolve within yourself that maybe, just maybe, where you are is your assigned lot in life, God remains vocally silent but reminds you of His promise by showing you the light you have never seen. Breaking through the filthy soil of where you were placed in life, you sprout and rise to continue seeing another world of possibilities and say the famous words of David: “It is good for me that I have been afflicted, that I might learn Your statutes” (Ps. 119:71 AMPC).

  An unplanted seed is nothing more than constrained potential. We love the thought of being gifted and having the ability to do something great, but we don’t smile so brightly when we are placed in the refining processes of life. But aren’t these two intimately connected? How can we have one without the other? We cannot rightfully ask the Master Husbandman to skip out on the development of our lives simply because we are uncomfortable with being alone in dark places.

  Everything that has ever happened to you happened for a reason. If we look back at the sprout that pushed itself through the ceiling of dirt above it, we arrive at the conclusion that we will understand the reasons behind our adversity when we arrive at the fruit-bearing stage. For when does a pot know exactly what its purpose is? Is it not when the potter is done forming and molding it?

  Those areas and times in which the death of a dream, an assignment, or vision seems to stalk your every move are nothing more than entrances into the next realm of your life. Do not run from them. Embrace them, because the proverbial death of what you are trying to keep alive will enrich the growth and lives of others. They form the soil and mulch that generate meaning from your mistakes.

  Without nutrients in the ground of its formation, the seed cannot be planted. From one seed comes a vine. From the vine comes the fruit. From the fruit come even more seeds that give rise to even more plants. Just as Jesus was buried and from Him continue to come millions of new spiritual plants that bear marvelous grapes for making eternal wine, there are thousands of seeds that will come from you being planted. Transformation requires sacrifice, and I wonder if you have mislabeled the Husbandman’s planting of you as Him condemning you to a graveyard. Far be it from the Eternal One to be so finite and temporary.

  I encourage you to allow God’s prison of purpose in your life to do what it was intended to do: develop you into a strong vine. It’s your location of cultivation. But when God escorts you out of your season of pain, be sure to leave behind the sorrow, bitterness, and anger, just like Nelson Mandela, who endured twenty-seven years in prison because he fought injustice. However, he said, “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.” After all, what good would it be for the Vinedresser to take you through the entire process only for you to give rise to mediocre fruit for sour wine? God isn’t finished preparing you, yet. You are a seed designed to sprout. Your fruit is becoming His wine.

  When you encounter trouble, what can you remind yourself about God’s nature? How has God used trouble for your good in the past?

  CHAPTER 5

  Crushing Is Not the End

  The reality is that we all suffer. We all suffer losing our children to gangs, to street drugs, to addictions we don’t understand. We all suffer the indignities of aging and Alzheimer’s, cancer and incarceration. We all suffer the economic roller coaster of less money and more bills. We all suffer the dislocation of our dreams and the explosion that Langston Hughes described so brilliantly when our dreams are deferred again and again and again.

  We are all crushed by the same blows of life. But not everyone allows the crushing to destroy them. Some discover the secret of making wine out of the remaining juice. They know how the blood of the vine becomes the fruit of the cup.

  I visited my physician several weeks ago for my annual physical. While I was there, one of the attending nurses drew my blood to perform the customary screenings for diseases and other maladies. Medical professionals require a blood draw in order to see what they cannot see with the naked eye. Blood tells them just about everything they need to know in order to understand what is working and not working within the human body.

  Similarly, experts in the justice system use blood analysis to determine vital information needed to solve crimes. Blood splatter analysts work in forensics departments and visit crime scenes to determine exactly what happened to a victim and the perpetrator by examining how and where the blood landed at the location. Similarly, law enforcement and forensics officers match blood from crime scenes with DNA on file to identify the guilty. And, conversely, blood collected years ago continues to exonerate individuals who were wrongfully incarcerated.

  It appears, then, in addition to how the body uses and produces blood, that it acts as a testifying agent to actions others have not witnessed. Just like we notice in crimes, blood can act as a string that ties individuals to a certain act. No matter the time, each person involved in the crime is linked to the blood that was spilled. If we’re able to determine who was present at a murder weeks, months, and even years later by blood testifying as to the identity of its owner, then blood becomes a witness to the past by its existence in the present.

  If you compare the words testify and testament, they both have the
same Latin root word, testi, literally meaning “witness.” In the Bible we see this meaning tied to the emphasis God seems to place on the importance of blood. Time and time again, blood becomes a way to infuse life, to communicate, to reveal, to protect, to seal, to atone, and to save. For instance, in the Garden of Eden, when God sees that it is not good for man to be alone, the Lord creates woman from part of Adam’s body. When Adam then states, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man” (Gen. 2:23), he is speaking literally as well as figuratively.

  The sons of Adam and Eve also discover the power of blood. Abel, having brought an acceptable sacrifice before the Lord, and Cain, offering one deemed unacceptable in God’s sight, clashed as Cain’s jealousy of his own brother led him to murder Abel. God’s response to Cain is revealing: “The LORD said, ‘What have you done? The voice of your brother’s [innocent] blood is crying out to Me from the ground [for justice]’” (Gen. 4:10 AMP). The blood of the victim speaks, crying out for justice even after his life has ended.

  In Exodus, when the people of Israel struggle to leave the slavery of Egypt behind, we see how the sprinkling of blood on Hebrew doorposts saved the inhabitants of the house from the wrath of the Angel of Death. The blood of slaughtered lambs shed on the altars in the temple became the means of atonement for people’s sins prior to Christ’s death on the cross. The contrast between these two is important because one was temporary—the bloodshed of animals for that moment’s sacrifice—and the other eternal as Jesus’ shed blood and resurrection forever defeated sin and death.

  Blood has amazing power. And Jesus reminds us that we cannot celebrate without it. In order to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection, we have to first acknowledge the suffering and crushing of the cross. Jesus was crushed in every way—physically beaten, emotionally isolated, and spiritually bereft. Excruciating pain shot through every inch of His frame. Comfort was diabolically designed to be torturously beyond reach. As the nails in His hands became too much to bear, His body shifted His weight to His legs and feet, causing even more agony because of the nails in His ankles as well. Once the weight on His feet took its toll, Christ would pull Himself up by His nailed hands. With no way to escape the pain, He endured growing hypoxia that made each of His breaths more labored than the one before. His lack of blood was so severe that every one of His rapidly failing organs was starving for oxygen. In essence, Jesus was suffocating as a result of His extensive bodily trauma.

  With a final heave of one last breath, Jesus gasped, “It. Is. Finished!”

  The Darkness

  The gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke bear witness to a darkness falling over Jerusalem at the time of Jesus’ death, and that darkness remained for a span of three hours. Some have attempted to debunk the accounts of these three disciples by attributing that darkness to some natural phenomenon, like a solar eclipse or severe weather. Seeing as how I stand on the biblical account, taking nothing from it and adding nothing to it, I am led to believe that there was something else at play that led to the heavens giving no light at the time. Because the God who decided to express this recorded darkness is the same One who controls the weather and the rotation of the earth He created.

  So why the darkness of those three hours? And why bring it to our attention?

  I’ve had to comfort plenty of parents who have prematurely lost their children. I cannot and choose not to imagine an instance of giving the eulogy for my own sons or daughters and then burying them. It’s a nightmare I do not rehearse. Nevertheless, it is one that others have had the misfortune of suffering. I’ve seen their despair, heard their cries, attended the funerals, and had to counsel them through the resulting depression and suicidal thoughts. I say that to lay the groundwork for our understanding the emotional state of any parent who has lost a child. Perhaps you have. If so, you intimately know the pain associated with something so tragic.

  If our emotions are given to us by our Creator, they must be modeled after His own emotions. After all, we know God laughs. He experiences joy, sorrow, and anger. The only difference between His emotions and ours that we can fully understand is that His are pure and haven’t been corrupted by the stain of sin. With that being said, doesn’t it stand to reason that He would experience His emotions on a level that far supersedes our own? So His sorrow at the sight of His Son dying and becoming the representation of evil that had so infected the human heart must have torn the Father apart. On top of that, the Father had to turn His back on the sin that Christ then embodied because righteousness and unrighteousness have no part with one another.

  The Father forsook the Son He loved so that He could be reconnected back to us.

  With the sorrow felt by the Almighty and His connection to every aspect of creation, I don’t believe it’s far-fetched that all of nature would react to the death of the glorious Son.

  The darkening of the sun could be seen as a reflection of the Master weeping not only at what His Son became on our behalf, but also, I offer, at the fact that so few of His own people received him. The sun refusing to shine gave us tangible evidence that the light in God’s eye had temporarily dimmed. Oh, yes. Surely, Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection would turn the world upside down and lead to the harvest of billions of souls throughout the rest of human history. But, at that moment, the Master, in His eternal nature, mourned the death of His beloved Boy.

  Something else, however, was also happening at His death. Jesus gave up the ghost, meaning that His soul had departed His mortal body. Though His body would soon be placed in a tomb, His eternal spirit was already at work in the supernatural. Having reached backward and forward through time to grab hold of every sin humanity would commit, Jesus had taken upon Himself the punishment and death that we deserved. By entering the grave and conquering it on behalf of everyone who would receive Him—past, present, and future—Christ forced the grave to give up its first fruits of those saints who had gone on before as a testament to His work.

  Only Matthew’s recording of the gospel speaks to the breaking open of tombs and the appearance of dead saints walking around Jerusalem. I’ve seen many pastors and teachers overlook this fact out of fear of how to explain this phenomenon, but I hold to the notion that Jesus’ presence in the grave on behalf of sin-stained humanity would not only force the grave to release a smattering of the faithful from its grasp but also upset earth itself.

  After all, a new kind of man was being born—something that was the embodiment of the reconnection of God with his prized creation. In tandem with his sorrow, darkness fell and the foundations of the planet shook. Nevertheless, what if we looked at the accompanying earthquake as the heaving and pushing of a womb that was struggling to birth the newness placed in it by the seed of Jesus’ sacrificial death?

  Let’s remember that Jesus suffered on our behalf and descended into the grave so that we might ascend back to our position of righteousness in God. He broke the shackles that bound us to sin and death. As a result, the grave had to release its hold on the faithful who lived before Christ arrived. Hence the earthquake. After He would ascend, so would they. The shaking of terra firma was not just a reaction to the Master’s emotional tumult. No, it had to have been the pushing out of the first fruits of the new creation wrought by the planting of the seed of a sacrificial Savior. Just as a baby crowns when his head appears and approaches departure from the womb, so, too, did the first fruits emerge.

  Without the crushing there would be no crowning! Suffering must never be wasted. Spilled blood is always redeemed. Crushing is not the end.

  The Redemption

  There are things in your life that you have placed in the ground because you have labeled them as dead. You have decreed that they don’t have life and purpose. Perhaps you’ve walked away from a marriage or even bade farewell to your relationship with God. As your sorrow is still tangible, a thick darkness now surrounds your heart, and you are slow in returning to its gravesite because of the p
ain you once felt. That trauma caused a tremendous shaking in every aspect of your life, and you have taken an oath to never hope again, never dream again, never love again, and never again take a chance that life could be better.

  But the very fact that life emerged from the grave as a response to Jesus’ death suggests that what you’ve buried still has purpose. Yet, this truth is difficult for you to accept because you struggle to realize that its appearance is quite different from how you last saw it. Once corrupted with human effort and sin, it has returned wrapped in the glory of a Savior who wishes you would turn again and see the life that now inhabits it.

  Whatever your passion may be—your dream, family, church, business, book—Jesus did not die just to save only you. His death was for every part of you that you had given up on. Look again. With the Master, it is being reborn as He steps out of His tomb with all power in His hands. Just like the resurrected saints that walked the streets of Jerusalem on the day of Jesus’ death were the “crowning” of the birth that would come from His resurrection, that which you have buried is crowning.

  Your crushing is nothing more than the beginning of a glorious transformation process that will reveal who and what you really are to the world and to you. And it’s just the first step. Just like your acceptance of Jesus’ death comes first, so does your crushing. Just like the grapes being trampled comes first, so does your crushing. There is more to come—so much more.

  What have you given up on? Buried? How might it be redeemed in a new way, different than what you expect or what you experienced? What could be crowning now in your life?