Monthly Archives: May 2023

Don’t Run When the Pruning Starts

Leave a reply
pruning a tree

There’s an orchard in Lancaster, PA that we love visiting multiple times throughout the year. We pick apples, peaches, and strawberries there. I saw a post from them this week about the pruning they are doing on their peach trees. It reminded me of how God works with us.

Pruning and training early in the life of the tree will help establish the desired form of the tree and make future pruning and maintenance less complicated. The rewards of proper pruning and training are abundant yields of high-quality fruit that are easily harvested.

Cherry Hill Orchards
Pruning at Cherry Hill Orchards

The Pruning Process

When I read this post, it made me think of how God prunes us. I feel like this is exactly how God has worked in our personal life and ministry. The pruning in the early years of ministry really changed us and molded us and prepared us for the kind of ministry God wanted us to have.

Pruning isn’t fun. It’s often painful, but it’s how God prepares our hearts and changes us into the person he wants us to be. He does it so that we can actually produce more fruit.

He cuts off every branch of mine that doesn’t produce fruit, and he prunes the branches that do bear fruit so they will produce even more. 

John 15:2 NLT

How God Prunes Us

The most common way that God prunes us is through testing and trials. He allows things into our lives to begin this work in our lives.

What I’ve seen time and time again over the years is that people run when God starts the pruning process. They get scared and take off instead of staying. They leave a ministry, a job, a relationship, a career, a church. God starts squeezing and putting the pressure on, and people get scared and run.

What Happens When You Run

There’s one thing I’ve learned about God’s pruning. If you run, the process will simply start again at another time. You may escape it for now, but then the testing and trials will start again in a different form.

The best thing we can choose to do is to stay in it. Stay in the pruning, the testing, the struggle. Don’t give up. Don’t run, even though it feels like everything inside of you is telling you to run. Stay still; allow God to work. Allow him to change and mold and shape you into who he wants you to be.

If we don’t run, if we don’t give up during the testing, we will produce fruit.

Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing

John 15:5

Choose to stick with it; don’t run during the pruning process. If we stay faithful, we will get to see what it looks like when God uses us to produce fruit.

For More Encouragement

For more on this topic, check out a great video by the Skit Guys called The Chisel. It’s all about this process of pruning that God takes us through. Or read my post Peach Picking and Sticking With It.

What Matters is How You Finish

Leave a reply
picture and how you finish quote

We all know of people who started out well but didn’t finish well. You don’t have to look far for these kinds of stories. There’s a story in the Old Testament about a king who started out so well. He was a really good king until one day, he wasn’t. His name was King Asa.

Who was King Asa?

King Asa was a good king. He followed God and did what was right, and God blessed him in his reign. Everything was going really well for him, until something changed in his life. During the thirty-sixth year of his reign, King Baasha invades. Out of fear, King Asa sends money from the Temple to another king and asks for an alliance. King Ben-hadad agrees to the alliance and helps drive King Baasha out of King Asa’s land. Success right? They drove out the invading king.

Not so fast. After they drive out the invading king, Hanani (a seer), comes to see King Asa and delivers this message:

“Because you have put your trust in the king of Aram instead of in the Lord your God, you missed your chance to destroy the army of the king of Aram.

II Chronicles 16:7

What was Hanani’s message?

Hanani tells King Asa that he’s been a fool for trusting in a human instead of in God and that from now on, he will be at war. King Asa gets so irate, he throws Hanani into prison. What’s interesting to note is that the Bible says that from that point on, King Asa began to oppress some of his people.

King Asa goes on to develop a serious foot disease but still doesn’t choose to turn back to God. Just five years after these events, King Asa dies, leaving behind a tragic legacy.

King Asa started out so great, but he didn’t finish well. It doesn’t matter how we start something, it’s how we finish. We can have the best start, but it’s the finish that matters the most.

What was King Asa’s Downfall?

He stopped trusting God; it’s as simple as that. He knew better. He knew to trust God and to obey him; yet, somehow, he turned away from God and started trusting himself. That was his downfall.

So many people start out strong in their faith, but then life happens. Our feet get knocked out from under us, and life batters us. We get so bruised and battered that we lose the will to stick with it. Soon, we fall away from church, we stop meeting with our small group, and we stop reading our Bibles and even praying. Before too long, we find ourselves in a dark place, far away from God.

How do we keep from being like King Asa?

We have to continue to trust God each and every day and not lean on our own understanding of life and situations. We have to remember these familiar words from Proverbs and continue to put our trust in God and not depend on our own selves for direction in life.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart;
    do not depend on your own understanding.
Seek his will in all you do,
    and he will show you which path to take.

Proverbs 3:5,6

Who do we trust?

The only way to get through this life is to trust God every step of the way and not our own selves. Jeremiah tells us that our hearts are deceitful and wicked, and we can’t trust them. We have to learn to trust God and not our own emotions, thoughts, and feelings; those can lead us away in a big way. As soon as we stop trusting God, we begin on the path to our demise.

Choose to listen to God, to listen for his voice in the midst of all of life’s craziness. Set aside time every morning to spend time with him through a morning time routine. Stay faithful to church, get involved in a small group. Most of all, continue to trust God one day at a time. If we do, we can finish strong and leave a legacy of godliness for our kids.

More Encouragement

For more encouragement on this topic, check out my post, Encouragement for the Weary Soul. Want to develop your trust in God by growing in your walk with him? Check out our devotionals and journals, available from Manney Resources.

Taking Personal Responsibility for My Life

Leave a reply
responsibility ahead sign

Taking Responsibility

One of the things that Matt and I deal with time and time again is the issue of taking personal responsibility for your life. I can’t tell you how many times we have sat across the table with people whose lives are absolutely a mess, and they look us straight in the face and say, “It’s not my fault. You don’t understand what happened to me.”

The fact of the matter is we don’t. We don’t know all that has happened to people. We’ve heard some heart-breaking stories over the areas—stories that nobody should have to go through! It breaks our hearts, and we know it breaks God’s heart. We don’t understand, but there is someone who does. God understands, and he has walked by their side every step of the way.

Turning to Something Else to Take Away the Pain

As horrible as our circumstances may be, God still expects us to live in a way that honors him. He expects us to turn to him and let him guide us through the trial. Yet, that’s the opposite of what most of us do. Most of us throw our hands up and say, “I can’t. I give up. This is too hard; I can’t do this.” When hard times hit, people give up on God, their families, their friends, their job…Soon all that’s left is a bottle. So they turn to that bottle, because at least the bottle is consistent. The bottle promises to help relieve the pain, take away the feeling of a broken heart. Satan convinces us that the answer is in that bottle, or that pill…that next high. And we have no idea that we are just driving ourselves further away from God and from others around us until we’ve lost absolutely everything.

I talked to three people just this week who are in this exact circumstance. The fact of the matter is that so many people convince themselves that what they’re going though is not their fault and it gives them permission to destroy their lives with whatever has a grip on them—drugs, alcohol, sex, spending money, gambling, pornography, anger, lust, and the list goes on and on.

Just a Victim of Our Circumstances

So many people feel like they are the victims of their circumstances. We fool ourselves into thinking that whatever has happened to us is not our fault, and therefore, we’re not responsible for our actions. The truth is that we are responsible for ourselves, our actions, and our lives no matter what life throws at us.

We all have life happen to us; what counts is how we respond. Nobody escapes this life problem free; none of us come out unscathed. Yet, we choose what happens next; we write the narrative on our lives.

It’s vital that we remember these three things:

  1. My life is my own personal responsibility.
  2. I have control over my life.
  3. What anybody else does or does not do has no control over me or my life.

The Reason God Allows Bad Things into Our Lives

Why do we have to go through bad things? Why does God allow testing to take place in our lives in the first place?

James gives us an idea of why God allows testing in the first chapter of his book.

Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing.

James 1:2-4

The Goal

James explains to us that with testing comes an opportunity to grow in our faith and as a person. Every test that comes our way is a chance to grow our endurance. Then, when our endurance is fully developed, we will be perfect. The definition of perfect here is mature or complete. From these verses, we understand that the only way to become spiritually complete or mature is to grow our endurance by getting through trials, by learning to deal with life as it comes at us.

What’s the Goal?

The goal in all of this is not self-control; rather, it is spirit-control. We want to be guided by the Holy Spirit living inside of us, and not by ourselves. If that’s the goal, how do we know if we’re succeeding? Paul gives us a checklist in the book of Galatians.

 But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!

Galatians 5:22,23

Spirit-Filled vs. Our Sinful Nature

Here’s how we know if we are spirit-controlled: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goddess, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control come flowing out of our life.

What is the opposite of that? What if we aren’t being led by the spirit’s control? Well, it will look like the list Paul gives only a few verses earlier.

When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. 

Galatians 5:19-21

Measuring Ourselves

So the test is to see which verses our lives line up with. Is it the first list or the second? That will give us an idea of how we’re doing. If our lives are lined up more with the second set of verses, then it’s time to change; and God can help us do just that.

It’s time to take responsibility for our lives, our choices, and our actions. Only then can we allow God to change us and become Spirit-led instead of self-led.

For More Encouragement

For more encouragement, check out my post, God Uses Trials to Develop Iron in Our Souls, and a good book recommendation is Get Out of that Pit by Beth Moore.