Those people who have roses in their gardens may occasionally come across a new vigorous growth coming from low down in the plant. They may well rejoice at the new life in the plant, but they would be wrong to.
It’s most likely a sucker. These are shoots coming off the wild root onto which a cultivated rose has been grafted. If allowed to grow it will take all the energy from the roots and gradually starve the rose, which will wither and die, leaving a wild rose in its place.
What has this to do with mission work?
Common to all Christians are the habits and thought patterns we got into before we were saved. We may have had struggles with addictions, an exaggerated tendency to despondency, fear of failure or a possessive need to be loved. When we become Christians, in theory our life has been transformed. St Paul talks about us being ‘dead to sin’. He tells us we have been buried with Christ through having been baptised into his death, so that we can walk in newness of life (Romans 6). But he also writes: ‘Lay aside the old self… be renewed in the spirit of your mind… and put on the new self’ to people who were believers and who presumable had already been baptised (Ephesians 4:22-24).
So there is still something for us to do to facilitate our transformation into being a new creation (Galatians 2:20). Sometimes those old habits come creeping back, like the sucker on the rose. Many of us make the mistake of thinking that a given negative action in our lives was an isolated act of sin, repent of it, and move on. But the same ‘isolated’ act then occurs over and over again, becoming a weakness, and eventually a gaping hole in our armour.
In the same way, a good gardener will cut off the sucker as soon as she identifies it, but it will grow back again and again and again. Because the problem is not the sucker, but the root it grows from.
Changing the metaphor slightly, Christians are wild olive branches grafted into the cultivated olive tree (Romans 11). But just as with the rose, there is a tendency for the old wild plant to reassert itself.
For mission workers, often under great stress and feeling isolated or lonely, it can be very tempting to fall back into old habits. They bring us short-term comfort even though we have the challenge of the guilt we carry with us. They become our secret sin, and we lie to ourselves telling ourselves it’s alright because it’s just a method of coping with the stress. But sin grows, like the sucker, sapping the life of a beautiful rose. And one day it will be seen by everyone for what it is – bringing down our ministry, our family, possibly even our own walk with God.
We need to tackle the root of the flesh which makes us vulnerable to such sin. We need to see it for what it is, expose the lie it is telling us, and root out the base desire. Sometime we need help with that – prayer partners, accountability partners, even deliverance ministry. If you would like to have a confidential discussion with Syzygy about this, email us on info@syzygy.org.uk.
A good tree cannot produce bad fruit; a rotten tree cannot produce good fruit.
(Matthew 7:18)
