The Law of
the Farm teaches us that success comes in daily effort and in discipline. You nurture and wait for the growing process
to complete. Today we use shortcuts: we
use chemicals to quicken the growth process, so that the investment is returned
quick. As a result, we pay the price
with our health.
Spirituality
has also been facing the same problem.
When look for ways to get favors from God without sacrifice or having to face the challenges of walking
with God. The Law of the Farm applies to
spirituality as well. Pain-free,
sacrifice-free spirituality in the end will have a price to pay.
Lent begins
with choice and human freedom. God has a
faculty that He has only shared with human beings It is called the freedom of choice. Using the freedom of choice, we can either
soar and develop into God’s image or go down to the level of animals.
Fist
reading (Deuteronomy 30: 15-20)
“Choose
life and prosperity or death and destruction”
Anyone in
the right mind would say we would choose life and prosperity. The Law of the Farm applies here as well; there
are no shortcuts to choose life and prosperity.
“Love the
Lord your God, walk in obedience to Him and keep His commands, decrees and laws. Then you will increase, and the Lord your God
will bless you in the Land you enter to possess”.
It looks very
logical; obey God and He will bless you.
The question is, why don’t we do it?
That is the complicated problem of our lives.
“But if your heart turns away and you are not
obedient, bow down to other Gods and worship them, you will CERTAINLY be
destroyed”.
Other Gods
are like the God of money, before whose alter people sacrifice all their
values. If you worship at the alters of
Other Gods, you will certainly be destroyed.
“This day I
call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before
you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your
children may live”.
Choose Life
so that you and your children will live.
Sounds logical. No shortcuts. It’s the Law of the Farm.
Building a
regular spiritual life is the Law of the Farm.
You have to do it daily. Praying,
reading the scriptures, sitting at the feet of the Lord on a daily basis is building
the foundation to a beautiful, blessed life.
If you cut this short, “I love God loves me” and live as you please,
while God is loving you, you will live in a hell that you have created. Bitter, angry, quarrelling, because the foundation
has not been built.
Gospel (Luke
9:22-25)
“The Son of
Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests
and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be
raised to life”.
We want to short
circuit this and come to the third day straight. There were two days before that; the Son of
man must suffer, go through rejection and must die. The Law of the Farm. The seed has to be planted in the soil and
die. You have to do fruitless things;
you sacrifice without any fruit. Its
called discipline, living the right way.
But you do it. If you don’t have
such a depth, your spirituality wont last.
“If anyone
would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross DAILY and
follow me”.
Go against your
nature on a daily basis. If you do that
you open yourself to a mighty blessing from God. Many people don’t like this dimension of
Christianity. We like the blessing, but
we don’t like to pay the price. We want
someone else to pay the price. That’s what
we do with the Saints; they have paid the price and we ask for blessings. Every Saint is a model for us of how to pay
the price.
“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny
themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to
save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.”
If you go
against your broken nature, if you fight your flesh, it is a death
experience. It is so hard. But if you die there, you will find this
beautiful life off God. If you last the
time that the breaking is harder, you will find peace, freedom, joy and you feel
good. Your inner-being develops.
What good
is it for someone to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit their very
self?
In the end
you will die and loose everything. If
you loose your morality doing what you like, you will pay even after
death. There is life after death. Where you go after death depends on the
choices you make now.
Psalm 1
“Blessed is
the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that
sinners take or sit in the company of
mockers, but whose delight is in the law
of the Lord , and who meditates on his law day and night”.
Every
morning sit at the feet of the Lord.
Allow His words to get into your heart. Before you go to sleep in the night plant that
word of God in your heart. It will grow
unseen in your heart. You can’t have a
spiritual experience without a daily journey with God.
“That
person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in
season and whose leaf does not wither— whatever they do prospers”.
Build a life of God, planted on the side of the
river and the blessings will follow.
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