Spiritual Spoilage Control

[hldude]

“Spiritual Spoilage Control”
By Zach Wood
John 15:5 NIV
“I am the vine, you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.”


In the past month, we had two instances where our fridge stopped working at home. Both times, we could tell it wasn’t as cold as it should be. I can usually tell something isn’t right when the milk isn’t ice cold. I don’t know about all of you, but I like my milk ICE COLD! If it’s anything less, it tastes gross to me.

So when these two instances happened, we went through a routine of figuring out what to do with the food and beverages to keep them cold. Of course it was an inconvenience to get things figured out, but we didn’t want all our stuff to go bad. We did our best to try to figure out how to keep things cold. Thankfully, the apartment below ours is vacant, so our landlord let us keep stuff in that fridge.

Apart from the cold temperature needed in the fridge, our food would completely spoil and go bad. It has to remain at a certain temperature to keep the food chilled or it all goes bad.

I cannot help but think of our lives in Christ when we dealt with these instances. We did everything we could to keep our food from spoiling. In our spiritual lives, if we don’t keep our lives in tune with God and stay in His Word daily, our growth wanes and our fire for Him spoils. We would do everything we can to keep our food and beverages from going bad in our fridge if something went wrong, but for some reason, we seem to ignore and neglect the care that our spiritual lives need.

Jesus Christ is the True Vine. We are the branches. If we don’t take more seriously our growth and health spiritually, our hearts will begin to spoil. So often we just don’t seem to care and do fill our lives with everything else but God. And then we wonder why we aren’t growing and why our lives look like junk. If we’re not filling our lives with God, we’re filling our lives with the world and its junk instead.

When will we take Jesus’ words from this passage and really apply them to our lives? He meant what He said when He told us that apart from Him we can do NOTHING.

 

[Not_Now.Soon]

We water plants and gove them sunlight. And some people know enough to do more to take care of them. We keep some food cold, frozen, or dry to keep it fresh longer. One universal rule is to keep different foods seperate from each other so they don't contaminate eachother. Even with people we have a lot of tactics to handle those we like, those we don't, those we work with, and those we don't know.

But with God, there's an element that makes it hard. Often people don't know how to strengthen their relationship with Him. They don't make time, because they don't know how to, or they don't know if it'll matter one way or another.

Fellowship with others who have faith, strengthen that bond. Prayer, reading the bible, and obeying God as best we know, I think brings us closer to a relationship with Him. And doing good, by following the teachings and comandments, as well as loving each other, I think helps protect us from sin. There's also fasting too. I personally haven't fone mich of that and my knowledge base is very poor.

The worst part is that a lack of knowledge isn't the only problem. False information is a problem too. Think about keeping food fresh if among the other things you knew about doing do involved not only keeping it cold, but also it's best to mix everyhing together, because lettuce fights off one way of spoilage, and chicken fights off another. The food would spoil in those conditions too. Faster even.

Either way though. Your right in saying we need to care for our spiritual growth. Atempting to do so and the help ftom God, I think are good first steps, and should be apart of every other step in the process.