Between the Two Ponds
One passage. One idea. A few quiet minutes. Short devotional readings for people being formed by grace, written from a small chair beside still water in Falcon, Colorado.
Pull one up. Read slowly. There is no hurry here.
No Graft Without the Knife
I want to sit with that, because we skip past it every time and it is the whole mechanism.
"But if some of the branches were broken off ... do not be arrogant toward the branches." (Romans 11:17-18)
The graft has to be cut in. Sit with that, because we skip past it every time, and it is the whole mechanism. You do not tape a branch to a tree. You do not lay it alongside and hope. The farmer takes a knife and opens the trunk, and opens the branch, and binds the two open places together, and the healing that closes over that wound is the union itself. Two woundings, held against each other until they become one thing.
Which means there is no grafting without cutting. We would all prefer a version of this faith where the sweetness comes without the knife, and people go looking for it, but the ones who claim to have found it are usually the ones whose fruit you would not want to eat. Sweetness without a wound is a flavoring, not a graft.
Christ was opened. His side was opened, his hands were opened, and it was through those openings that our life came. And you will be opened too. That is not a threat; it is how the joining is done. The place where you were cut, the loss, the humbling, the thing that broke you open, is exactly the place the good sap can finally get in, if you will let it be bound to him and not to your own bitterness. A wound bound to Christ becomes the union. A wound bound to bitterness becomes a scar that keeps everything out. Do not despise the cut. Ask whom you are being joined to through it.
The Wild Branch
Olive trees grow wild in Israel the way wildflowers grow here.
"But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, although a wild olive shoot, were grafted in among the others." (Romans 11:17)
Olive trees grow wild across Israel the way weeds grow anywhere. And when a wild olive matures on its own, the fruit it produces is bitter and essentially worthless. It will not feed anyone. It grows, and it fruits, and the fruit is no good. So the farmers graft. They take a branch from a good tree, cut into the wild one, and bind the good branch into the wound. The union takes. The wild tree begins to carry the character of the good tree, its very identity changes, and it starts producing fruit sweet enough to set on a table.
Paul turns that image on us and says we are the wild branch. We were the bitter one. We grew well enough on our own, and what we produced was not fit to serve. And we have been grafted into Christ.
Which means the fruit that comes out of your life from now on is not being generated by you. It is being drawn from the tree you were bound into. The sweetness is not something you manufacture by effort. It is something you carry because of a union you did not arrange and could not have arranged. So stop straining to produce good fruit by willpower, as though you were still a tree on your own roots. You are the wild branch, and the cut where you were joined in is the only reason you are sweet.