Too many people have found total devastation in making an unwise financial investment. One day you are comfortable and well off. The next, you are bankrupt and bereft. It is a deeply unsettlingly experience that has long-term implications. It is something we all seek to avoid, but to avoid it we must monitor our situation and make wise and careful choices. If we realize our investments are headed in the wrong direction, we must do all we can to exit them before they are completely worthless. This is common sense.
It therefore ought also to be common sense that if we hold to an idea, doctrine or teaching that we later realize is not godly, that we abandon it too. All the more so, because ideas and doctrines and teachings are what we build our lives on. They have a far greater impact than money. A fortune can be regained. The years of your life cannot.
When He was told the Pharisees were offended by His words, Jesus said, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots.” That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, until you consider that He earlier told the parable of the weeds. Jesus is making it clear that He considered the Pharisees and what they taught to be ‘weeds’ in His Kingdom.
As Leon Morris puts it, “He [Jesus] proceeds to a horticultural metaphor to bring out his total rejection of their position, and speaks of the fate of plants that the heavenly Father did not plant. Whether the plant refers to the teacher or the teaching, Jesus is saying that the heavenly Father […] has revealed truths; his word may denote the truths themselves or the people to whom the truths have been revealed. Either way the point is that what God has made known is the significant thing. What God has not made known and what people like the Pharisees teach so confidently and authoritatively has no future. Because it is not divine truth it will not last. In due course it will be rooted up, another horticultural metaphor, this one speaking of plants torn up by the roots. This signifies final and complete destruction. In this way Jesus makes clear his contempt for the teachers who so confidently claimed to know the ways of God, but who had not been “planted” by the God to whom they so brazenly appealed. So far from being reliable expositors of the kingdom of God, the Pharisees were not even in the kingdom.”
That which is not of God does not survive to His everlasting Kingdom. We see that all around us. Almost everything we set our eyes to is temporary – it all dies, falls and rots away. But that which is of God – the things He created – live on as the earth and sky persist- perpetually made new by the seasons, cycles and storms of life.
As God’s Word persists, God’s truth also persists. A life that eternally matters must produce fruit that lasts, and fruit that lasts cannot be based on temporary ideas or false foundations. This is true wealth; That we build our lives on God’s truth, not human teaching or false doctrine.
Those who invest in God’s righteousness, invest in eternity. What wonderful encouragement for those of us who live surrounded by corruption!
Tokunboh Adeyemo
APPLICATION: Intentionality
How are you managing that which belongs to God?