I love trees, and today in the U.S. it’s Arbor Day, a day marked for celebration of trees (traditionally by planting a tree) and all the good they do for the environment around them.
God uses trees throughout His Word, beginning and ending with the Tree of Life, and many other references throughout.
Today, though, I thought about how God tells us, in the Psalms and in Jeremiah, how we can be like a tree, sustained and fruitful even in hard times.
Jeremiah records God’s word to His people:
“This is what the Lord says:
‘Cursed is the one who trusts in man,
who draws strength from mere flesh
and whose heart turns away from the Lord.
That person will be like a bush in the wastelands;
they will not see prosperity when it comes.
They will dwell in the parched places of the desert,
in a salt land where no one lives.
But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord,
whose confidence is in Him.
They will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit.’”
Jeremiah 17:5-8
At one point in history, God’s people demanded Samuel appoint them a king instead of looking to God as their King. The first king they put their trust in was Saul, and we know how that ended. And for hundreds of years God’s people put their trust in, and were ruled by kings.
Even today, a lot of people (sometimes even God’s people) are trusting in men and women in office to fix things, to make bad situations good, to make wrong situations right. And there seems to be no shortage of people willing to promise to do those things.
But that never ends as well as we’d like because people are just people, and the world’s system is not God’s. Let the world have the world.
We have God, a Savior, a Lord, who can do much more – He can make our hearts right.
Jesus tells us “’Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.’ By this He meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were later to receive.” John 7:37-39
So, we might not be able to plant a tree today, but let’s be a tree and leave the world’s ways (sorry, I couldn’t help it!).
Let’s plant ourselves by the living water by putting our faith in Christ and Him alone and receive from Him rivers of living water, the Holy Spirit, continually moving through us, nourishing us, sustaining us, and producing in us fruit and all kinds of good things to benefit us and those around us, no matter the circumstances, with no end to its abundance.
