Trees are very important to God. There are hundreds of verses in the Bible that mention a tree or trees. There are even verses that compare people to trees. Trees symbolize life, prosperity, and abundance. They can also demonstrate a lack of these things. We are even compared to trees. In the book of Psalms, it says that the person who follows the Lord will be like a tree planted by water. In the New Testament, Jesus talks about trees producing good fruit and trees producing bad fruit to compare true followers to people merely going through the motions. Trees are all around us, so it makes sense that God would use trees to illustrate certain principles in ways that are easy for us to understand. God talks about various horticultural practices to give us a picture of spiritual principles. He talks about grafting different trees to illustrate how He brings Jews and Gentiles together into one body. He also talks about pruning.
Pruning is a practice of cutting away parts of a tree to encourage growth, to discipline the tree to grow in a certain way, and/or to keep the tree healthy and strong. Trees are pruned differently depending on what you want to ultimately accomplish with the pruning process. Trees are also pruned at different seasons depending on the type of tree. Pruning doesn’t harm the tree, but it does make it look a bit rough until the new growth starts. In the Bible, God talks about pruning us like pruning a tree.
John 15:2 says “Every branch in me that does not bear fruit He takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit.” Sometimes we read this verse and think that it applies to individual believers. After all, “He is the vine, and we are the branches.” (John 15:5). We are told in the same passage that we will bear fruit if we remain in Christ and allow Christ to remain in us. We think to ourselves that if we are producing fruit, then we will not be taken away in the pruning process, but this passage tells us that even when we are producing fruit, we will still undergo a pruning process.
“No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” (Hebrews 12: 11). When God sees something in our lives that is out of balance or not the way He wants it to be, He disciplines us. If you’re like me, you shudder at that word “discipline”. When you hear the word discipline, do you associate it almost exclusively with punishment? Do you look at discipline as a bad thing that should be avoided at all costs? What if discipline meant something else entirely. What if we looked at discipline as pruning instead of as punishment.
When we prune a tree, we aren’t punishing the tree. We are simply making sure the tree is at its best for the environment that its in. We are making sure the tree is healthy and strong. We are making sure it is producing the maximum amount of fruit possible and that it looks its best. When God prunes us, He isn’t punishing us. He is simply making sure that we are at our best, healthy and strong, producing the maximum amount of fruit and enjoying the maximum amount of His favor and blessings. Pruning takes planning. It takes time. God knows exactly what His plans are for you. Jeremiah 29:11 tells us that those plans are to give us a hope and a future, not to harm us.
God prunes us through trials. He prunes us through correction. He prunes us in seasons of abundance and in seasons of winter. Pruning removes the unwanted, dead, unhealthy parts of our lives and allows the healthy parts to grow bigger and stronger. Sometimes, pruning hurts. Sometimes we are unaware of the weight we have been dragging around with us. We are unaware of the unhealthy parts of our lives or our personalities. When God starts to remove those parts of us, we are uncomfortable. If it’s through a trial, we may feel intense suffering.
James 1:2-5 says “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” Consider it pure joy. It isn’t going to feel like joy. It isn’t going to naturally be associated with joy in your mind when you are going through it. No one looks at a trial and says, “Yay! A trial. I’m so joyful at the idea of suffering something that’s really difficult!” But James says that when we find ourselves in a trial, we should change our perspective from the trial itself to what comes after. When we look past the circumstances of our pruning to the fruitfulness that will come afterward, that’s the part that brings us joy. We can then suffer through our trials in joy because we are looking through the trial to the finished product. We know that that trial is going to make us mature and complete.
There’s no doubt about it, trials bring out all the stuff hidden in our hearts. If I have a cup in my hand and someone jostles my arm, whatever’s in that cup is going to come out. Whatever is filling that cup will become obvious to anyone looking. It’s going to come out. Sometimes our hearts are filled with things we aren’t even aware of. Trials jostle our hearts. Trials put us under pressure. And the things that come out are the things we are full of. Matthew 12:34 says that our mouths will speak what our hearts are full of. Another translations says “out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.”
The Bible tells us that when we are saved the Holy Spirit dwells within us. That means all those fruits of the Spirit that we read about in Galatians 5:22-23 (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control) are already planted on the inside of us. We already have them in our hearts, but in the beginning those fruits are tiny seeds. It’s only as we use them that they begin to grow into fully formed fruit. We have to put them into practice. So when we first enter a trial or a period of testing, the abundance of our heart is probably not going to demonstrate fully formed fruits of the Spirit. It’s probably going to bring a lot of yuck out first! And that’s the whole point! Once we see what’s filling our hearts, we can cooperate with God in the pruning process of removing it from our lives. When we cooperate with God, we get rid of the dead, ungodly things filling us up and we water those fruit seeds that the Holy Spirit planted there.
When we allow God to prune us, when we count it all joy, when we go through the trials and temptations and testing, we become mature trees, lacking nothing and full of the fruits of the Spirit. If you want to study more about the process of pruning and the fruit that comes from it, consider looking at this study. I also like this article from Joyce Meyer Ministries. Pruning hurts. It isn’t comfortable. It isn’t pleasant. But it IS for our good! It helps us to continue abiding in Christ and to bear much fruit for Him!
A Beautiful Mess 