Another Ramble About Weeds

It's funny how some weeds look a lot like the vegetable or herb you're trying to grow. Recently, I was watching one plant come up thinking it might be a potato that we missed last year when we harvested them. After a few weeks though, it became clear that it was just an inedible weed, and up it came as I removed it.

I was thinking about this as I was watching a real potato plant come up where I had planted it a few weeks ago. The differences between this real potato plant and the weed pretending to be a plant I wanted were obvious now that I was looking at the real thing.

But what about someone who didn't know the difference? What about someone who had never seen the real plant come up, but had only just planted? Or what about someone who was looking for edible plants in the wild? Many edible wild plants have poisonous lookalikes. As my wife reminds me, we can't afford to be wrong.

This in turn makes me think about the kinds of fruit we want to see from a disciple of Jesus Christ. We know what it's supposed to look like from what the Scriptures tell us, but how many of us have actually seen a true disciple of Christ who practices everything Jesus taught? In those we take as our examples, are we seeing the edible plants, or are we seeing the poisonous lookalikes? If you've never actually seen the edible plant, you may well assume that the poisonous lookalike is the real thing and feed on that. In the same way, if you've never actually seen someone who “gets it”, you may take what you are seeing for real Christianity and wind up trying to be like someone who is as far from Jesus as possible.

I heard recently that one of the ways you can tell an edible plant from a poisonous one is whether or not it's sweet or bitter (I'm sure it doesn't work in every case, but it seems to be built into our taste buds), and not just by appearance. Granted, this means you have to sample some of it and be prepared to spit it back out quickly.

In some ways, telling whether or not someone is actually a disciple is a lot like this. A true disciple of Jesus Christ will always taste of love and compassion. None of us are perfect as of yet, but a true disciple gets it that what Jesus taught was loving compassion for anyone and everyone, and this is how you know God is coming through that person when His love is pouring out of them.

These days, we tend to take theology or moral virtues as our taste test. But there are a great many pseudo-disciples that are toxic to our progress of faith who are highly virtuous and hold to technically sound theology that truly don't get it that you can't know God apart from loving compassion and allowing His love to flow through you. They think God is found in this or that writing or piece of doctrine. These things tell about God, but you can't know God through them any more than you can get to know a celebrity by reading his or her online biography. God can only be known through loving compassion.

Jesus said you would know a tree by it's fruit. The fruit which you need to see is loving compassion. If it isn't there, turn away, there's nothing nutritious from that plant that you can use and it may poison you.