A friend brought me a lush, gorgeous Pythos ivy in a hanging pot. As its tendrils grew longer and longer toward the floor, I clipped them and stuck the ends in a vase of water. Slowly they started to grow roots. After a while, I planted those stems with new roots back into the hanging pot. Those roots soon dug deeper into the dirt and intertwined with the other roots of the plant. They began to grow lush, full, and flourished even more.
It reminded me of the Christian … or the way our lives in Christ should be. Paul wrote to the Ephesians saying,
I pray that according to the wealth of his glory he will grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner person, that Christ will dwell in your hearts through faith, so that, because you have been rooted and grounded in love, you will be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and thus to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you will be filled up to all the fullness of God. (vs 16-19, emphasis mine)
When new Christians are baptized, the Holy Spirit immerses them in the new faith. Slowly, the new way of living takes root. But unless they are transplanted into a body of believers, it will be hard for them to thrive.
We all need to intertwine. We need to grow together, learn together, nourish each other, and share the love of Christ. Then we can spread out to others. We all have a responsibility to train up the children in our churches, even if we are not called to teach Sunday school or VBS. The Torah instructed the people of God to teach the commandments to their children (see Deuteronomy 4:9, 6:11, 11:19.)
How we act around the kids (and the adults new in Christ) has a great effect on their growth. When they see how we live out Scripture in our daily lives, it encourages them to do the same. They will flourish in the nurturing soil of the faith, attached to the vine as we are through Christ.
“I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in me—and I in him—bears much fruit, because apart from me you can accomplish nothing” (John 15:5).
Then when the time comes and they are cut away to start off on their own, the Holy Spirit will immerse them in how to live in the world yet not be tainted by it. What they witnessed in us will begin to take root.
Eventually, our hope and prayer is that they will realize they need to be repotted with other believers. And then the cycle will begin once again.
We are all children of God when we claim Christ as Lord. And we all grow at different rates. Let us not judge each other but intertwine and help each other grow in the faith, no matter our age or how long we have been in the Body of believers.
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