"Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." -1 Thessalonians 5:23
George Washington Carver, the creator of peanut butter and my favorite inventor (mostly because of the peanut butter thing) discovered that cotton derives soil of certain minerals, while peanuts distribute it back into the soil. Knowing this, someone decides to become a cotton farmer. They know and understand that no matter what the plant, four things are necessary when farming: water, soil, minerals, and time. So they plant the cotton, harvest it, then decide that they want to plant cotton again. So the next time it's time to plant, they go out and plant cotton without having done anything to put the minerals back into the soil. So harvest time comes that fall and they look at the crop and instead of the lush white little clouds that were seen the previous year, all there are, are shriveled up little dead things all over the place. They stand there puzzled, trying to think of why this happened. After all, the plants had 3 of the 4 necessary things. They had water, soil, and time. That should more than compensate for the lack of minerals in the soil, right? As an outsider it can be easy to see the problem. The crops clearly need all 4 things in order to grow properly. In theory this is a simple concept, but a lot of times it can be easy to not understand it.
All the time I hear people say that they're Christians, they just don't take the Lord's supper every Sunday (Ats 20:7) or that they're Christians they just don't study daily (Acts 17:1) or that they're Christians except for the fact that they were not baptized (Mark 16:16), etc. But when judgement day comes, are you prepared to tell God that you were mostly a Christian? Are you prepared to tell God that you obeyed most of His commandments? "Oh but this one thing doesn't seem as important as the others!" Let me ask you something, can one thing be more of a commandment than something else? Does God have a scale that measures which sins are worth more? Can you go to hell even harder for some things than others? Of course not. I'm not saying that everyone is going to hell because of sin, because if so then there would be no point in Jesus coming down to earth because every man other than Jesus Himself has sinned (Romans 3:23), but I'm saying that we need to do our best to follow God's word. It may seem like some things are less important, but rain is no less crucial to a plant's life than soil, or soil than minerals, or minerals than time. You can't have a crop without all of the necessary things, and the same thing goes along with our spiritual lives.
Today I would like to encourage you all to look at your lives, and find something that either you can improve on, or that you're just not doing, and challenge yourself to do that very thing. To improve on your prayer life, start evangelizing, or start studying more frequently. I'd like to plead with you to start, or improve on those things. After all, how can a crop grow without all the things necessary?
