Have you ever looked at a rose bush and admired it? Try it sometime. The petals bear a beauty that only God could explain. The roses bear colors that seem as if they could never be remade in a painting.

           Let me guide your imagination and eye around a particular rose bush. As your eye guides down the rose petals you observe the rose’s stem. It’s thorny. It shows a potential roughness that the beauty seems to overwhelm. But the roughness is still there and will always be there unless a gardener comes by and trims back the thorns. As your eye travels around the rose bush you observe a dirty rag hanging from one of the long green stems. The stem holds onto the rag with a fierce grip since its thorns are long and sharper than a knife. You also see that the rose that bears the burden of the rag is dying. Its burden is killing its nutrients, its life.

            Have you ever felt like this rose? You feel as if the burdens of this world way you down. You see the rose that bears the rag will die someday. Its colors and beauty that God wants to give it and has offered it fades away because the rose holds onto the rag. It doesn’t need the rag but its thorns still hold onto it.

           Here it is, if you feel like this rose:

          The thorns are your sins, the things that keep you from communicating and walking with God.

          The rag is the meaningless weaknesses you have that you feel that you cannot live with out.

         Ask the Master Gardener to take away the thorns. Ask Him to take away your rags, your meaningless worries, preoccupation’s, and sins that keep you from communing and talking openly with Him.

         And the warm, open and loving hands of almighty God will trim back your thorns, He will gently take away your weaknesses and make them your strengths, He will give you your true colors again. He will make you new again. And your refreshed life will grow to the depths of a loving God who is the Master Gardener. He knows his rose bushes. And you know what? He knows you more than you can ever imagine. That is why He wants to trim you, He wants to help you grow into the rose, the person you should be. So ask Him, He’s waiting to take away the rag.

         “Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit.” John 15:2

         “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.” John 15: 5