It's Time For A Prune Up!!

Around this time, you see so many flower gardens planted throughout the tri-county area of South Carolina.  They are full of color and life. Needless to say, flowers don't grow and look so beautiful without putting a lot of work into it. It's essential that you take the necessary steps to maintain the health and beauty of a garden. Some steps include watering the garden, making sure it's expose to the right amount of sunlight and even giving it a whole lot of love.


In addition to all of those steps, you must prune your garden. It's va ital step that must be taken in order to guarantee a healthy, beautiful, and quality garden.





How do you define pruning?


Pruning is a horticultural practice involving the selective removal of parts of a plant, such as branches, buds, or roots. Reasons to prune plants include deadwood removal, shaping (by controlling or directing growth), improving or maintaining health, reducing risk from falling branches, preparing nursery specimens for transplanting, and both harvesting and increasing the yield or quality of flowers and fruits. The practice entails targeted removal of diseased, damaged, dead, non-productive, structurally unsound, or otherwise unwanted tissue from crop and landscape plants. (Read more about pruning at Wikipedia.org)


In other words, in order to maintain and improve the health of your garden, you must remove the dead parts and shape it up by contolling or directing its growth. Otherwise, flowers in your garden will fall away, become damaged and/or unproductive, and even die. WOW!!






The same thing applies to us when it comes to growing up in Christ. A pruning process must take place. In order to bear spiritual fruit and be productive in the Kingdom of God, we must allow our hearts to be pruned. We must allow God by the power of the Holy Spirit and in the name of Jesus remove all diseased, damaged, and dead areas in our life. Otherwise, we will not grow in Christ and become stagnated. As a result, we will become uneffective Christians with no power, no purpose, and no spiritual life. Double WOW!!






"I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit. You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me,"  (John 15:1-4).






"I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in Me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered; and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned. If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you. By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit; so you will be My disciples," (John 15:5-8)