Romans 11:16-24 :: Grafts and Grace

Romans 11:16-24 (The Message and TNIV)

The “holy, God-planted, God-tended root” is the place of privilege with God that Israel first enjoyed.  The natural branches are Israel and the grafted branches are the Gentiles.  The Gentiles were added into the family and are as holy as the core of the tree they were grafted into.  The Israelites who did not believe were considered deadwood and were pruned from the place of privilege.

Paul employs a very interesting metaphor here.   He references an olive tree (TNIV).  In Palestine, an olive tree that failed to produce foot would be trimmed back, or pruned.  A branch from a wild olive tree would be grafted to the pruned branch and the sap from the wild olive tree would invigorate the deadwood and new life would result in this process.

There are times when we must prune back our beliefs and practices that fail to produce any good fruit.  This pruning back allows for new life to be grafted into our wounded and pruned area.  We then will be able to grow new life and bear new fruit.  The branches that were pruned are not necessarily thrown away for good either.  God can take those old beliefs and graft them into the tree as well.  An old dead belief or practice, now comes alive again.

An example in my life of God doing this for me is in the area of spending time alone with God.  As a teenager, I was taught how to have a "quiet time" with God.  It was very ritualistic for me.  I had a journal that was divided up into days and I couldn't stand to have one of the days blank.  I took great pride in maintaining consistency of day-to-day quiet times.  Over time this ritual became a dead practice. I would go through the motions, but it was a practice that was not bearing fruit in my life or in the lives of others.  I was checking off a box of spiritual maturity...or so I thought.  For a season of my life, I quit having "quiet times."  That was simply a deadwood practice for me.  After a couple of years of God instilling in me the "new graft" of relational connections and community in God and with God, a new shoot was growing from my tree.  The root of spending time with God was holy and pure, but my additional legalism was deadwood.  Now that root of spending time with God, bears the fruit of a relationship with God that goes beyond a 15-minute window with a spiritual journal.  It bears the fruit of actively searching ways to encourage and build-up others around me as a result of the relationship I have with God, through the work and grace of Jesus.  My "quiet times" today don't look like they did, and might not even be considered such by my mentors, but they are what they are and right now, I think God is pleased with the fruit they produce...at least most of the time.

What about you?  Have you ever had an experience where God has had to prune some deadwood in your life?