214 ~ LANDSCAPING WHILE HARVESTING

Hi and welcome to the Via Zion Sermon podcast.

We are a local church based here in Chennai, India.

We are so glad you are with us and hope that this will

encourage, inspire and instill fresh faith in you.

As Spring sets in, we believe that God is leading His people

into a time of harvest and fulfilled promises.

Since a harvest involves reaping what was sown in previous

seasons, it implies that even the harmful weeds that have

sprung up need to be harvested and disposed of.

When we do that, we can genuinely thrive and be a

blessing to others. As you listen in, will you look

deeper at yourself and ask God to reveal what things need to be

uprooted and removed from your life?

Hi, church. It's my joy to bring the word of

God to you today, even as we celebrated Resurrection Sunday

last week. I don't know about you, but I

was so expectant. Because the resurrection means

everything to us. It is the hinge on which all of

our beliefs lie. And ever since then I've been

having the sense that spring is really here.

You know spring world over is very pivotal.

It's very real in Chennai. We it's almost like summer has

started. But when you look at what spring

really is about, spring is about new life springing up across the

earth. It's about the spring rains,

it's about the spring harvest. A lot of the plants in India, a

lot of the crops in India are being harvested at this very

time as we speak. And I believe that as much as

spring is here, I believe that God is bringing about a great

harvest in this season and we need to be very expectant for

that. And what does this harvest look

like? It looks like the harvest of

souls. It looks like a lot of the seeds

that we have sown in previous seasons are going to be brought

to fruition in this season. It's going to be growing.

There's going to be a lot of increase.

There's going to be a lot of blessing.

But it it begs us to look closer at what this harvest will look

like in each of our lives. And so that's what we're going

to be looking at today. We're going to be looking at

what this harvesting will look like in each of our lives.

This past week, one of our intercessors sent me a word for

the month of April, and it was from the book of Leviticus, from

the chapter 26. And while I have claimed that

for myself, as I was reading the rest of the chapter, I this one

was really got highlighted to me and I want to share today from

that verse Leviticus, chapter 26, verses 3 to 5.

Leviticus 26:3–5

This is what it says. If you follow my decrees and are

careful to obey my commands, I will send you rain and its

season and the ground will yield its crops and the trees their

fruit. Your threshing will continue

until grape harvest, and the grape harvest will continue

until planting, and you will eat all the food you want and live

in safety in your land. It's so interesting that all of

us want safety. All of us want to have all that

we need, but so often we forget the first parts, which is follow

my decrease, be careful to obey my commands, which is you know

what God speaks to us, what God is speaking to us through His

word. So often we remove that, and yet

we're expecting and waiting for all the perks of following Him.

And today God is calling us into this beautiful place of

obedience and submission so that He can bless us so that He can

increase the harvest of our righteousness.

And it looks, if you look here, it says your threshing will

continue until grape harvest, and the grape harvest will

continue until pruning, meaning there will be continually a

blessing that is poured into our lives spiritually and in every

other way that we are looking for.

But this requires a very huge intention on our part.

We need to be very intentional about pursuing God, hearing God,

obeying God, in order for this harvest to happen.

Now, I have to ask you this. When a harvest happens, if you

have even watched a documentary or you watch farmers work when

they're harvesting, the first thing they're looking for is

they look for the weeds. They look for the things that

could choke out the good harvest, and then they pluck

that out. We have a gardener who comes

once a month just to check on the plants that I so-called

maintain. And the first thing he does is

he comes to our We have a small little patch of lawn.

He first sits on the lawn and with an implement, he looks for

all the weeds. He goes at it from the root,

pulls the weeds out, and then he tends to the healthy grass.

And I believe that God is calling us to look at ourselves

first before we look at the harvest before, because the

harvest is his concern. It's what he does.

But there is another part of this, which is where God

examines our lives for those weeds, and He wants us to

address it. He wants us to give him

permission to uproot those weeds before they take over our lives,

so that the harvest is truly full, so that the harvest is

truly plentiful, and so that it is.

It is all that God wants out of our lives.

I love this verse from Isaiah 5, verse seven.

That's going to be the crux of what we're going to be looking

at. It says the nation of Israel is

the vineyard of the Lord of Heaven's armies, the people of

Judah, His pleasant garden. He expected a crop of justice,

but instead he found oppression. He expected to find

righteousness, but instead he heard cries of violence.

Today I would ask that you would picture your life to be a garden

if your life, every aspect of it, was a large garden that that

God the Father himself, is tending to very personally.

And I want us to look closer at what this garden actually holds.

This garden ideally should have flowering trees.

It should have huge shrubs, it should have those medicinal

herbs. It should have all of those

things that are useful for our lives.

But very often these gardens of our life have weeds that have

somehow crept in and are now taking over large space and

large tracts of our land. And God is calling us to a place

of looking closer at these weeds and saying, hey, I want to help

you, I'm the master gardener. I want to help you.

This past week, the reason I even came to this place of

studying the scriptures was on Monday morning when I opened the

newspaper. I made a habit of opening the

newspaper every morning. I spent about 20 minutes just

going through the news. Some of it is very depressing,

some of it is very enlightening. Overall, it's a great place to

actually, you know, poised and be ready to pray for certain

things because the newspapers full of potential prayer needs.

So that's what I was doing. I was just going through and

this one picture really stood out to me and it's probably

going to come up on the screen right now.

This plant, it's called Senna Spectablis.

It's actually a flowering tree and you would have seen it all

around your city. If you're in India, you would

have seen it down, you know, tree lined streets.

There's a big tree with a thick tree trunk and it's got lovely

yellow blossoms and it provides incredible shade to any street

right now. This Monday, when I was reading

the newspaper, the news article was that this tree is now listed

as an invasive alien tree. Reason being in the 80s, it was

planted in plantations in parts of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and

Kerala borders. And it was planted just to

shade, to provide shade to the coffee plantations and, you

know, to to line streets and to help out in these forested

areas. What happened was in the 80s,

what was planted as a shade tree today has literally taken over

the entire landscape. So what has happened is the

Mudumalai Forest Reserve and other reserves in that area have

been overrun by this plant to the extent where the ecology has

literally become imbalanced. So what has happened is this

tree has taken up the entire canopy.

It's preventing sunlight from reaching the floor.

Grasses and shrubs that need to grow there for the deer and

other hobby was to thrive is missing this tree on its own.

The bark, its leaves, they don't taste good.

It's not friendly, not inviting to other animals.

And what is happening is it has spread prolifically because its

roots are so far reaching, its seeds are so powerful that it

moves from place to place, and it has started infiltrating

healthy tracts of land. And what they've done now, this

end of December 2023 and the beginning of 2024, what they

have done is they've had to actually uproot tons of this

tree. They've actually cleared 21,000

tons of this particular tree and they've reclaimed 493 hectares

of land. And what ecologists are saying

is they're finding that nearly now, after, you know, they

cleared everything, nearly 15 species of grass and five

species of legumes are now growing in those cleared traps

of land which were unable to grow all of this time because

these guys had just overrun the place.

Interestingly, also they found a new wild rice variety which is

starting to grow in those spaces.

Ecologists are so excited, they say the forests are coming alive

again, all because this one tree became like a weed and overtook

the entire land. It invaded, It decimated land,

It made it unusable. It required harsh clearing of

the land. It required a harsh uprooting.

I was looking at pictures online of these, of some of the work

that's been happening with this weed.

Someone actually showed a 40 foot long root of this tree.

No wonder they were so well planted.

No wonder they were able to spread so prolifically.

They were well and firmly rooted in those spaces.

And today, I believe God is asking us to look at the Cena

Spectablis and ask which plants have you allowed into the garden

of your lives, which has overrun your heart, overrun your life,

which is literally taking up so much room that I don't have room

to grow the things I want to grow in your life.

If you don't believe me, if you don't believe the importance of

the weeds in our life, I want to just read a parable that Jesus

said to his disciples, he shared it with them.

They didn't understand it, so he explained it to them.

They were a bit slow, like us. And so we're going to be reading

from Matthew chapter 13 as I read.

Matthew 13 · chapter mention

I want you to just picture what Jesus is talking about, Matthew

Matthew 13 · chapter mention

chapter 13 verses 2413 says. Jesus told them another parable.

The Kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his

field, but while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and

sowed weeds among the wheat and went away.

When the weeds sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds

also appeared. The owner's servants came to him

and said, Sir, didn't you sow good seed in your field?

Where did the weeds come from? An enemy did this, he replied.

The servants asked him. Do you want us to go and pull

them up? No, he answered.

Because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the

wheat with them. Let both grow together until the

harvest. At that time I will tell the

harvesters. First collect the weeds and tie

them in bundles to be burned. Then gather the wheat and bring

it into my bun. Verses 36 to 43.

Jesus goes on to explain the parable.

They asked him. Explain to us the parable of the

weeds in the field, he answered. The one who sowed the good seed

is the Son of Man, the field is the world, and the good seed

stands for the people of the Kingdom.

The weeds are the people of the evil one, and the enemy who sows

them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the

age, and the harvesters are angels.

As the weeds are pulled up and burnt in the fire, so it will be

at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his

angels and they will weed out of his Kingdom everything that

causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the

blazing furnace where they will be weeping and gnashing of

teeth. Then the righteous will shine

like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father.

Whoever has ears let them hear. Jesus was talking about an end

time harvest. But very important to highlight

here is that there are two things that Jesus talks about

that needed wedding out. He said I will remove, they will

remove things that cause sin and all who do evil in each of our

lives. When I talk about this harvest

that God is doing right now, we're not going right to the end

time. The end time harvest is real.

But even in the season of harvest, even in the spiritual

spring that we're all in, many of us are walking out of exiles,

walking out of wilderness seasons, and we're walking

towards promised land areas that God is actually bringing

fruition and fulfilment to His promise.

But in that harvest, there's a side project that is happening

and that is the removal of these weeds in our life.

We need to allow God to do that because it's so important.

It is so important that the harvest happens in fullness.

What happens is if I don't give room for the Lord to actually

remove the weeds in my life, there will be huge parts of my

life which will be unproductive. There will be huge parts of my

life where there is stuff that is dogging me and holding me

back. He wants me to step into the

promise entirely free, entirely ready for what's next to not

being held back by what was in the past.

And so it's so important that we allow God to remove these two

things from our lives. The first thing is the things

that cause us to sin. If you have questions on that,

go to the Book of Ephesians, Go to 1 Corinthians.

Go to Two Corinthians. He talks about the stuff that

holds us back. Slander, gossip, bitterness,

envy, anger, lust, greed, things that are common to all of us,

none of us are exempt, and he is so desiring to remove these

things that cause us to sin. Bitterness is a huge thing.

It talks about a root of bitterness, Paul writes.

Make sure this root root of bitterness doesn't take root in

you, because if it does, it will corrupt everything.

So it's so important that we allow him to remove the things

that cause us to sin. The second thing that Jesus

himself says is the ones who are evil, the ones of the enemy.

There will be people that the enemy places in your life very

strategically. They may look like good

associations. They may look like, you know,

very healthy business associates.

They may look like they're, you know, lucrative for you.

But you need to be very discerning.

If they're from God or if they're from the enemy, you need

to be discerning, but who needs to be in your life and who

shouldn't? And that's what this harvest

will look like. You will find that when you give

God room, he will subtly remove certain people from your life,

and while it will be painful and jarring, once we have

surrendered to him, we just kind of go with the flow.

We trust that he knows what he's doing.

You will find that he will alert you to things that you have been

harboring in your heart or in your life, attitudes, postures,

mentalities, and he'll he'll convict you about them.

Things that you've been using as a cushion, protecting yourself

and emotion, a certain stance. He will address it and say, I

want that out because for this new season, for this season of

spring, I don't want that in your life.

And so it's so important that we come to this place of surrender

and say, Lord, I'm here. As much as I'm stepping to the

harvest, I want you to also approve things from my life.

Why does God want to approve things from yours and mine?

Can't he just leave, you know, sleeping dogs?

Like, why can't he just leave it be?

Leviticus chapter 18 verses 24 to 25 explains to us about what

Leviticus 18:24–25

things that are left dormant, what it does to us.

Do not defile yourselves with any of these things.

For by all these the nations are defiled, which I'm casting out

before you. For the land is defiled,

therefore I visit the punishment of its iniquity upon it, and the

land vomits out its inhabitants. The the power of the sins of

people on a land. The Amorites, Jebusites, the the

guys who lived, the Girgashites, all of these guys lived in

Canaan. Their sins were so terrible the

sins had corrupted the physical land and so God was actually

going to clear them out for the Israelites to settle there.

He made it very clear he was not clearing them out because of the

Israelites righteousness. Not at all.

He was clearing them out because of their unrighteousness and he

was purging the land because the the land had become defiled

today. The things that could corrupt

us, that lust, that greed, that anger, that bitterness.

We'll corrupt the garden of our lives.

It'll corrupt every area of our life if we let it overrun the

place. And that is why God wants to

uproot it, so that the land of our hearts, the land of the

landscape of our lives, will be cleared.

The problem with invasive weeds, the problem with these invasive

attitudes and and addictions and associations is that they will

take over the good land and overrun it.

And it leaves the land unfit for anything else.

Even if you want to grow in faith, even if you want to grow

with with with Christ at the centre, you want to have greater

capacity, greater impact. These routes will be

detrimental. Your life is too precious for it

to be defiled by these things. God is calling you into a place

where you will clear the land so that the stuff he wants to plant

will take root and multiply. How do we know that these huge

weeds are actually occupying space and allies?

You may say. Well, my life seems OK.

I'm at peace. I'm doing the things I want to

do. God is using me.

I know that I'm stepping into greater impact, greater

direction. I have more, you know, clarity.

All of that maybe. But you know the evidence of a

harmful weed in our lives is by the fruit that we are bearing.

The fruit we bear often will be poisoned.

It could be a little toxic. How do we know this?

Luke chapter 3 verses 9 is what John the Baptist says.

Luke 3:9

He says the axe is already at the root of the trees and every

tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and

thrown into the fire. He talked about Jesus coming to

earth, and in Jesus there was going to be conviction that came

upon people. They would have to repent, they

would have to turn, and they had to bear fruit in keeping with

repentance, which means when my heart is so humble before God, I

know that when he's addressing a root issue, he's addressing a

weed issue in my life. I come to him and say, Lord, I

know that my fruit has not been good because bitterness will

always bear bitter fruit. Anger will bring about a very

toxic fruit. It doesn't bring about good

fruit. And the fruit is what others

taste. The fruit is by which God is

made known to the world. If my fruit is toxic, I don't

bring him a good name. So it's so important that we

identify these things and go deeper with ourselves.

Go deeper with God in our lives. There are four different ways I

believe that weeds show up. Firstly, you know a weed shows

up as stuff from a previous season that started out helpful

or necessary. Like I said this this particular

plant, Senna Spectablis, was planted in the 80s as a share

tree. It was originally known as a

share tree. It's come, it comes from the

family of Cassia. So it's actually a good tree.

It's not a bad thing, but it was.

What was necessary for a previous season became invasive

in the next. In our lives, there were certain

seasons. Maybe you were in a wilderness

season. Maybe you in a season where it

was the dark night of the soul. Maybe it was a season of

tremendous growth and and blessing.

And there were some things that came into your life as a result

of that, and you let it stay, You let it rest, and it took it

took ground, it planted itself, it rooted itself, and it's

grown. Now, as you move into another

season, have you been discerning enough to know whether you

needed that or whether it's time for it to go?

It's so important because it's one season.

God may have taught you how to compartmentalize things and

operate, but maybe in the next season God is saying no, I want

those compartments broken because I want to work in all of

it. Maybe in one season you were so

comfortably numb. You had learned to bifurcate

what was happening around you. You learned to stay numb and

isolated in your mind and heart. But God is calling you now into

season of feeling things. Maybe there was a season when

you had to be very silent. When things were spoken over you

and you kept quiet, things were spoken about you.

But God is saying now I want to use your voice.

I want you to open up your mouth.

I want you to speak up for me. Maybe you came out of a hidden

season, but now God is saying no, I'm exposing you.

I want you on that platform. I want you to lift your voice

up. It's so important that we

understand the some of the things which were helpful in a

previous season may not be applicable or even necessary in

the next season and it requires that we identify it for what it

is. That's one kind of weed.

The second kind of weed is the stuff with deep roots and

poisonous seeds. It's interesting this particular

like I said, they found these plants with 40 foot long roots

and the root is huge. You couldn't have just removed

it by shaking the tree a bit. They had to dig deep.

They had to go really deep in order to uproot it as a whole,

because even if a little bit of the root is left, this plant has

a way of regenerating itself. Not only that, they found that

even when things were uprooted, the tree continued to

proliferate. They found out that it was

producing millions of seeds. Seeds are the smallest of all

small things they hardly seen. Roots, on the other hand, are

very, very noticeable, but again, hidden beneath the

ground. Each of us have things from our

childhood, from our adolescence. Things sometimes generationally

pass even through the womb to us, and these are the things

that no one else sees, but they're very real because they

have an impact on our lives. The roots are the things that

have held us fixed in certain mindsets, in certain spaces, in

certain addictions. For the longest seeds are the

things that we have unconsciously or consciously

passed on to others. You know, as parents, we have

this capacity to pass on our mindsets to them, our mind

blocks to them. Those are the seeds.

We are rooted in certain things, but we're proliferating our

ideas, our doctrines, things that may not be of God to

others. That's another kind of weed that

we need to address. Some of the things that we have

allowed. Maybe generationally, certain

things were passed on. You can always say, well,

alcoholism runs in my blood. Maybe you're saying I come from

a family of those who are envious, who covet what others

have, Or maybe we come from people who are very angry by

nature, our whole people group, we behave like this.

I don't know what your deep roots look like.

I don't know what it looks like generationally.

For you, What you carry into this new season matters because

your roots matter. What have you been unconsciously

passing on to others around you? People in your cubicle?

People who work with you, People who work for you?

What are you passing on? What are the seeds that you are

dropping here and there which is causing weeds to grow up in

other people's lives as well? The third kind of weed that

sometimes shows up is the stuff that is preventing others from

thriving around us. When they were clearing the

tracts of land, they found that this particular tree didn't

allow other trees to grow around it because it was hogging up all

of the nutrients from the soil. Other trees were having minimal

nutrients. And a lot of times when stuff is

in our life, the weeds of our life when left unchecked, when

left, are unuprooted. When they just left unaddressed.

They start to harm the way we interact with others.

They make us so toxic to others very unconsciously.

We don't realize it, but after a while you notice people are

avoiding you. People don't meet up as much or

people are very guarded around you.

Growing up, I remember my brother and I when we used to

fight and say mean things to each other.

My father used to say this one thing to me.

He used to say, if you guys are so difficult with each other, if

you're so hypersensitive to each other, people will put you on a

shelf. How many of you today can say,

honestly that you feel like someone has put you on a shelf?

They don't want to reach you. They want to keep you out of

reach just because they don't know how to manage you?

Maybe some of the weeds in your life are preventing others from

thriving around you. What could some of this stuff

be? It could be you.

You're hypersensitive. You get offended by anything

they say. Maybe you're insecure of those

who are doing well off compared to you.

Maybe you're envious of what others have.

You're distrustful and suspicious because of others who

have hurt you, so you're distressful and suspicious of

everyone. Maybe you become abrasive

because that's your protective mechanism.

You protect yourself, maybe a quarrel.

Some You pick a quarrel at the drop of a hat.

It's interesting because this particular weed starts off very

small, which is scrolling through WhatsApp.

Status is you're going through Instagram, you look at Facebook,

you see someone else doing better, you see them on that

holiday and that's when it starts.

It's just one seed and before you know it, it's grown into a

full blown tree. When you start meeting them,

you're abrasive, you're quarrelsome, you say things, you

slander them, you gossip, You start coming across so toxic

that people start avoiding you. They endure you in the name of

Christian love, but people are wary around you.

That's a symptom of a weed in your life.

The 4th kind of weed that we lot of times find is when the stuff

is so overgrown that it blocks the light.

The forest reserves where these were originally planted are now

completely the canopy was covered by this plant.

So what had happened is the canopy was so thick that

sunlight couldn't reach the bottom of the forest floor.

And So what happened was the deer and the rhino and other

things which need the plants on the forest floor to feed on.

There was none of that. So these animals were migrating

and going to places which had more sunlight and more flora at

their level. The eco ecosystem as such had

got an imbalanced just because of this unchecked weed.

And I wonder how many of us have allowed these huge weeds of

greed, of lust, of insecurity, whatever it looks like for you.

I don't know what it is, but whatever it is, has it started

blocking the light of God's revelation?

Has it started blocking the light of heaven from percolating

through and bringing life? Because the power of Jesus is

that he is the light of the world.

In him there is no darkness, he said.

Those who walk in the light, who walk with me, walk in the light.

But what happens is sometimes the weeds take over our lives.

If you've left it unchecked for years on end, decades on end, it

would have cut the light in some on some level.

So we can be walking with Jesus, so to speak.

We can be saying, you know, knowing the word, we may be so

aware of what God is doing, but we may miss that there are

certain dark patches in our lives and his light needs to

penetrate those very spaces. So how do we deal with these

things? I've talked to you about all the

different kinds of weeds that could show up, the ones which

are generationally rooted, the ones where we are passing these

poisonous seeds, the times that they're so overgrown, it's cut

the light. We've looked at how stuff from

previous season, which is not necessary now, has again

overtaken us. How do we deal with this?

If you talk to anyone who's actually done a bit of inner

healing, they'll tell you that it's such a hard process.

It's long winded. It is messy.

But when the Holy Spirit is the mediator of this whole process

of uprooting, it changes the equation.

Because the minute you and I try to do it in our own willpower,

we try to address these things, pull it out or or, you know, try

to, you know, really work hard at it, we'll find just how

miserably we fail. We're human, but we have with us

the resurrection power of Christ, which is mediated by the

Holy Spirit Himself. He is the one who brings it into

our lives. He is the one who enables us to

heal. And he has two types of work

that the Holy Spirit does in this kind of a situation.

He has a restorative work and he has a reclaiming work.

Restorative white, because when you take something out you need

to put something in. Jesus talked about how when

someone was set free from a demonic power, He said when the

demons were chased out he was clean and neat inside.

But then when the demon returned to check on him what did it, he

says the place was so clean. He brought seven more demons and

the end situation of that person was worse because what had

happened was when he vacated something should have been

filled. When a demonic spirit was

removed, the Holy Spirit should have been filled in.

And so today it's so important. It's so important that each of

us bring the Holy Spirit in because restoration only happens

with him. Because when he removes things,

he plants things in. He brings in his power, he

brings in the love of the Father, He brings in grace and

truth and peace. If I don't have what He's

filling me up, what he removes me, will removes from me, will

leave me desolate. So when he removes things, he

adds in his presence, He brings in the power of God.

He brings in the presence of God, and that changes

everything. So it's restorative.

It's also reclaiming. He reclaims that.

You know what that means? When a land has been overrun by

something and you clear it out, you're actually reclaiming the

land for something good. Too many of us, our lives have

been overrun by the enemy. He has taken up huge space in

our lives. But today God is saying I want

to reclaim that for me. I want to occupy that with my

sources, my resources. I want to clear it so that I can

plant good seed, so that I can raise a harvest of righteousness

within you that others will benefit from.

Only the Holy Spirit can bring restoration.

Only the Holy Spirit can reclaim.

We can't do it on our own. I love this verse from Hag from

Zechariah chapter 4, verse 6, which says he God's talking to

Zechariah 4:6

Zeru Babel and he says it's not going to happen by might or by

power. Zeru Babel but by my spirit.

God was calling Zeru Babel to rebuild the temple.

It was a huge task. These were people in exile.

They didn't know how to be free, they didn't know how to rebuild.

And God was saying it won't be because of your strength, it

won't be because of your willpower.

It's going to be because of me. And today I want to encourage

you. If you are saying I identify

those weeds in my life, it is not on you alone to fix it.

You have the Holy Spirit. He's the one who's going to do

the heavy lifting. You just need to be client.

You just need to come in line with him.

And so how do we deal with these four kinds of weeds that we

talked about? The first thing is if your weed

was from a previous season where it was necessary then but not

necessary now, you need the discernment of the Holy Spirit.

I love Proverbs Chapter 2, verse two, it says So train your heart

Proverbs 2 · chapter mention

to listen when I speak and open your spirit wide to expand your

discernment and pass it on to your sons and daughters.

It's so important that we are discerning of the season we are

in. Do I need this particular self

protective mechanism in this season?

Do I need to be as silent and retrospective in this season,

introspective in this season as I was in the previous?

Do I need to be more vocal? Do I need to be so confined in

the season or can I start to become social again and invite

people into my life? I need to be very clear of what

I'm clearing out because there's a new season ahead.

Am I discerning? Discernment?

Is what God wants you to do. Be wise about the associations.

Maybe there was some business associations or relationships

you built in a previous season, but now you've found that

they're a chokehold. They're strangling you.

They're keeping you from the purposes of God.

They're keeping you from the direction that God is calling

you on. Maybe God is asking you to end

those relationships. Maybe God is moving you out of

someone's life because they need to be set free to walk on the

direction God has marked for them.

So will you be discerning? In order to remove the weed that

has taken stock in a previous season, you need to be

discerning and ask the Holy Spirit Lord, here I am.

You can deal with this as you see fit.

That's the first thing. The second thing, the second

kind of root we looked at. The weeds that are deeply

rooted, generationally, ancestrally, are the ones where

we have been, you know, unconsciously passing on these

toxic seeds to others and passing our views, our heart

issues, our attitudes to others. Only the spirit of God has the

power to alert us to those roots.

We can't do it on our own. He helps us to identify the

root. Many times when we look at

ourselves and we see envy, envy is just probably the fruit.

It goes deeper down. It may go right.

From the time you were child, maybe you didn't have enough.

Maybe you always had lack. And so you had a tendency to

look at others and wish you had what they had.

So maybe you need to go right down to that place.

The Holy Spirit will take you back.

He will literally bring you into a place of awareness of what

happened maybe 30 years back and he will heal that primary wound

and only when he heals that will the entire route disintegrate.

It will not happen by dealing with just the surface level

issues. And I'm so glad that today, the

Holy Spirit, His power when it is at work, and as it's the

resurrection power of Jesus, every generational curse, every

generational baggage was dealt with on the cross.

Everyone. Nothing is exempt.

Maybe you're saying my family's generation baggage.

You'll never guess it. I don't need to guess it.

The Lord knows He dealt with it on the cross.

It's done. You can walk free from it.

The poisonous seeds that have unconsciously been spilling over

from your lives. You now watch your children

speak a similar language as you. You watch the people who walk

around you also wallowing in the same kind of self pity that you

wallow in. You need to take stock.

Where have I been spilling these seeds?

And ask the blood of Jesus to wash it out, to completely

cleanse it so that you don't propagate this weed like

behavior in anyone else. That it ends with you, that it

stops with you. Maybe you've been speaking

gossip, slander. Maybe the Lord is saying enough.

Stop. I want to cleanse your mouth

because the power of life and death is in the tongue.

I don't know how God is going to do it for you, but I have opened

myself up. I've told the Lord April D weed

me Lord remove every weed. Deep generational ones, surface

level ones, just the starting sprouts, everything.

D weed me because I don't want to step into the harvest season

with all of these things crowding me.

I don't want them taking up precious soil space.

I don't want them taking up precious and oxygen from the

environment. I want more of you.

I want more of your seeds in my life.

So uproot these Ephesians. Chapter 3 verses 16 to 17 talks

Ephesians 3:16–17

about what the Spirit of God does in removing these roots.

He says, I pray that from His glorious, unlimited resources,

He will empower you with inner strength through His spirit.

Then Christ will make His home in your hearts as you trust in

Him. Your roots will grow down into

God's love and keep you strong. Like I said, if He's uprooting

something, he needs to plant something.

You and I, Colossians, Chapter 2, verses six to seven.

Colossians 2 · chapter mention

You and I need to be planted in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Our roots need to grow down into Him.

Let your lives be built on Him. Then your faith will grow strong

in the truth you were taught. You will overflow with

thankfulness. It's so important that when the

Holy Spirit uproots we get rerouted in the right things and

we need to root ourselves in Christ.

We need to root ourselves in God's love so that we will

overflow with thankfulness. It's so important that we are

repetitive of about God's goodness in our life.

The the one of the imminent signs of a weed is when we're so

repetitive of all that has gone wrong in our lives, of all the

people who disappointed us, of all the things at times when you

didn't feel God in your life. But it's important that when I'm

rooted in Christ, I'm overflowing with thankfulness,

that the primary repetition of my life is His goodness again

and again, His constant presence, his mercies which have

been new every morning. It is so important to replace

that bitter root with a root that is planted in Jesus alone.

It is so important to hand those poisonous seeds to God and say,

Lord, may your blood wash it, purify it, and then plant it in

my life so that it bears good fruit.

Because each of us have the power to impact someone else.

But what we do with it matters. What we do in our parenting

matters. Do I pass on to the next

generation all of the stuff that's wrong with me?

Or do I find healing and then pass that on to my children?

It's so important. What are you propagating?

What are you spreading around you?

The third thing. Remember I talked about how

bitter roots, weed, weeds bring out toxic fruit.

Am I right? It's so important to remember

that fruit is what others know as by fruit.

When others taste of our fruit, they thrive around us as well.

It's so interesting that some of the weeds in our life will

actually push people away unconsciously.

You'll find that they don't want to hang out with you as often,

or if they do hang out with you, they want someone else.

There is a buffer because they just can't deal with your

toxicity on your own and that's a wake up call for us.

We need to be bearing good fruit so that those who come around us

enjoy tasting that fruit from our lives.

And the only way we will bear fruit is that the Holy Spirit is

doing His work in our life. Because the fruit of the Spirit,

as we see in Galatians 5, is Lovejoy, Peace.

And I love it in the Passion. Translation, I'm going to be

reading it from the Passion. This is where it says, joy that

overflows divine love in all its varied expressions, peace that

subdues, patience that endures, kindness and action, a life full

of virtue, faith that prevails, gentleness of heart and strength

of spirit. This is not something we can

manufacture. I can't cook this up in a

kitchen. I cannot conjure this up with

the spell. This is the work of the Spirit

in me, and it's most often done under dire circumstances.

It's done under the hardships of life in furnace experiences.

When we are going through the hardest season of our life, the

Holy Spirit is birthing these fruits out of us, and the ones

who benefit the most from our fruit are those around us.

So if you have been feeling others aren't thriving around

me, they don't want to be around me.

You need to invite the Holy Spirit in and say, Lord, clear

this up, clear me up, remove those weeds so that I genuinely

love the people around me. So that my joy, which exudes

from me, attracts people to me, so that the patience that I

exhibit challenges others to be more patient.

That is what we need to be asking God for.

And the fourth kind of variety of weed, which I was talking

about when it takes up the canopy and cuts the light, we

need to ask the Holy Spirit to come back in, to clear that up

so that the light of Jesus shines on every part of our

lives. Proverbs chapter 20, verse 27

Proverbs 20:27

says the Lord's light penetrates the human spirit, exposing every

hidden motive. Isn't that amazing?

The Lord's light. He is the light of the world.

When he comes in, darkness cannot coexist with him.

He comes in. It's is.

It's a kind of brilliance that we cannot even experience on

earth. No light will do it, but the

light that Jesus brings in will light up everything and the

light brings life. I love Malachi.

The book of Malachi ends on this note where it says the sun of

righteousness will rise with healing in his wings.

When the light, light comes in, everything it touches there is

life, there is healing, there is new growth.

So we'll be let the light in. The spirit of God is the one who

brings the light of Jesus in. He's the one who brings

revelation from his word. He's the one who gives us access

to the Father. And so it's so important that we

invite the Holy Spirit in. Even as I close, I just want to

ask, have there been dark patches in your life?

You know it. You sense it.

Maybe your spouse says there's some darkness in there that I

see. Maybe it's a best friend who

says you need to get a bit of help.

There's something there that is almost like a black hole.

Things are getting sucked in. Will you invite the light of

Jesus to come in? Will you say, Lord, I'm here, Go

for it. Because so often we're afraid to

expose ourselves to the light of Jesus.

Because we think it's going to be exposing and and it's going

to be detrimental to us. But we don't realize he's a

careful God and that when I open myself up to him, the healing

that he does is so beautifully intimate that many will not see

it. No one will see it.

Maybe the ones closest to you will see it happening, but the

the world will not see how he heals you.

But the evidence of it will be demonstrated to the world.

But the process is a very intimate, very private thing.

So will I. Can I ask you that you would

actually invite him and see Spirit of God?

I want you to come in. I want you to help me bear good

fruit. I want you to light up my life

with the light of Jesus so that every dark patch is lit up.

Will you come out? And with your power, will you

uproot every destructive root for my life, the ones that were

come from before my time, generational things, uprooted.

Will you invite him in to give you discernment about the season

you're in? Without discernment, without

vision, my people perish. That's what the word says.

If you don't have discernment about your season, if you don't

know what the season entails, you will miss out on living it

to its fullest. Living your fullest in that

season. And so today, as we close, I

want to play this one scripture over you.

It comes from the Book of Songs of Solomon, which is from the

it's one of the books that King Solomon wrote.

And while it's it's a book, it's it's like a romantic book.

There are very deep themes which are brought out of it And

there's one verse which I often pray over myself and this is

what it says. Awake north wind and come S wind

blow on my garden that its fragrance may spread everywhere.

Let my beloved come into his garden and taste its choice

fruits. This is an invitation that you

can pray over the Holy Spirit and say, Holy Spirit, come into

this garden of my life, blow up on every tree there, every fruit

tree, every herb, so that the spices, that and the aromas

which I lifted up are pleasing to you.

And then you invite your beloved.

You invite Jesus into the garden of your life and say, here I am.

Taste the fruit that is being born by the Holy Spirit.

Taste it and rejoice in me. Because ultimately our lives

must be a sweet smelling offering to God.

It must be something where God delights in us.

So can I ask that you would pray this with me, Lord, I don't know

what the weeds in people's lives are, but I know that the weeds

are real. I know that the weeds concern

you, Lord. And so we're inviting you in.

We're inviting you in. Come into the gardens of our

life. Would you open the gate of your

garden and say, Lord, I'm inviting you in?

Come in, Inspect this garden of mine.

Take out what is not. A few Previous seasons were

hard. Lord, I had to build a mechanism

to protect myself. I had to build certain things.

I had to bring certain things in to keep me sane.

But, Lord, in this season I want you to uproot what is not a few.

Move out. Those who don't need to be there

in the season, look after them, care for them.

Father. I pray for those deep roots

rooted in generational hardship, generational addictions.

Remove it by your power, Father. I pray that I will be rooted

firmly in Christ Jesus. I pray that I'll be rooted in

your love so that I'll be unshakable.

Oh, Father, Holy Spirit, we invite you in to stir us up, to

work in us so that the fruit of the Spirit are born so others

will taste and see that the Lord is good.

We invite you in to light up our lives.

Every darkened patch, every patch that we have closed off.

Saying no, Lord, this is my secret garden.

I don't want you there. You will not like what you see.

Can we open it up and say, Lord, I'm here.

I want your light to flood this area.

Awake, O north wind comes S wind blow on our gardens.

That the fragrance may spread everywhere.

Beloved Jesus, come into this garden.

It's yours. Taste, its choice.

Fruit. In Jesus name, I pray.

Amen. Amen.

God bless you. I pray that this will be a month

of great harvest, not just this month.

I believe it's going to be a season of harvest.

So as you walk into it, going with courage, if you got really

worried after listening to this, that's not the intention.

The intention is that while he brings about this good harvest,

he's also going to deal with the things that are detrimental to

that good harvest. And he will do it with the

greatest care, with the greatest gentleness.

So would you commit yourself into his hands every day?

Make it your friends. Say Lord be weed me.

Take away anything that's not from you.

Help me to produce a rich harvest.

May that be our focus through this season.

God bless you. God bless you.

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