Read the transcript from today's video devotional.
What a beautiful encouragement to read about a group of people who love one another and have flourishing faith. I feel the weight of this considering who the author of this letter is. It's a guy named Paul who was influential in planting this community of faith. He, in many of his writings, referred to the people who he was responsible for shepherding and teaching as though they were his spiritual kids. It's like a dad looking at a crew of kids saying how proud he is of who they're becoming.
What an encouragement to think that he would describe these people this way. I love that he says, we can't help but thank God for you because of your faith. It's flourishing. I think about the word flourishing—it's one that's become more popular in contemporary culture over the past few years. Flourishing is something that I think every human person is longing for, whether they have that word to identify it or not.
We Can Cultivate, But God Causes Growth
To flourish is to come into the fulfillment. It's to see that what you are experiencing is coming to the fruition that you're hoping for. Obviously, the word that comes to mind immediately when I think of flourishing is flower. Now, if I were to ask you the question, can you make a flower grow? Some of you with a green thumb might hear that as a challenge and say, absolutely, I can.
You have all the methodology. You might have all the experience. Some of you guys have books that are about all of these kinds of topics, and maybe you've seen your garden flourish in a season that took a lot of maintenance and care. You might say, yes, but I would gently and kindly push back on that, because I think what is true for even the best of botanists, even the best of gardeners, is that we can cultivate the ground for growth.
We can eliminate the barriers to it growing. We can do the work of fertilizing and watering. We can cut back the weeds. We can prune the plants. We can maintain an environment where flourishing can happen. But it's only, always true that God is in the business of growing flowers. A seed takes root and it grows. That is a phenomenon that comes from the creation of God's created order.
We can't make flowers flourish. We can't actually cause a flower to grow, but we can prepare the environment for that flower to become what it needs to be. We can eliminate the barriers. We can cut back the bushes so that it has room to do what it's supposed to do. I think about that when it comes to this verse and how he describes their faith flourishing.
Flourishing in the Community of Faith
It's because they are taking root in Christ and they are, as a community, eliminating all of the barriers for growth. They're removing the stones in the weeds and in the garden beds, so that they are able to become who God intended them to be. Let this great encouragement from Paul to these people be true about us.
Let it be true that we would live in a way that our faith would flourish. We can control the environment where this seed being planted can take root and flourish, but only God by His power causes things to grow. It's beautiful when there's a time of flourishing amongst the community of faith. Let it be true about our community today.
