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PULLING BLACKBERRY

We have been doing some cleaning up around the hall where we meet for church. An old Scout hall, it has been sadly neglected for a long time, and what were once garden beds are very much overgrown weed patches. Unfortunately, predominant among the weeds is blackberry.

Blackberry is a particularly aggressive weed. Most garden plants - and even most weeds - are content to sit where they are, going through their life cycle in one spot, and relying on their seeds to spread their presence further afield. Not blackberry. It grows rapidly, and can put down a new set of roots just about anywhere where a stalk touches the ground. It can take over whole gardens in no time at all. There are stories of people finding complete buildings buried under massive blackberry patches.

When I was a kid, I thought blackberries were wonderful. We would dress up in our oldest, thickest clothes and our sturdiest shoes, and set off with buckets for the blackberry patches in the local bushland. I knew of a couple of particularly fruitful ones, and it was very rarely that we came back with anything less than a bucket of berries - often, we had several buckets.

Sure, we had scratches galore, and the odd embedded thorn, but the feast of those luscious berries was, to our young minds, more than worth the price.

Strange how our perspectives change. I still love the taste of blackberries, but as I attacked those thorn bushes this morning, I saw them as nothing but very annoying weeds. I saw them also as something of a metaphor for the work of sin in the world.

Like blackberry, sin bears fruit that, to the immature, seems wonderfully attractive. Yes, we may recognize that the very thing we find so attractive is hurting and scarring us, but the price seems little compared to the pleasure.

But, like blackberry, sin is an aggressive weed in our lives. It is not content to sit in one spot and "bloom where it is planted." No, it spreads out, ever claiming more ground in our lives, and turning what had been fruitful areas into unproductive prickle patches.

Blackberry is particularly difficult to eradicate. This morning the best I could do was to cut it back, chasing the prickly stems back to the ground and chopping them off. It is only a stop-gap measure, and very soon the blackberry will begin to grow back. Pulling them out by the roots is just about impossible. Apart from their very tenacious hold on the soil, even one small bit of root left in the ground will soon send forth shoots to begin a whole new blackberry patch.

No, the only way to deal with blackberry is to poison it.

Sin is much the same. We chop it back in one area of our lives, and next thing we know it has popped up somewhere else. Before we can even turn around again, the sin that we cut back is again beginning to sprout. Likewise, pulling sin out by the roots is an almost impossible task. We just don't have the strength to do it, and even if we have some measure of success, in no time we find that old root is again beginning to send forth shoots.

Sin, like blackberry, needs to be poisoned.

What is poison to sin? The blood of Jesus, for a start. It prevents sin from setting its fruits of destruction. Then there is the Word of God. When we commit ourselves, as Jesus did, to live according to the Word no matter what, we put a covering over our lives that makes it impossible for sin to spread and put down new roots. There is the powerful poison of repentance. It goes right to the root of sin and makes it shrivel in the ground. Prayer and the life of the Spirit work together to remove sin and replace it with the character of God.

It's hard work clearing blackberry, but far better than seeing a whole garden disappear under a prickle patch. It's even harder work clearing the sin from our lives, but infinitely more satisfying.