We have had a baking summer in London. I think we are at something like four heat waves. We are still in an official ‘drought’ and there’s a hose pipe ban. In the last week, the temperatures have gone back to normal and we’ve just begun to get some rain.

The earth is scorched, the ground is bone dry with cracks in the turf. Our gardens are parched, flowers are dried up, the grass that is left is like stubble. It has become chaff. Kids playing football in the park create clouds of dust. The trees are drooping and look forlorn and dry, longing, gasping for rain. Plants once colourful and vibrant are now dried out and brittle, so thirsty for water.

The only thing that remains green are the weeds.

Go out into your garden and look on your lawn, your brown lawn with lots of dirt patches yearning for moisture. But in the midst, there are weeds that, inexplicably, look healthy. In oceans of brown grass are dark green weeds. On baking hot pavements there are little green weeds poking through the cracks. Flourishing among wilting plants in borders, are weeds. In unwatered grass, the only thing that still keeps green are the weeds.

When the earth is starved of rain the only thing that grows are the weeds. They look healthy. Yet, if they are allowed to remain, they will strangle the growth of good plants and eat up, ruin and kill the grass of your lawn.

It’s a parable of our Christians lives: if you starve yourself of God’s Word and Prayer, take yourself away from gathering with God’s people, you become impoverished. You dry out. But it is not only that, in the midst of the dryness, other things will grow. The seeds of sin manage to flourish in that arid ground, growing up through the cracks. 

We need to realise that in the Christian life something is always growing. If we are not growing in grace and seeking to put sin to death, sin will be thriving and growing. Sin is never static, and it needs little help to grow. I fear that we think if we neglect of the means of the grace or are not seeking God it will not really have an effect on us, we can always pick it up and start watering later. But what nature teaches us is that in the unwatered grass of our lives, the only thing that still keeps green are the weeds of sin.

Sin takes it’s opportunity, it is not passive. If we are not feeding our graces, we will be feeding our sin. The weeds which are so difficult to get rid of in our gardens and persistently need treating and dug out are like the sins in our hearts which need to be painfully cut out. The Word of God and prayer and the sacraments are the tools that God has given us to cultivate our hearts.

The picture of a grass that was healthy but is now baked and dried by the sun is a picture more familiar to the Scriptures than it is to us. Brittle leaves and branches that have no moisture and so can be snapped. A feeling of yearning and longing for water. A weariness and dryness. The experience of being barren spiritually. These are all not unfamiliar to the Scriptures. The Psalmist uses it as a picture of the Christian life. You could go to Psalm 63:

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

That is authentic spiritual experience.

The Psalter itself begins with contrasting the way of the righteous and the way of the wicked. In Psalm 1 he speaks of the righteous, the ones whom have delighted in God’s Word and meditated on God’s law day and night: 

He is like a tree
    planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
    and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.

The wicked are not so,
    but are like chaff that the wind drives away.

Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
    nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;

for the Lord knows the way of the righteous,
    but the way of the wicked will perish.

The Psalmist presents us with two ways to live. But if you think what I am trying to say is ‘try harder on your bible reading’, or ‘work hard on your devotion’ then you will be discouraged because you are probably like me and will at times find these things are a struggle and a battle.

It is here though that the Bible gives us wonderful encouragement. Isaiah 44 takes up the imagery with the promise of God’s Spirit who comes and refreshes. He brings life and colour, vitality and blessing. A quenching of thirst and a vibrant fruitfulness.

For I will pour water on the thirsty land,
    and streams on the dry ground;
I will pour my Spirit upon your offspring,
    and my blessing on your descendants.

They shall spring up among the grass
    like willows by flowing streams.

Ultimately that blessing comes from the one who was described ‘as a root out of dry ground’ (Isaiah 53:2), one who would grow up as a ‘tender plant’. It is the picture of a fragile little shoot coming out of parched land, which begins to bud and grow. The growing out of the stump of a huge tree that has been cut down. This growth is in the midst of a barren dry desert, with burning heat and scorching non day sun, not growth from a place well watered.

It is the prophet Isaiah’s way of saying that Jesus’ life would often feel parched, it would be hard and unattractive, even fragile, but it grows into the most magnificent and majestic tree, that has branches which grow in the hardest of environments. When it comes to our lives and the human heart. Jesus never finds fertile soil when he comes to the unconverted. He comes to the most unlikely of places. As Charles McGowan writes “He derives nothing there, but He gives everything — conviction of sin, grace to repent, faith to trust, hope for tomorrow and all eternity. He gives life.”

It is a wonderful encouragement to come to Jesus to look to him in the midst of our dryness, to come to the living waters, to sink our roots deeply down into him, planting ourselves in Christ. Recognising that starving ourselves of his life and his light, that neglecting his word and prayer and people, will only result in dryness and barrenness which will in turn allow the weeds of sin to flourish and grow.