Where Are Your Roots?
Tree roots provide a tentacled anchor, enabling trees to withstand winds, adverse conditions, and seasonal changes. Having a healthy root system provides the basis for mature growth and development of trees. A tree's very life originates within its unseen roots.
Like trees, our lives need roots. We need roots to ensure our personal growth and development has something to draw from. Our roots are critical to succes in our lives-even life itself. The quality of our lives can be traced to the quality of our unseen anchor-our roots if you will.
Where are your roots? Who or what is your life's root system? When the storms of life come what anchors your life? What sees you through? What sustains you? Again, where are your roots? Your answer may reveal who/what you have chosen to draw your very existence from.
The Bible has already given us an answer that will work everywhere, all the time, in every situation. In Colossians 2:6,7 God instructs us to be rooted in Christ. This includes being rooted in the knowledge of who and what we are as Christians, as children of God. This is a truth no crisis can prevail against. Acting on the knowledge of who and what we are, in Christ, is part of the unseen root system God designed and made available for each of our lives. The length and breadth of that system is limited only by our willing obedience to God's Word in our own lives.
So, where are your roots? In yourself, the hope of having someone else's experience to draw from, or in the Word of God-especially the Epistles (letters written to Christians)? There are a lot of root systems around, however only one system works. Which root system are you relying on for life, strength, and health? Where are your roots?
God’s root system begins with His written Word. God’s written word is His will to us through, primarily, the letters written to the churches, Romans through Revelation. I’m not saying neglect the Old Testament. A former businessman said that we could run a business using the book of Proverbs. The 23rd Psalm is so beautifully written, for our benefit. The book of Isaiah has much we Christians can learn from. And the book of beginnings, Genesis, tells us what took place before and after Adam sinned, clueing us that the Messiah (Jesus) would come and defeat the devil (Genesis 3:15).
Hebrews 8:6 says that, as Christians, we have a better covenant, established upon better promises. Therefore, spend most of your time in the new covenant, written to us Christians. New is better than old, for sure. The Old Testament (covenant) has much to say about curses. In the New Testament we are told, in Galatians 3:13, that Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the Law.
That’s one reason why the New Testament is much better than the Old. Plus, the Old Testament was written to spiritually dead people, because Jesus hadn’t yet come to redeem us. The letters written to us Christians tell what happened when Jesus went to the Cross for all mankind. The Old Testament proclaims the fact of Jesus’s coming. The Gospels tell us what happened, but only in the letters written to Christians do we find out why Jesus did what He did, for all mankind.
© Hubert Gardner Ministries 2014-2024