Keys to the Kingdom

By Carolyn Tucker

Many years ago, I was visiting with a neighbor on her property and she was explaining the layout of her front-yard landscaping. She said, “The ground is so rocky that we simply planted the trees where we could dig a hole, so that’s why there’s no rhyme or reason to them.” Since she mentioned this, I suspect she was a little disappointed with the final outcome. Everybody has 20/20 hindsight. Any decisions we make, or neglect to make, today will always affect the future sooner or later.

Believers really need to live our lives on purpose and not helter skelter. We can’t just wing it and hope everything turns out OK; we have to be intentional. Flying by the seat of your pants  usually means you’ve got a hole in them and have lost your cell phone, wallet, key, etc. Maybe you’re a squared-away person and write a to-do list every morning and meet all your goals by supper. If so, that’s great and you deserve a pat on the back. I sure hope God shows up somewhere on that list.

When you were created in your mother’s womb, God wasn’t just haphazardly throwing a bunch of stuff together in some wild and crazy experiment. You were fearfully and wonderfully made with a purpose! Your Creator had a rhyme and reason to your layout. As Christ followers, we were designed to bear good fruit. So we must stay very close to the Master Gardener so He can prune us in order for us to grow strong in Him.

When we live for God with a purposeful heart, one of our main objectives is to bear fruit. “But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things” (Galatians 5:22,23 NLT). Developing the fruit of the spirit never goes out of style and will continue as long as we belong to Christ Jesus. “When you produce much fruit, you are My true disciples. This brings great glory to My Father” (John 15:8 NLT).

We are to constantly abide in Jesus, so we must make our personal relationship with Him our #1 priority. The following quote was written in one of my journals: “If we don’t make time for friends, we won’t have any.“ If we aren’t diligent about making time for Jesus, we won’t have any fruit. “Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in Me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from Me you can do nothing. Anyone who does not remain in Me is thrown away like a useless branch and withers. Such branches are gathered into a pile to be burned“ (John 15:5,6 NLT). Basically, if we choose to live an unproductive self-absorbed life, we’ll end up in a worthless stick pile because we‘ve disconnected from the life-giving Vine.

Jesus didn’t come to give us religion, He came to give us a genuine personal love relationship with the Father through Him. “So you must remain in life-union with Me, for I remain in life-union with you. For as a branch severed from the vine will not bear fruit, so your life will be fruitless unless you live your life intimately joined to Mine” (John 15:4 TPT).

The Key: Make sure your relationship with God has a daily rhyme and reason, and  prepare to be pruned.

It seems to be a pattern in our culture to chip away at personal freedoms in order to protect people from themselves.  We heard about an example of this in New York City when the mayor at the time pushed through an ordinance banning the sale of drinks larger than 16ozs; the pushback was so intense that the law was repealed in short order.  The attitude seems to be that we are wiser and better educated than you and we have drawn some firm conclusions on how you should conduct your life; freedom and civil debate are stifled.

Do you remember learning that there are nine planets, sometimes using a clever sentence to remember them in order?  Pluto was recently demoted from the ranks, lowering the number in our solar system to eight. Thankfully, none of us lived in the 18^th Century when bloodletting was a common practice and the probable cause of death of our first President.  If science closed off research and free debate on the topics, we would still be under these misimpressions.

Free debate must be encouraged to get to the truth.

Why do I believe this to be so important?  On a macro level, the American experiment in freedom has delivered the most powerful, the most economically successful nation in human history.  Yes, those truths are diminished somewhat by the poor choices free people make; slavery is a glaring example.  We mourn the consequences of poor choices people make with the privilege of Constitutional freedom, but the free expression of ideas eventually led us to the right conclusions.

This process of reevaluation often plays out on the local level, including Bourbon County.  When people use whatever means possible to silence those with whom they disagree, we all lose.  When we try to shout down local candidates we don’t like because of personal reasons, or they are not part of our particular “faction,” we all miss out on the free expression of ideas and appropriate debate.  Instead, we write and share social media posts with trivial negativity and half-truths about our fellow citizens.  We use whatever personal leverage we might have to discredit or discourage opponents instead of engaging them in healthy discourse.

What Bourbon County needs more than anything is a free people in an earnest quest for truth to reestablish the trust we are now missing, to our great detriment.  Our public forums and debates must keep the quest for truth through the free expression of ideas at the center.  Otherwise, we will not arrive at solutions that represent our best.

Before you attack, demean, pick apart and generally criticize someone with whom you disagree, examine your motives and the general impact it will have on the culture and wellbeing of our community.  Certainly, politely call out those who are stifling open discourse through half-truths and nit-picky acts of disrespect. Let us depend upon the honest exchange of ideas through free and civil discourse in order to arrive at the best solutions for Bourbon County.  Let us reestablish trust through respecting one another’s freedoms.