Spiritual Spoilage Control

“Spiritual Spoilage Control”

By Zach Wood

John 15:5 NIV

“I am the vine, you are the branches.  If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.”

In the past month, we had two instances where our fridge stopped working at home.  Both times, we could tell it wasn’t as cold as it should be.  I can usually tell something isn’t right when the milk isn’t ice cold.  I don’t know about all of you, but I like my milk ICE COLD!  If it’s anything less, it tastes gross to me. 

So when these two instances happened, we went through a routine of figuring out what to do with the food and beverages to keep them cold.  Of course it was an inconvenience to get things figured out, but we didn’t want all our stuff to go bad.  We did our best to try to figure out how to keep things cold.  Thankfully, the apartment below ours is vacant, so our landlord let us keep stuff in that fridge. 

Apart from the cold temperature needed in the fridge, our food would completely spoil and go bad.  It has to remain at a certain temperature to keep the food chilled or it all goes bad.

I cannot help but think of our lives in Christ when we dealt with these instances.  We did everything we could to keep our food from spoiling.  In our spiritual lives, if we don’t keep our lives in tune with God and stay in His Word daily, our growth wanes and our fire for Him spoils.  We would do everything we can to keep our food and beverages from going bad in our fridge if something went wrong, but for some reason, we seem to ignore and neglect the care that our spiritual lives need. 

Jesus Christ is the True Vine.  We are the branches.  If we don’t take more seriously our growth and health spiritually, our hearts will begin to spoil.  So often we just don’t seem to care and do fill our lives with everything else but God.  And then we wonder why we aren’t growing and why our lives look like junk.  If we’re not filling our lives with God, we’re filling our lives with the world and its junk instead. 

When will we take Jesus’ words from this passage and really apply them to our lives?  He meant what He said when He told us that apart from Him we can do NOTHING.