Who needs Christians?

A man buys a packet of seeds and plants them. If they grow and become a lush, fragrant garden, who gets the praise?

And if they are sparse and stunted, who is responsible?

We are the gardeners of our lives, responsible for everything that flourishes or fails, just as Adam and Eve were responsible for tending Eden. Before they sinned, they were landscape architects, planting and pruning and arranging. Everything was perfect. No pests, pesticides, or plagues.

But man’s fall from grace cursed the ground. For the first time, the earth produced thorns and thistles. And man’s delightful work became painful toil.

The world is still God’s garden. The Church is still his gardener.

While American voters and the media dissect the presidential candidates, shake their heads at another failed administration, and tremble in their boots with every blip in the Dow, the main problem—the Church—remains unresolved.

The Church is the manifest presence of God on earth. We were redeemed to say to the world, as Jesus said to Philip, “Anyone who has seen me, has seen the Father.”

Today, everything that has been sown throughout the world apart from God is bearing fruit and is ready for harvest. Likewise, everything that has been sown in agreement with and in obedience to God is bearing fruit and is also ready for harvest.

Harvest will be a time of great rejoicing, suffering, and conflict.

But the Church has a little time yet to increase the joy, lessen the suffering, and diminish the conflict. As the Church goes, so goes the world.

God is still calling us to repentance.

Will we remain deaf, ignorant, apathetic, lazy? Victims of a religious spirit? Worshipers of money and comfort? Deceived by the doctrines of men? Defensive of our godlessness?

To repent means to change our minds, to think differently, to think the way God thinks, to agree with God. That’s why he gave us the Bible. It’s all in there. Not just history and stories but the very mind of Christ.

But the church has toiled in Garden Earth for so long trying to be good, or appear to be good, that it has lost sight of being Christ.

“Dear friends,” John wrote, “now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”

The more clearly we see Jesus, the more like him we become.

“Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure.”

God is purifying his Church. He is purifying your life and mine and the life of anyone who is willing to change. He is turning up the heat through our circumstances and skimming off the dross, the impurities. Then he turns it up a little more and skims a little more, until we reflect our Father to the world.

Jesus said, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

A perfect rose garden is not a garden filled with perfect roses. It is a garden filled with only roses. No weeds or rocks, pests or peckish critters.

The world is out of answers, resources, and hope. One government is replaced with another that is worse. America’s problems will not be resolved by another administration. We could replace every politician in Washington and be no better off.

God has the answers. His answers for the world are his Son and his people. And his Son has already finished his part.

There is still time to clean out our gardens. But not much.

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