A few years ago I planted a rose garden in our backyard to commemorate my wife's first Mother's day. Out of the four rose bushes planted three managed to survive. This garden is located close to my shed and while I had tried various ways to spruce up the shed, not even those bushes managed to really do the job right. Originally I added some light-brown lattice to the sides of the shed and when that didn't seem like it was enough I tried painting some of the strips of lattice a dark brown hoping the different shades of brown would work. After a year or two, it just didn't and I felt like I still needed some other touch. In the end, I decided that something else would be some sort of climbing vine. I wanted one of those climbing plants so that it would grow along the lattice and add a splash of color and as a result, I chose a Honeysuckle. It took three years of slow growth but finally one day that desired color came into view with the first of many orange and red flowers that began to grow. That year there was a little bit of trimming that had to be done to the plant and I wasn't much of a fan of the withered flowers that were falling all over when their time was up but I could live with it, or so I thought. As usual the next year it took just so long for that plant to finally start to show signs of life that I actually wondered if the winter had finally killed it. Well, it hadn't, the sprigs (new growth coming up from the root system to form a new plant) that started shooting up in different places were annoying. Those sprigs weren't part of my plan and neither was the way the honeysuckle went wild in shooting out new branches and seemingly replacing the ones I trimmed off overnight. The roses I had planted years before were being overshadowed by the canopy the honeysuckle was constantly recreating. Instead of growing up and around the shed as it was supposed to do the plant kept shooting its branches straight up and instead of leaning over the roof they kept coming back over the roses. Roses require a great deal of sunlight and that canopy was denying them that most precious commodity. Of the three bushes, I had planted one too close to the property line as it was and the new neighbor had erected a new privacy fence so that plant was now being hurt from two sides, meaning something had to be done. My decision was to start to kill the honeysuckle since it had become a weed. Trimming it once a week had gotten old real quick and given all the sprigs that were shooting all over, there really wasn't much choice. At this point I knew I would be content to have the dried up, dead plant sprawled out over the shed giving the shed a nice look that way. To fulfill this desire I had thus employeed some weed killer which worked great on everything it touched. Great care must be taken so as not to hurt the roses. Trouble is that the root system of the honeysuckle is by now extensive and the only real way to kill it may be to kill the roses as well and even that it no guarantee. This got me to thinking about what Paul wrote in Romans 7:19-21 “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me.” No matter how much we try to get rid of our old sin nature, once we are saved, so the new can flourish the old nature fights for it's life. Trim it back, spray the weed killer of the Word on it, but be forewarned it is still there. That doesn't mean we should give up, but it does mean that there is something worth fighting for, just like those roses. In this case, as Paul is talking about it is our spiritual lives. The weed of sin just won't die until we leave this world behind. As a result, we must be ever vigilant to the growth of deisire for sin in our lives and put a stop to it before we give in to it's temptation. Sin will try everything in it's power start back up again, form new sins, get us to fall back into old ones. Don't let it.
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