This morning’s word is The Seed You Refuse.
The anchor verses are James 1:15 and Galatians 3:13.
In Danville, Ohio, a small town in Knox County, a mother began to see something she did not recognize growing in her nineteen-year-old son. He had been buying firearms and ammunition. He had been talking online with people she did not know, in places she could not follow. When she confronted him, what she heard alarmed her further. She did not have a Bible verse in mind. She had her own eyes, and she had her own gut.
On June tenth, she called the Knox County Sheriff’s Office on her own son.
The investigation that began with her call ended four days later with a planned attack stopped cold. The target was the large public fighting event held at the White House that weekend. The FBI made five arrests across multiple states. Roughly twenty-three people were identified online. Thousands of people who attended that event, and perhaps her own son, are alive today because one mother saw a seed and refused to let it take root.
That is the thread this morning. What you let take root, you become. What you refuse to plant does not bear its fruit. The work of the believer is naming the seed and refusing it.
The Day Five reading in the ten-day plan from ResLife Church on overcoming temptation puts the dynamic in scripture. James chapter one verse fifteen: “desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.” The author paraphrases Psalm seven verse fourteen: the one who is intimate with sin, nurturing it, dwelling on it, will give birth to disillusionment. The salesman pitches a beautiful picture. The walker presses on toward the expected end. What arrives at the end is not what was promised. The picture was the seed. The disillusionment is the fruit.
The mother in Danville saw the salesman’s pitch coming through her son’s phone. She did not let the picture continue to play.
Ignatius of Antioch, the second-century bishop and martyr who wrote seven letters to early churches on his way to Rome and execution, names the posture that recognizes the seed in chapter seven of his letter to the Trallians. Put away conceit, arrogance, disdain, and haughtiness. Be humble and quiet. Tremble at HIS words. The puffed-up heart does not see the seed coming. The humble heart does.
Peyton Jones and Kris Langham, in the Spirit step of their disciple-making plan Discipology, name the same posture in different language. Walking in the Spirit is surrendering the stolen crown. The daily whisper is “not my will, but yours be done.” Self-control is really Spirit-control. When the seed appears, the heart that has been surrendering all morning recognizes it immediately. The heart that has been crowning itself misses it.
The mother did not author the seed in her son. She did not put it there. She did not approve of it. She saw it. She named it. She acted. What GOD does next, in HIS time and by HIS means, is the reversal.
The Day Ten reading in the healing plan from ResLife Church carries the same teaching from the angle of what is already in your hand. The author tells of getting poison ivy at sixteen and being healed overnight after a fellow student prayed for him. Years later he learned the larger verse, Galatians chapter three verse thirteen: Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law. The author’s three-year-old son was praying that promise over hives from peanut butter, and when the father asked him a few weeks later, “Who has been redeemed?” the boy answered with the words he could barely pronounce. “I been deemed.” No reaction since, over a decade later. The line that holds the chapter: keys are very helpful if you know where they are.
The mother in Danville did not let what was taking root in her son win. She did not let it win that night. She did not let it win that week. Some seeds, you do not let take root.
What is taking root in you this morning? In your body, in your phone, in your relationships, in your thoughts? The believer’s freedom is to take captive the seed and refuse it. The Spirit knows the difference between the seed of GOD and the seed of the enemy. The Word names what the eye cannot yet see. The keys are already in your hand.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.