Increase Your Bloom AbilitySample

Allow God to Clip What Is Good to Make Room for Great

Allow God to Clip What Is Good to Make Room for Great

Many of us easily recognize areas that need to be cut away. We remain in unhealthy relationships. We enjoy bad habits. We exploit our time and money. We battle selfishness, anger, and bitterness. Hands down. These are branches that need to be removed!

Less recognizable are the healthy and good branches that also need clipping. For God to do even greater things in and through our lives, these must yet be pruned.

But we are a stubborn people--happy with the status quo of our branches. You and I often stop short of prolific and becoming profoundly fruitful.

It’s time to let God clip what is good to make room for great. Maybe it’s a job, a ministry, an opportunity, a relationship, an area of service or giving, the location you call home, or even the house where you worship. It could be where your kids attend school, your college, or anything in your life that could give glory to God and be fruit-bearing.

For me, these are difficult cuts. These are not dead branches. They are flowering, fruit-bearing branches. It doesn’t make sense to my human understanding why these must be cut back, sometimes severely.

How do we recognize when God might be prompting us that it’s clipping time of this nature? Graciously, the Holy Spirit nudges our stubborn hearts. Other times, He uses circumstances, people, even our health, and most assuredly, His Word.

This is the kind of year I am having. I have streamlined my life to the bare bones as it is. The only things to cut are places I feel necessary. Places of calling. Important work. Dear people. Stuff I love and ministries that excel.

Allowing God to cut what looks perfectly fine hurts. Often it’s accompanied by a sense of purposeless loss. How can we be sure it will be worth it? That’s the heart of our hesitation, isn’t it? Can we trust Him?

Maybe that’s why He gives us this word picture of The Vine. Gardeners know a severe pruning makes all the difference to a healthy branch. The effects will be seen. Just not now.

The call here is to trust His ability to know us well enough to make each branch more vibrant, more effective, and more fruitful—even when we can’t see it. And to make this fruitfulness lasting.

Will you trust Him today to begin increasing your bloom ability?

We hope you found this resource encouraging. For more Gospel-centered resources from Cheri, visit www.sheyearns.com/what-is-next/ .