Crushing: God Turns Pressure into PowerSample

Yesterday’s Fruit, Tomorrow’s Wine

One thing I’m certain of is that God loves me. I’ve been through too much in my life and seen how the Father has taken care of me to say that He doesn’t have His hand on me. I can hardly speak about how I’ve seen God move in my life without becoming overwhelmed. I realize that some people don’t feel that way about God. They look at their lives and can see only negativity that forces them to ask, “If God loves me, why does life keep hurting me? Why do I keep losing everything that’s valuable?”

Really? Is what you lost that valuable? 

In this season, in this stage of your life, the fruit you’ve held on to has been culled, and you’re desperately trying to stop the bleeding. On the outside, your blessings have been taken from you, and the exterior pangs you feel are accompanied by the inward agony for what you cannot reclaim. But the Master has not placed value where we have. Whereas we long for what has been taken, the Master is overjoyed with what remains. Could it be that the Lord hides next season’s harvest in what we have left?

Your miracle is never in what you lost – it’s in what you have left!

If you’re down to a handful of meal, that’s all you need. If you’re down to two fish and five loaves of bread, that’s all you need! Like the widow in the Old Testament, you can be down to one last jar of oil, but the Lord has created more capacity for you to pour out, improve upon, and increase what you have left. Start looking at what remains and cease grieving over what you lost. After all, if you needed what the Master took from you, do you really believe the Lord would have sought to take it? 

For where God is taking you, you don’t need the weight and refuse of yesterday’s bread. The Master has an expected end for your life, and the trip doesn’t require the extra baggage of last season’s blessings. If the Lord, in all His wisdom, took from you what would weigh you down during the next leg of your journey, why would you seek ways to regain it? In pruning you, the Lord is assisting you in circumspectly and precisely tailoring your life down to carry only what you need to get out where He wants you to go, because He knows that the blessing of last season’s harvest can become a trap and graveyard for your future. 

Are you willing to leave behind yesterday’s fruit so that you can embrace the wine of tomorrow’s new season? 

I’m writing to those of you who find yourselves awestruck by the damage left behind by a Master who dared to cut you. Though it appears that everything you built has been taken from you, the Lord has strategically left a remnant that will give rise to more fruit next season. It’s the remnant that is most valuable to the Vinedresser, for there is life in what remains.