Pruning

This poor tree looks really bad!  A few minutes before I took this picture it was a beautiful full pink grapefruit tree.  From this tree I ate a fruit every day for breakfast from January until the middle of May.  Sweet pink grapefruit!  I even shared some of the abundant fruit with members of our Home Fellowship.  Bob Taylor especially!  Now look what I have done!  Wait, however there is more to this story.
In my front yard a few yards away is a orange tree that gives us sweet fruit every winter.  Two years ago the tree looked ragged and tired yet it was producing fruit so I aggressively trimmed it much like the above picture.  During the summer months it grew new leaves and branches and produced some fruit, but not much.  This year it went wild with literally hundreds of blooms.  This coming winter are we going to have a great harvest!
It didn't take me long to figure out what to do to my near by grapefruit tree.  That brings us to the present circumstances.  Just this morning I looked out my bathroom window and in just a few weeks there is new grow already!  You can't keep a good tree down!
In the Gospels Jesus told his disciples a parable that pruning takes place when the branches produce fruit so that they might produce more fruit.  He wasn't speaking about grape vines or even grapefruit trees!  He was speaking about us.  One would expect that the pruning would be the result of us not walking as close to Him as we should, sort of a discipline issue.  That however is not what the text tells us.  The Lord prunes us when we are producing fruit so that more fruit might come.
In our little fellowship here in Mission Viejo  we have had some pruning going on, although not as extreme as my dear grapefruit tree, but pruning none the less.  When this happens there is always some pain involved and our first response is, "What did we do wrong?"  The words of Jesus however bring us back to reality.  Our little Fellowship has in the past and is producing fruit now and the Lord wants to see more of this taking place. 
In the last few weeks the Lord has put aside His clippers for the time being and we can sense a peace that has settled over the Fellowship and a feeling of excitement over what the Lord has in store for us in this new season!  Almost like the new growth on my grapefruit tree that I saw this morning!  What a gracious and loving Lord we serve. Pastor Chuck Smith had a phrase that he would say in light of the little bumps and turns that the Church would experience from time to time.  He would say, "Well let's see what the Lord is going to do with this."  Well said Pastor Chuck, well said.