I know many of you have been battling fierce thoughts this season, tormented by fear and anxiety. The enemy has been poisoning your mind and trying to warp your thoughts and decimate your hope. The longer you have battled, the harder it has been to resist the thoughts or have the strength to see through the weeds in your mind. But the Lord has seen your desperation. He gave me a metaphor to give you hope and encouragement!
I was actually working in my garden, and we have a patch of dirt in our backyard that hasn’t been planted with grass yet, so it had taken on quite a few weeds. And they weren’t the little kind! They had been allowed to grow for so long that they had deep roots and were so tall they went up to my knees and thighs! I finally decided I was sick of looking at them. Thus, I decided to weed that dirt patch.
However, it was harder than I wanted it to be. The weeds were so well-established that I had to jump on a large shovel to loosen the hard soil before I could yank them. The labor was exhausting – first I had to use my entire body weight to jump on the shovel, then I had to bend down to tear up the weed and shake the heavy soil off the roots, then I had to shove the heavy weed inside the trash bag. It was so exhausting that I decided to do something else. Rather than uprooting one weed at a time, I decided to do all my jumping first, then tackle the yanking. So, I jumped onto the shovel over 100 times to loosen the soil around each weed. But what is important to note is that I didn't visibly upset the soil. It wasn't turned over. You could not even see that I had dug. Thus, the weeds still stood fully upright after I jumped. It was just enough to make them loose.
But as I looked around, I was shocked! God showed me something significant and He wants to give you hope! You see, I had BARELY loosened the soil around them, not even enough to make them tilt or fall over. It looked like I had not done anything! So it shocked me when I looked back and saw that those supposedly hardy, noxious weeds weren’t standing tall at all! They had all wilted within one or two minutes, just because I had loosened the soil a TINY little bit! That's when I heard God say, “It only takes a little tiny disturbance of the soil of your mind to destroy the weeds! Their strength is a mirage. Your freedom will come much easier than you think. I will do the rest!”
God wants to shed light on the illusion that the enemy has led you to believe: that the battle for your freedom will be hard and grueling, if not impossible. But it's a mirage! The enemy just wants you to give up! So God wants you to know that your freedom is found through a very tiny move on your part; that all you need to do is loosen the soil around what you have believed and God will do the rest. You don’t even need to yank the weeds, just make your mind uninhabitable for them through a tiny loosening. Don't keep believing what you have held onto. Don't keep focusing on the negative. God is stronger than the weeds, He is for you, fighting for you, and He has already won the war. Stand on the truth and seek out the cracks or lies in the mirage. Watch as the weeds wilt quickly and die. God will bring your freedom more easily and quickly than you believed if you just loosen the soil!