Thorny Roses

And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope: And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us. (Romans 5: 3 - 5)

Why must Christians experience hardships? Why do bees have stings? Why do roses have thorns? Why does HIV kill people? Why are desert plants thorny?

 You see a rose is extremely attractive and smells nice. With its beauty and scent it is irresistible to any passerby. We simply could not have any rose bush if the roses did not have thorns as they would all be plucked before they get fertilized. The thorns are their defense. And not defense so that it is not picked, but defense to give the rose a chance to reproduce. You see the rose is not mature when it buds. It does not reproduce when it blooms.

It has to be fertilized and the fertilization will happen when it is in full bloom, the exact time it is most attractive and crying to be picked to spread that fragrance and beautify someone’s room like it did to mine in college.

God’s way of preserving it for the purposes of reproduction is the reason the rose has thorns. Then due to that blockage to its beauty it is allowed time to reproduce after its kind as God had intended. Do you realize that the elements of the reproduction are not shielded from that rose? The bees can easily access it because they are necessary to that reproduction.

When I was a shepherd I remember eating the fruit of the cactus plant. I do not think there is a fruit with the kind of taste, texture that fruit produces. It is a fruit so unique in taste. To use a marketer’s language it is a fruit someone can kill to eat.

Interesting enough they are everywhere a cactus bush can be found, many times on roadsides. But very few have tasted them.

Why? The cactus is very thorny and the fruit is normally at the very top, many times in the middle of the bush. One had to very deftly and ‘professionally’ pick it amidst those thorns as a slight mistake and the fruit would fall inside the bush and completely out of reach and sight.

But getting it out of the bush was the easier part. The fruit itself has thorns which are worse than those of its parent, some tiny and barely visible. Getting rid of those thorns, especially those you couldn’t see was the main assignment and I don’t think it was possible to do it completely. We were pricked one way or the other as we peeled and ate the fruit, some remaining under the skin of our hands, even tongues, for days.

But eating that fruit compensated for all those sacrifices! Many of us started with a dare and ended with a commitment to eat that fruit at all cost. And the cost was truly high.

What do thorns have to do with the Christian life?

A lot of the preaching of our times presents a Christian life devoid of struggles. Most of those who preach about struggles make them struggles to attain worldly success instead of spiritual maturity.

Thorns ensure that the rose matures enough to reproduce. Cacti are plants of the desert where hardly anything grows and their fruit must have better fortification for the same reason. I doubt even nosey monkeys can dare get that tasty fruit from the cactus.

But thorns also speak another message. Those who need whatever they are protecting must surmount the defense they are offering to access it. Roses are still being worn on lapels. Roses still decorate office receptions. Roses are exported to lands with unfavorable weather.

To benefit from the rose someone has to necessarily be ready to deal with those thorns. He has to prepare himself adequately for him to come out of the picking unharmed, which is the reason for those thorns. He must see ahead to be willing to face those thorns. In short the thorns are a sort of weeding of the pickers as the casual will not dare to face those thorns.

Does this speak about spiritual growth?  Does it speak about of our pursuit of holiness? Does it speak about discipleship?

Are we desperate enough to grow that we will forego ‘fun’ to do it? Are we desperate enough to attain spiritual stature that we will invest heavily in the process? Are we prepared to fast and pray to hear what God wants of us as opposed to what He has for us? Is our eternal destination as desirable as our earthly comfort that we will stop wasting our waking hours on this world and all it has to offer? How do we define our spiritual pursuit?

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. (Matthew 5:6)

We can be so convincing that we really love God. Many times we even end up deceiving ourselves that we are sold out to God’s agenda. But many times our choices point us and those who are looking at us another direction.

Do I really love God if I will need to rush to the pastor every time I need to get God’s direction? Do I love God if I must listen to a preacher to get my encouragement? Am I sold out to God’s agenda in my life when someone else must give me that boost for godliness? Is God really my all in all if He does not give me precise direction concerning my giving? Do I really belong to God if He does not determine my dressing choices?

But there is another aspect to the thorns. Hardship is a necessary accessory to growth. We grow as we are able to handle resistance.

Immunity is the body’s way to handle infection. And why do we have immunity? Nature is progressive. The body must therefore grow as it is exposed to that change.

HIV kills that immunity. Yet do you know that there is something probably more dangerous than HIV? It is a body so shielded from the elements that infections are blocked from touching it. And why is it so? The body slowly adjusts itself to the reality that it is safe and stops developing antibodies since there is no need for them.

Have you ever realized that most wealthy people die from very cheap ailments? Flu, food poisoning etc? Why? Their bodies get accustomed to adequate external (medical) protection that they stop developing their own internal defense. They become similar to people with full blown AIDS because their systems forget how to fight viral and bacterial attacks from their environment.

They will only take purified water and eat safely prepared food. They will live in sanitized neighborhoods and urgently call a doctor in case they feel the slightest discomfort so that it is dealt with immediately and conclusively. Though they have life insurance, they will not take chances to allow their bodies the shortest time to at least identify those biological intruders.

Slowly by slowly their immunity ‘collapses’ so that the slightest attack they encounter will kill them easily if they are not near a hospital.

Contrast them with those who eat from dumps. These eat stale, even rotting food yet look very healthy. They never go to any hospitals as I doubt anyone would attend to them if they went anyway. They sleep outdoors, looking to be shielded from the extremes of the weather and are barely dressed yet you will rarely see them having chest infections.

This is because their bodies adjust to their environment and come better off. They deal with food poisoning all the time and so their systems can deal with it without much effort. They deal with the extremes of weather and their bodies adjust accordingly. They encounter allergies and are comfortable with them.

The body becomes what you condition it for. That is why a marathoner is different from a sprinter or a footballer. This is because they each train their body for the thing they want it to accomplish. And immunity is not much different. The body learns to deal only with what it encounters. Any other thing it encounters will depend on the kind of training it was exposed to as it dealt with earlier invaders.

The other day there was a scuffle in parliament in Kenya. Many Kenyans were infuriated that an MP who was bitten by another was admitted in hospital for that bite. It actually looks comical. That a whole human being is admitted in hospital for a couple of days for being bitten by a person, even to the point of being put on a drip.

While many think it is pretense, which wouldn’t be strange knowing politicians, it might actually be that he needed that kind of hospitalization and treatment. Knowing the kind of fortification they put their bodies under, a wound of that nature is capable of becoming life threatening.

Many people are so detoxified to the point of being unhealthy. Antibiotics have killed all the diseases that they have even killed the necessary bacteria that keep the body in a balanced biological state. Their systems are so clean that they are dead or in other words not functioning as normal human bodies. All the detoxification has resulted in the body lacking normal functions unless they are aided by drugs.

I remember when I was a shepherd. Since we had no shoes one would have their whole toe nail knocked off and we would not even want our parents to know. Our antiseptic was plain roadside dust to stop bleeding and heal the wound. We had real adventure as we tasted all the fruits and leaves we could to know which was sweeter. Yet none of us became sick of anything.

Ever heard of urine therapy? This is where a person uses urine to treat their skin. Why is that and how does body waste become useful? It brings balance to a dysfunctional body. And it is a field that has gained currency very recently.

What about poop therapy? I laughed when a friend mentioned it and challenged me to check it out. Poop therapy is when stool (waste matter) from someone is inserted to a sick person where all treatment has failed. It heals by restoring normal processes of the digestive system that have been harmed or removed by medicines, especially antibiotics.

But we are here dealing with spiritual realities. Do you know that the person most shielded from the world is the one easily ensnared by it?  Like the body shielded from infection will collapse from an insignificant infection that may not even be noticed by a normal body, a person who has been shielded from spiritual conflict is more prone than one who has learnt to recognize the wiles the devil uses over time.

These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. (John 16:33)

I wonder what many people think when they read this verse. Is that our experience?

Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. (2Timothy 3:12)

Who preaches that doctrine nowadays?

We are so scared when we hear about persecution. Most have always imagined that persecution ended with the book of Acts. Some even preached something like that for generations, even implying that whatever the Christians in the former atheist USSR were going through was deserved due to their lack of zeal or generational curses without forgetting that they probably had the most portent church on earth.

Let me summarize the message of the thorns.

The first thing thorns do is locking out intruders who are unnecessary or undesirable to my growth. They protect me from people and things that are negative to my spiritual reproduction. Like the thorns on a rose they block casual visitors and intruders from interfering with my growth and maturity.

This is where company comes in, where church and preachers come in. This is where our interaction on and with the media come in. This is where we obstruct our interactions with the world to ensure weeds and other destructive enemies and pests are locked out.

Our thorns are the standards we establish and are connected to the other aspect of the thorns.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it. (Matthew 13: 45, 46)

Our spirituality is of prime importance to us. It is a priority for us to grow and we will breach any obstacle placed on our pursuit.

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. (Matthew 5: 10 – 12)

How ready are we to deal with the opposition our commitment to Christ must attract?

But we must not create opposition. In fact we are God’s enemies if we create enemies. Remember Christ said we love our enemies? We are to be simply so committed to God that anything and anyone not aligned to God will automatically hate us because they hate or are not as committed to God as God demands.

There are habits that give us those thorns as well as create thorns for others.

Consistent reading and study of God’s word, the Bible, makes us know what exactly God not only wants from us but especially wants of us. We will know who we are and should be in the sight of the author of the Bible, who of course is not your favorite pastor.

Living by the standards the Bible and my study of it dictates makes me radically obedient that the casual and politically or other correctly set Christian will see me as a threat, and not because I care for their lifestyle but because my radical obedience is painting his compromise in very clear, sharp colors. And that is one source of the persecution, Christians who are not sold out to the cause of Christ.

A devotional life and prayer will keep me in constant connection to the heavenly throne. And this will attract the wrath of the enemy of souls for the simple reason that that lifestyle draws people to God better than a magnet would iron. He therefore will keep his resistance to me extreme to try his best to water down that commitment.

That is the reason it is folly to rebuke hardship or persecution as they are positive contributors to a thriving and healthy Christian life.

Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. (2Timothy 2:3)