April is a good month to be outside. It is truly a time of resurrection. We are privileged to have a ringside seat to a show for which we pay nothing, that asks nothing of us, and that will happen even if we are indifferent to it. All nature screams the resurrection, or rebirth, of life. After months of cold, barren landscape, we see the emergence of new life everywhere. We do well to pay attention to the physical and material world we live in; it is glorious and it is instructive. The fact that so many of us are not in tune with the gentle rhythms of nature in not a step forward, but a regression.

            I have lived through the death of Lent for the past couple of months, and it never ceases to amaze me that what Lent asks of me is happening in my yard and garden as well. For a month or so, it has been all pulling and killing weeds and clearing out old dead ferns to make room for my new asparagus ferns to emerge. The raspberry bed took hours to clear away the old dead canes, and lo and behold, as I cut them back I noticed lots of new growth eager to make its way through to fruitfulness. I have spent hours in my garden, which has been fallow since last year. From all the decay and rot, there is now well-tilled dirt waiting for corn seed to be buried with another offering of new life. Why all the weeding and tearing out? It is necessary. It is not an end in itself; in fact, I don’t love to weed and clear out. I still have thorns in my hands from the raspberry bed. No, this is necessary work so that resurrection and new life can take place. This is true in nature, and it is true in the human soul.

It was all made clear to me the other day as I was raking leaves under one of the oak trees. As I raked back the leaves, I uncovered a host of worms and life working beneath the surface of things, and I dug my hands into a thick layer of dark, rich, composted soil. It is this death and decay that has become the soil from which all this new life around me will emerge. Death and life are juxtaposed. This rhythm of death and life has been played out sense time immortal. It is as if all nature bears witness to the key moment of history and adds a yearly exclamation point. All life proceeds from death. Death and resurrection is the ordained way things proceed. All growth proceeds in this manner. Try as we may, this is the shape of our existence, is it not? For you to live, something must die: plants and animals die to maintain your physical existence. The death-like trance of inactivity called sleep precedes the refreshed state you enjoy when you awaken in the morning. Try as you might, you can not alter these rhythms of life. This is “the way things are.”

When we turn our attention to matters that are spiritual in nature, such as how we grow as Christians, we should not be surprised to find out that all growth and maturity into the likeness of Christ should turn on this basic premise. Our salvation is secure because someone died that we might live. Our growth is patterned on this same rhythm of death and resurrection. We so quickly forget that, and repeat the errors of both the early church and contemporary culture. In Galatians, Paul chides the church that they had started well, but had got off track because they thought that growth was possible because of their own efforts: “Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain you goal by human effort? …Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law, or because you believe what you heard?” Do you see the mistaken notion? They thought, as we often do, that we are saved by works: “Christ gave his life for me”; but now we grow by our own human efforts. In so doing, Paul says that the Galatians have missed the key to growth and cut themselves off from the transforming power of the Holy Spirit in their lives.

The key question for growth and change in the Christian life is not, "Am I doing everything right and being obedient?" That is the human effort Paul says will never bring growth and change. Rather, the key question of growth is: “Do I believe the promise of God—that he loves and accepts me as I am because of what Jesus has done?” Human effort is involved to be sure, but it is on the other side of faith and the admission that my best efforts of obedience are not the reason God loves me. The reason God loves and accepts me is because of the death and resurrection of His son.