Embrace Seasonality

Life in Christ is not a straight line. 

If you expect uniform output, you have reduced your faith to ritualistic inputs—where disciplines done rightly yield guaranteed results. 

But there is one guarantee for those who bear fruit: God will take you through seasons of pruning. He will remove through the winter what stands in the way of a bountiful spring.

Faith that only moves up and to the right is climate-controlled religion. Walk with the living Christ, and he will lead you into the elements—into rain and drought; laughter and sorrow; aching and abundance.

“For everything there is a season …” (Eccles. 3:1).

Embrace seasonality with Christ—or else you will misinterpret dry seasons as punishment instead of pruning.

The frost comes before the bloom. After stretches of obscurity, loneliness, and despair, red ripe fruit bursts from the stem, sweeter and stronger than ever.

There is “a time for every matter under heaven.”

What “time” is God taking you through?

Submit to the season, and stay with Jesus.

Is it a time of trimming? God cuts back your capacity so that you can stretch out into your purpose.

It is a time of silence? God pauses the normal conversation so that he can start a deeper one.

Is it a time of dancing? This is what the waiting was for. Take it in! Be merry and glad! And get used to the joy. It’s a foretaste of what’s on the way—eternal springtime, unstoppable glee.

Until that day, Jesus is the one constant. Though snow covers, it cannot separate the branch from the Vine. Remain in him, and though your fruit awaits its season, your leaf will remain green with abundant life (Ps. 1:3; Jer. 17:8).