Two Landscapers, Two Trees

Christ's living church and the institutional church are like two separate trees. They are disconnected and unrelated from the lowest root all the way up to the highest branch. These trees are drastically dissimilar on account of the two different landscapers who planted them. The natures of these two landscapers are diametrically opposed to one another. One is the Master Landscaper while the other is a fraud who doesn’t really care about landscaping at all. The latter got into this business mainly to spite the former, a fact which his faulty landscaping skills make apparent.

The two aforementioned trees are entirely different from one another except this one thing: They are planted in the same soil. This is the false landscaper’s idea. The false landscaper planted his shiny, synthetic replica as close to the Master’s living tree as possible to distract people as they pass by.
Any passerby who takes a moment to investigate these trees might easily distinguish the work of the Master from that of the fraud. However, from a casual distance they seem to overlap and blend into each other. For this reason the fraud goes out of his way to ensure that the general masses shuffling past the two trees are as intellectually and spiritually dazed as possible. This in itself is the false landscaper’s greatest feat, as people would have to suffer from a deplorable state of mental rot to mistake a shoddy, plastic tree for one that is naturally beautiful and vivacious. He plays on the hecticness of common people so that they never stop and seriously inspect these two different trees.

The sad fact is that most of us church experts can hardly imagine what everyday obedience might even look like. We assume that God can only be as great as we imagine Him to be. For this reason the institutional church has all the characteristics of unnatural machination.

We will strive toward maturity when we worship God for His incomprehensibleness. Such worship is pleasing to God because it gives up the right to define Him or even understand Him at all (if that’s what He should decide). If we have learned anything about God, it should be that He works and moves in ways that we cannot predict or even imagine.

by Patrick Roberts BooksByPatrick.com

Patrick is an average Christ-seeker. His goal is to turn people to Jesus Christ.