I love trees — real trees, not cheesy, delicate, decorative, tract home trees that get about 15 feet high — and break if even a hummingbird lands in it! Our home in Fontana, CA, had one of these lame kinds of trees — which I tore out and, with my son Jeff’s help, replaced with a man’s tree: A sycamore — the only one in our neighborhood!
When my dad passed away, Mom gave me all his watches. Suppose, instead of going to the nursery and buying a tree for our front yard, I decided to dig a hole and plant Dad’s heavy-duty Omega watch. Could I realistically expect a “watch tree” to sprout, grow, and eventually produce a crop of watches? That’s stupid! Even though Dad’s watch is the product of trained human minds and skillful human hands, there is no life in it that could germinate and produce new watches.
So it is in our spiritual life. Regardless of how trained and skilled we are; regardless of how knowledgeable and experienced we are and how hard we try, serving the Lord in our own strength is a recipe for a burned-out and barren tree. It’s only through Christ in us, working through us, that we can produce a crop pleasing to God.