Life-Giving Manure

Manure can give you new life. Especially if that manure is strategically placed around your life.

And he said to the vinedresser, ‘Look, for three years now I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and I find none. Cut it down. Why should it use up the ground?’ And he answered him, ‘Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put on manure. (Luke 13:7-8 ESV)

When we read this parable in its entirety, we see a landowner looking to capitalize on his tree investment. I mean, what good is a tree that is supposed to bear fruit if it doesn’t bear any fruit. But today, I don’t want to focus on why the tree wasn’t bearing fruit, or what fruit it is supposed to bear because that leads to existential questions that some of us are still trying figure out. Today, I want to look at the second part of this passage that is excerpted above. The vinedresser (read: “farmer”) replies to the landowner, “Let it alone this year until I dig around it and put on manure.” Interestingly, manure is the garbage that comes out of an animal’s body: it is the undigested, unwanted nutrient-rich byproduct of life. The vinedresser wants to dig around the tree and place manure around it, to help the tree produce fruit. The vinedresser knows that the tree’s lack of fruit is a direct reflection of the lack of nutrients it needs to produce. The tree needs the garbage of life to give forth to new life: this is the paradigm of life. From this parable, one should realize that the landowner is God the Father, the vinedresser is Jesus, and the tree is you and me. We are planted exactly where currently stand, to do something for God. He is walking around, looking to see whether we’re doing exactly what He’d planted us for. As can be expected, most of us are not doing what we’d been planted to do: we’re not returning on God’s investment. Jesus, instead of cutting us down to make room for another, suggests that our lives simply need a little assistance in the form of nutrients (manure), so that we can grow and have something to show for our lives. If you’re wondering why your life is surrounded by excrement, it’s because Jesus provided it as fertilizer: you need it to grow and bear the fruit you were always meant to bear. When you keep that in mind, all the things you consider as “manure” in your life become life-giving. Pray today, to see the manure in your life becomes life-giving manure.