Words are powerful. They can change the world, one heart at a time. God has designed it this way as He created us and sent His Word into the world to rescue us. We use words to change the people in our lives, to communicate our love and our hopes and dreams for them. Public speakers know this power, but even a child understands the power of the simplest words, “I love you,” to touch the people around her.
We speak to ourselves as well. Each day, we hold an inner monologue that has possibly the most profound influence of anything in our lives. We can preach to ourselves, or we can lie to ourselves. We can tear ourselves down with negativity and despair or build ourselves up with hope and truth.
Sometimes the specific words that we choose have a powerful effect on us as well. There are some words that I have intentionally started to use more in my life and how they have changed my thinking.
One of those words is CULTIVATE.
Desire for change
We long for change in our lives, and everywhere we look, we can find people ready to share their solutions and ways for making the changes we desire. God’s word has solutions as well, and these simple but profound truths can change us.
The Bible has multiple ways to describe this process—and one of them is the imagery of working and tending a garden. Just as humanity started out in a garden, and our first parents were essentially gardeners, we see throughout scripture the pattern of cultivation and growth.
God uses the imagery of trees (Psalm 1, 92), vines (John 15), and farming (Matthew 13, Galatians 5-6) to describe our hearts and lives. Our ultimate goal is to be a flourishing tree that bears fruit and stays connected to the source of strength and truth, Jesus Christ. Here is just one of these key passages:
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.
Galatians 5:22-23
So often, when I pray for this fruit, I pray, “God, help me to be more loving. Help me to be patient.”
In my life, this kind of mindset has caused frustration. Why don’t I change? Why do I struggle so much to be kind or patient or faithful?
For me, the problem is partly centered on that word: be. “God, help me to be kind.” Sometimes I think of it in terms of “am” or “am not.” And I feel frustrated when I am not, and sometimes may even feel like God hasn’t answered that prayer. I can focus on simply asking, am I, or am I not, and I can overlook the Bible’s description of the actual progression.
Change as cultivation
Instead, following the pattern set up in scripture, we should think of these results as something we need to cultivate. This mindset of growth and change, I believe, starts with how we talk to ourselves. “God, help me to cultivate thankfulness in my life. Help me to cultivate patience.” I may not use this word every time, but the shift in thinking has helped me to focus on a few truths:
1. Cultivation starts with a hope for the future. Cultivation demands a vision for the future result, and people who cultivate believe that there is hope for a flourishing plant and fruit at the end. No one plants when there is no hope at all. But we have hope for change, and we can cultivate virtues in hope. Paul echoes this hope in his prayer for the Colossian church:
9 And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, 10 so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God
Colossians 1:9-10
2. Cultivation takes hard work. When I pray, “God, help me to cultivate thankfulness in my heart,” I am acknowledging both the necessity of God’s work in my heart as well as the work that I must do to make these things happen. Earthly farmers rely on the sun, water, and good soil as well as strength and health to go out and work—these are all gifts from God! But they understand that actual harvest will not take place if they don’t go out and do the difficult work. As we pray in this way, we can acknowledge that there are specific steps we can take to work out these things in our lives.
3. Cultivation takes time. Thinking about virtues as things we must cultivate helps us to recognize that they take time. No one can force a seed to grow faster, or force the seasons to speed up. There are certain seasons that are designed to help us grow certain virtues. We can wait patiently during those seasons and do the things that are appropriate for that time. We can acknowledge the changes that we want typically take time and are not instantaneous.
4. Cultivation requires a plan. After we pray for God to help us to cultivate a specific virtue, we should understand that there are specific steps toward that virtue in our lives. Just as farmers make plans for daily work as well as contingency plans, we should consider what our day will likely hold and how we can cultivate certain virtues in a variety of circumstances. Is there a passage of scripture we can prepare and meditate on when things get hard? Is there a conversation that we should prepare for in advance? What plan do we have for how to think when things suddenly upend our schedule for the day?
Fields for cultivation
Let me give an example of how this shift in thinking has helped me. Living in America until my mid-twenties, I could usually plan out my day so that I could avoid as much waiting as possible. I would make sure that I went to places such as banks and restaurants when the lines were likely to be down, and I could shift errands around to ensure the fastest route possible through my list of tasks. Life was a kind of strategy game where I could plan things in order to accomplish as much as possible as quickly as possible.
When I went to China, that strategy didn’t translate at all. There were many times when I went to a place to do what seemed to be a relatively simple task, but I would end up waiting, sometimes hours, and sometimes leave not even having accomplished that task. This became a relatively common part of our lives, and it revealed to me just how impatient I was. My strategy in America had helped me to be efficient, but it had not helped me to cultivate the virtue of patience. I could see what an impatient person I was. I would feel angry, agitated, frustrated, and sometimes hopeless with these ridiculous delays. I knew I needed patience, but I didn’t see clearly how to become patient.
One day, I took an out-of-town friend to a bank where he hoped to withdraw money he needed for a doctor’s appointment, and this simple errand became an outrageous comedy of errors that also helped me to see the path for cultivating patience in my heart. That day, we lived through language barriers, hours of waiting interspersed with phone calls to the branch of the bank in his hometown, and continued failure at several offered solutions.
Somewhere along the way, I realized that this was actually the perfect place to cultivate patience. The long and orderly lines to the various bank tellers were like rows in a garden, and if I chose to see them, they were beautiful little hills of soil where I could cultivate patience.
There wasn’t anything I could do to speed things up. We could keep trying to accomplish our task, or we could give up, but as we did so, we had the choice to do it with kindness or with impatience. I could acknowledge the eternal significance of the people involved and show them the love of Christ, no matter what kind of bizarre obstacles kept us from our mission. Patience requires practice, and I was getting 2 hours of free, guided practice, directed by my Divine Instructor, Christ Jesus. He had placed that lesson in our daily schedule, even though we hadn’t expected it.
That day was life changing for me. We left the bank with no money in hand, but the kind of patience I had longed for in my life had started to bud. I realized that patience needs to be cultivated, and the best place to do that cultivation is sometimes a long line at a bank.
I have since used this word, cultivate, with the virtues I long for. And cultivating requires hope, hard work, time, and a plan. Praise God for His help and the way He provides us with strength and everything we need!
3 His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence
2 Peter 1:3
What virtues do you long to cultivate in your life?
This article is part of a series that has culminated in a prompted journal for Christian growth. You can find more information about this journal here. You can find the second part of the series here.
Do you long for real growth in your Christian walk and more clear evidence of the fruit of the Spirit in your life? God’s word has the answers, and this journal points to those answers while providing the structure and space for you to work through these truths for your life. (Amazon description)
Suggested Reading:
“How People Change targets the root of a person: the heart. When our core desires and motivations change, only then will behavior follow. Using a biblical model of Heat, Thorns, Cross, and Fruit, Paul David Tripp and Timothy S. Lane reveal how lasting change is possible.” (Amazon description)
“God did not give us His gospel just so we could embrace it and be converted. He offers it to us every day as a gift that keeps on giving us everything we need for life and godliness. Here is a valuable tool to preach the gospel to yourself daily to strengthen your faith and define what you believe and why.” (Amazon description)
