The result of cultivating our old nature is sorrow. Yet we find sometimes even aged believers attempting to bring a clean thing out of an unclean, attempting after a long life of religious disappointment to bring themselves into a fit state for God’s presence, and, perhaps, looking to Christ, as a means for effecting their desires.
A little while ago, an unskilled hand had trained a rose tree over a porch. The leaves of the tree were green and the growth was strong, but not a flower was there.
“Why is this?” inquired the master of a skilled gardener.
The answer was given by an act, not by words, for, taking out his pruning knife, the gardener, in one moment, leveled the rampant growth to the ground.
“What have you done?” cried the owner.
“Don’t you see, sir,” was the reply, “Your man has been cultivating the wrong shoot!’ and at the same time the gardener pointed Out the grafted rose, which had barely struggled two inches above the ground, and which the wild shoot had completely overwhelmed. In a few months the graft, set free from the encumbering growth of the wrong shoot, sent out in vigorous life its beautiful branches, and covered the porch with its luxuriance.
All the cultivation or training in the world could not have made that wrong shoot become a beautiful and flowering tree; neither will the efforts of a whole life succeed in making our “old man” (the Adam nature) like Christ, or fruitful towards God. God has condemned our old nature in the cross of Christ. He has judicially cut it down; and no fruit fit for God shall grow upon it forever.
The practical word, then, for those Christians who are seeking to produce out of self, fruit acceptable to God is, “Do not cultivate the wrong shoot!