I remember when first I had a garden, and knew nothing of rose culture, how delighted I was when I noticed a most vigorous growth on a beautiful rose tree. I looked for many fragrant blossoms on that branch that seemed to lengthen by inches every day, but no roses appeared, and the other shoots which were bearing roses began to languish and cease to flower. Then I realized that this most promising growth was the product of the briar root, and because it had not been cut away, the tree had lamentably suffered. For that season, it did not put forth any of its former beauty. Self in us abides the same and will to the end, and if the life of Jesus is to be made manifest in our mortal bodies, there must be the mortification of our members which are upon the earth. We must be those who have no confidence in the flesh. Self-judgment must be our rule. Many a promising shoot will have to be cut away, and we be made little, if Christ is to be seen in us. Many of those bitter experiences in life, when things that we cherished and in which we could boast, which made something of us, but were taken from us, were simply the Master’s wise cutting down of self that Christ might be magnified in us. If we have been planted for the Master’s pleasure in His garden, we must be subject to His culture, or else we cumber the ground. How often under that culture has our pride been checked and our vanity wounded, and this pruning must continue to the end; the experience is not joyous while it lasts, for the sharp pruning knife seems to cut into the very core of our being, but it is all meant to yield afterwards those peaceable fruits of righteousness, the fragrant roses that delight the Master’s eye. Ah! let us yield ourselves to the Master’s hand who ever uses the knife for our good.
J. T. Mawson