what you planted

It was puzzle, I was sure I had planted cute little flowers in that plot. Spread seeds all over the place I thought from those little foil packets. Should have yielded flights of floral fancy, not an overcrowded cluster of carrot seedlings and radishes! The fertile soil yielded a great crop; it just wasn’t I had hoped for. What the heck?! How did that happen?
Apart from me not having labelled the little packets, a lesson in itself, it was a matter of what you sow, is what you reap - now who said that I wonder?
In the Letter we’re studying, the apostle John’s first, he talks about how God has planted extravagant love in us and so expects that to yield a harvest of loving action in our lives. If He has planted love in us He expects and looks for us to plant love into the lives of others by virtue of our actions that demonstrate our love for God. In this way we cultivate and even harvest love for our brothers and sisters and for those among the Lord has sent us in order to witness to His unquenchable love.
What’s going on if we find ourselves being hateful? It means we have allowed something other than God to be planted and growing in our hearts and minds. However it gets there, it is the work of the anti-Christ about whom John writes more later in the Letter.
The only useful response to that potentially disastrous situation is to bring that failure to God, understanding He already sees it, and allow Him to forgive and cleanse the invasive, life-choking weeds that have come to dominate as only He can. It’s a total weed-out - no trace, no evidence left that we have erred. Thus we’re free again to receive His planting of sacrificial love and begin again producing the harvest of loving action expected.