Tonight I want you to pick up your bible and come on a journey with me. Since I didn’t have internet on Good Friday, join me tonight as you curl up in bed, ready to wind down from the day and hear something beautiful of such a sacred day. This blog is combining a few things and you need to know the sources of them. Some of the information came from Lisa Teurkherst and Beth Moore studies I’ve done over the years. Some of the info came from entries of my personal journal last year. And all of it came from Holy Spirit who is redefining who the Trinity is in my life at the moment. (If you want to read more of these resources themselves, send me a message!) As I look over a beautiful lake in the midst of picturesque mountains nestled in some unknown city deep in Swaziland, I can’t help but pray his Spirit over these words and over your time reading them and hope in wonder and awe that his presence permeates the walls of your room, your work place, or the coffee shop you may be reading this in.
To start, we’re going to pick up right in the middle of a place in the resurrection reality of our Lord Jesus. It’s a part that is often overlooked because of the scale of the events that are described before and right after it in scripture, but I’ve learned recently the importance of Jesus’ time and example in these short passages.
John 18:1-2 “When he had finished praying Jesus left with his disciples and crossed the Kidron Valley. On the other side there was an olive grove and he and his disciples went into it. Now judas, who betrayed him knew the place because Jesus had often met there with his disciples.” Or as Luke says, “Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples followed him” (22:39). The fact that this was a place that people knew Jesus spent time at, is good enough reason for me to spend time studying it.
This olive grove is the Garden of Gethsemane. Tonight, I want to take a look at the significance of the olive tree and what we can learn from it as highlighted by Jesus’ time spent beneath it.
It’s interesting in scripture that the olive tree is used as a source of providence and wealth often times. It’s described in scriptures where it is paired with things like fig trees, pomegranates, honey, barley, grapevines, new wines, bread, cisterns, “houses filled with good things”, fruit trees, becoming fat and enjoying life, strength, beauty, dignity, royalty, mercy, and possessing more qualities of being relentless and resilient. It is used in prophesy, in visions, in royal gardens, in allegories, descriptions, and in even more imagery when The Lord is speaking to his people. However, in the few hours before Jesus is betrayed and arrested, we can glean a completely different picture of the olive tree.
As Jesus kneels before his Father one last time in the familiar garden beneath the olive tree he states in Mark 14:34 “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” The olive tree suddenly takes on a new face. It paints a picture of why our hearts must go through crushing times.
Instead of being a source of wealth, providence, safety, good crop and wealth material, beauty, strength and power it becomes a source of pain, crushing, and weighty sorrow. Let me explain a little more.
-In order for the olive tree to be fruitful, the tree needs the harsh eastern wind (hosea 13:15) and the life nurturing western wind that comes from the mediterranean. It needs both to bring forth fruit.
-Second, the fruit of an olive tree (olives) are naturally bitter. For the olive itself to even be edible, it must go through a lengthy process of washing, breaking, soaking, sometimes salting and seasoning, and even more waiting. This lengthy process the olive must go through for it to be useful or enjoyable is for the sole purpose of ridding it of bitterness.
-third, when harvesting olives, they are not only bitter but they are strong and hard when picked straight from the tree. You need a *Soaking* rain so that the olives can be better picked, harvested, and then begin the preservation process.
–>When I was learning all about this last year (the end of 2014) I wrote in my journal, “Rachel, you didn’t realize it until recently but you are bitter. You don’t receive love because you don’t believe it’s real. The fairytale pursuit kind of love you have watched your closest friends encounter and eventually have the gift of marrying into are simply a fantasy over your own life. You believed that The Lord is not good to you. Ignores you. Overlooks you and doesn’t delight in you, so you have chosen not to delight in Him.” Therefore, I adopted a deep bitterness towards anything lovely and it stretched into corners of my heart and roads of my life that I could have never imagined it would ever touch.
I wrote that after a particularly difficult season over the last 7 ish months of being broken piece by piece over things I held dear to me. Identities, relationships, friendships, finances, family bonds, desires, hopes, and clarity. At the end of training camp, The Lord removed another large chunk of identity I had unconsciously clung to for most of my life. It left me very raw, very hurt, and very vulnerable to lies and thus encouraged my previous belief that I was unseen, unloved, undesired, not worth pursuing, second best, and simply not worth people’s time and affection. I had learned to love people well but God said he wanted me to now learn how to receive love, starting with him. So he invited me on a honeymoon to 11 different countries for the next 11 months.
After that journal entry I wrote, “Like the olive, God you are washing me. You are breaking me. You are soaking me in your love and seasoning me with your words not allowing anyone else’s love to touch me or season me in the way I feel I need and want to be loved. Thank you for not letting me take control over the mess I feel like I’m in. I tried to get drunk last night for the first time and you preserved me. It was as if I was drinking water the whole night. Not as single thing changed or happened. I felt nothing at all. Just another example of your preserving grave over my life. Thank you. I want to use this to press into you.“
Lisa Teurkherst said, “If we are to escape the natural bitterness of the human heart, we have to go through a long process of being cured. The crushing times are preservation times.”
My long process of preservation and softening is not over. I still feel the sting of all of this still and I still battle it all out with The Lord truly on a daily basis.
Something funny about olives: the best way to preserve them is to crush them completely so that you can extract arguably, the most valuable part: the concentrated oil.
The same is true for us. The seasons of crushing and stretching and sorrow often bring about the sweetest tears, the most beautiful testimonies, and the can give the most glory to God.
2 Corinthians 4:8-9 addresses this however in a statement of encouragement. “We are had pressed on every side but not crushed; perplexed but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down but not destroyed.”
Something I want to encourage you with is this. Even when the olive is crushed, it is still not the olive’s end. Crushing is the way of preservation. It is also the way to get what is most valuable out of it. So know this: When the sorrowful winds of the east blow, don’t forget that they are necessary. When you are being processed, don’t forget that it’s for the sake of ridding you of bitterness. When you are being crushed, don’t forget that it’s for the sake of your valuable preservation.
James 1:2-4 says “Consider it pure joy, my sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”
The seasons I have been walking through are allowing for processing and preservation and if you are in a similar season know this: You are being softened by the Lord’s love. You are being rid of bitterness. You are being processed and preserved for the use and greatness The Lord has for me and my life. You are being preserved for Him for a revealing of your passion and your ministry, for your future, for your future husband or wife, for your dreams, and ultimately for the story full good purposes he has written with Mercy’s pen over your life.
You may be pressed. You may be being bent into a deep submission. But you are not crushed. You are not crippled. And you most certainly are not abandoned.
Jesus’ time beneath the olive tree in scripture was spent in moments of sweet fellowship and growth. Great seeds of faith and love were planted under these trees as Jesus lived and spent time beneath the shade of the Olive Tree. But great sorrow, great pain, and great hurt also came from his time beneath the tree as well. How beautiful that the simply imagery of an olive tree can encompass such a wide array of emotions and experiences of our savior’s life and also provide encouragement and validation of what we too experience. I think it was no accident that Jesus concluded his time of ministry and fellowship with his disciples underneath this beautiful tree. Paul says in 2 Corinthians chapter 1, “For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings….”
I want to wrap up with a passage from Hosea. Hosea, as many of you are familiar, was a prophet told by God to marry and continue pursuing a prostitute. This relationship was a perfect mirror God gave the Israelites to look in to better understand the adultery they had committed in their relationship with God, and his sweet and tender pursuit of them despite their repeated offenses. Hosea’s book ends with a passage of repentance that led to blessing in the relationship. Hosea speaks and says “Return, O Israel, to The Lord your God. Your sins have been your downfall! Take words with you and return to The Lord. Say to him, Forgive all our sins and receive us graciously, that we may offer the fruit of our lips…for in you the fatherless find compassion.” Then God responds with “I will heal their waywardness and love them freely. For my anger has turned away from them. I will be like the dew to Israel he will blossom like a lily. Like a cedar of Lebanon he will send down his roots; his young shoots will grow. His splendor will be like an olive tree…Men will dwell again in his shade. He will flourish like the grain. He will blossom like a vine and his fame will be like the wine from Lebanon.” The Lord’s response was the same over Jesus just as much as it is the same over us if only we would trust him in the crushing times and let him soften, cure, and preserve us by His grace.
Our remembrance and celebration this past weekend will understandably bring each of us to a particular place of reverence, especially in the time on Easter morning. It should also bring us to a place of acknowledging hurts, habits, sins, and deep wounds that were redeemed on the cross. For such things were the entire purpose that Jesus chose to ardently and passionately cling with bloodied hands, pierced by thick nails, to the cross that was soaked in his own blood, as it is the only thing that would bring him once again into the arms of his beloved. Us. But I want to encourage you with knowing that there is great purpose behind the times when God breaks you from such things. He loves us too passionately to leave us in such despair and ugliness. He has promised us through Jesus redemption for sin, but sometimes the process of ridding us of such things often emulates the process and preservation of the fruit from the olive tree.
If you were sitting in front of me I would ask you to close your eyes as I spoke this over you, but I guess reading it yourself is kind of our only option for blogs 🙂
Imagine Jesus, son of God, your best friend, your deepest relationship is bloodied and looking down on you from his place of execution. John 19:28 speaks of the moments right before Jesus’ last breath and says that Jesus states, “I am thirsty.” What? The man who claimed to be the very Living Water himself to a Samaritan woman and the well and to countless crowds is now saying, “I thirst.” He looks over to the guards who are standing next to large jars of common mans wine at the crucifixion site. Jars that began his ministry in the book of John that then represented purification, ritual cleansing, and celebration at a wedding, are now at the site of his last breath and give us an image of the the dregs (common man’s wine) that he will consume and officially pass away the old covenant so that once again, we may be with him in celebration and purity. As he looks over to the soldiers, they dip the sponge in the bottom of the jar and put the it on the end of a hissop branch to offer it to the Son of God. David speaks of hissop in Psalm 51:7 and says, “cleanse me with hyssop and I will be clean…” except…hyssop has no cleansing properties.
Why is this branch in David’s plea for cleansing as well as at the crucifixion site? It’s because of what Moses says in Exodous 12:21-22 about how to be saved from the Angel of Death when The Lord sweeps through the land of Egypt for passover. The Israelites were to use a bunch of hyssop (a brush type branch with flowers on the end) and dip it into the barrel that held the precious blood of the passover lamb, and then paint it on the top and sides of door frame of the home of those who would be safe. The blood would then drip down to the ground. Now, imagine a cross in the middle of that door. Every place there is blood on the frame or the ground is a place the cross touches and it is a beautiful representation of the salvation that came from all those who stood behind the blood on the door frame, who lived in the house and would be safe, as well as those who stand behind the cross of Jesus Christ who are covered by the precious blood and who are safe from death and separation from The Lord God.
This is the branch that was used to offer the contents of the bottom of the wine jars to Jesus as his death marked the official stamp of cleansing and the seal that would save millions of those who trusted and invited him to be their personal Savior. It is this night, that Jesus took the wine, wet his lips and declared, “IT IS FINISHED.” Something funny about that word though. The original Greek word and its tense should actually say in English “It WAS accomplished. It IS accomplished. And it will ALWAYS be accomplished.” It was this night that Jesus accomplished and won the war for our hearts and paved the precious bridge that could lead us back to our Father, if only we would take the hand of his most beloved Son allow him to lead us across that bridge and back into the arms of our most perfect Father. It was this night that your face and your name flashed before his tear filled eyes, and as he breathed in and felt the weight of the pain of his body shutting down, he said, “She is worth this. He is worth this. I regret nothing.” Then, he bowed his head and gave his spirit into the hands of His Father. Not the other way around as when a human dies. He didn’t give his spirit and then let his head fall. It’s because he CHOSE this. He CHOSE to willingly cling and endure to such a fate so that we may know his perfect love that TRULY lacks nothing, not even sacrifice.
Friends, I pray that as the Easter season has passed, it will no longer be a passing season in your hearts. I pray the bold prayer that this Easter season has changed absolutely everything for you and that it is a daily reverence and celebration that marks a legacy over your life as a follower of the most precious and beloved Savior.
My time so far in Swaziland has been life changing. I cannot wait to share more with you all when we get internet!
Because of Him,
Rachel
