You just
awoke to a new day and stumbled from bed, stomach growling. Walking down a
dusty path, dew glistens in the early morning sunlight causing a large fig tree
to your right to appear as though it is manna straight from heaven. Your
stomach makes itself known again, a little more angrily, as your pace quickens
and the Hallelujah chorus resounds in your head. Upon closer inspection you
find its beauty only leaf deep as you stand hungry beneath its barren branches.
Fig trees
require three years from planting to bearing fruit and then the trees yield
their delicious wares twice a year, late spring and early fall. As the leaves
on the tree fill out the figs grow meaning a full, leafy fig tree should have
branches laden with sweet, juicy fruit.
Jesus
encountered a similar situation to the one above in Matthew 21 and He cursed
the tree causing it to instantly die. The day before encountering this barren
tree He cleared the temple in righteous anger at what it had become – a large,
beautiful building field with deception and void of the fruit of true worship.
The place spiritually hungry people would turn to in need was in the same state
as the fig tree on the dusty road.
Promise
without fulfillment.
Religion
without substance.
The sad state
of most the church here and abroad.
In Ukraine we
are surrounded by massive, ornate cathedrals worshipped by tourist’s camera
lenses and used more as museums than places for the glory of God. The Orthodox
Church boasts a Christian nation and religious icons adorn surfaces all over
the country, yet I look around and see hopeless, lonely, fearful, tired people
ruled by a religion void of relationship. It is a fruitless fig tree drawing
hungry children of God and leaving them unsatisfied and nutritionally deprived.
Later in the
passage Jesus said, “And whatever things you ask in prayer, believing, you will
receive” (Matthew 21:22). So I pray the religious spirit is driven out and Holy
Spirit is ushered in. I ask for Ukrainians to come to know Jesus as more than a
fair-skinned, rosy-cheeked, feminine-like icon in a window or keychain and that
once again the blind and lame can find Him and be healed. I pray for believers
to rise up and lead people to freedom, hope and life and I ask for a renewal
and revival led by the perfected praise of children in a land desperate for
peace and joy.
