The Olive Tree And The Dry Summer

There is an olive tree in that courtyard that was old when the house was young.

The man who owns it now did not plant it and neither did his father. It came with the walls. It has a trunk like a rope that has been twisted for a hundred years and then left, and it fruits every other year the way olives do, and in the summers when the well runs low and the ground goes to dust and everything else in the courtyard gives up, it simply carries on being green.

His nephew asked him about it once. How is it not dying, when the mint is dead and the beans are dead and even the fig looks embarrassed.

And he said, because you are looking at the wrong end of the tree.

Now here is the other thing about that man, and he would not thank me for saying it.

He teaches. Every week, in a room above a shop, twelve or fourteen people, and he is good. He is careful, he is warm, he does not waste anybody's time. But if you sat in that room for a year you would notice something, and he has noticed it himself, which is worse.

It is the same three passages.

He knows them completely. He learned them in a season fifteen years ago when he was hungry and had nothing else and went at Scripture like a man eating, and what he took in then has fed everybody in that room ever since.

And a few weeks ago, walking home, he thought: I am living off an old rain.

Nobody has complained. Nobody would. It is only that a man knows when the water he is handing round came from somewhere a long way back.

If that is you, come and sit under this tree. Nobody here is going to tell you to try harder.

The tree is not living on the last good year

Jeremiah gives us a picture and it is worth slowing down for, because it is often quoted as encouragement and it is actually a piece of botany.

He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.Jeremiah 17:8

Read what is doing the work there. It is not that the tree stored up rain in a better year. It is not that the tree is trying harder than the mint. It is that its roots are in the stream, so the drought is happening above ground and the supply is happening below it, and the two are simply not connected in the way that everybody standing in the heat assumes they are.

That is why the man was right about his nephew looking at the wrong end of the tree.

You are not running on a reserve, and you were never meant to. Jeremiah 17:8 puts the root in the stream in the present tense, and it is the Holy Spirit whom Jesus called a spring of water welling up, so the supply you are worried about running dry is not a tank you filled fifteen years ago. It is a current, and it is still running.

Growth here is being fed, not being measured

Now let me deal with the other thing, because a man who has just realized he is teaching from an old season usually does one of two things, and both of them are wrong.

He either decides he is a fraud, or he decides he needs a program.

Neither. There is nothing to be ashamed of in what you learned fifteen years ago. It was real, it fed people, and the fact that it has lasted this long says something good about how deeply you took it in at the time. Those years were not shallow and nobody is calling them wasted.

And there is no plan being handed to you here. This site does not do that. You have not hit a ceiling, and there is no age in this at which the feeding stops. Colossians 2:7 speaks of being rooted and built up in Him, and the participles are ongoing rather than finished, and it is the Spirit who does the building, so nothing about your years in this is a lid.

Here is the whole of what is being offered. Not more study. Slower study.

The difference between the man eating and the man serving is not the amount of food, it is the attention. Fifteen years ago you read like somebody who was hungry, which means you read slowly, and you stopped, and you said things out loud, and you went back over lines twice because they had hit something. Somewhere since then you started reading the way a man checks a page he already knows.

You are still growing, and you are being fed right now, as you read. Psalm 1:3 says the tree planted by streams yields its fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the same words you have handled a hundred times and makes them food again, which is the one thing no amount of effort on your part could arrange.

And under all of it, the ground this site stands on: God is the one keeping you while you keep what you were given. The root is not your achievement. It is where He planted you.