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Greetings. In Luke 13:6-9 Jesus tells a parable about time when he talks about a story of a tree not having any growth or fruit on it. This story is an example of time as the owner of the tree grows impatient with no fruit and asks his hired hand to cut down the tree. But the hired hand asks for one more year to do something different this time: dig around it and fertilize it.

Jesus story and parable about this tree illustrates that there are ingredients to producing growth. The owner was looking for evidence that this tree in the past three years had not produced fruit and when he saw no fruit, he was ready to give up and cut down the tree. In the same way, we also can cut ourselves down and quickly judge ourselves that we are not growing or getting better and we too can judge our lack of growth as a signal that we need to cut ourselves down.

But for time to be our friend, we need to think of ways in which time can work to help us grow. The statement is false that time heals all wounds. If we have hurts, habits and pain in our life, thinking that eventually time will heal all this is a false strategy. Time will not be your friend if you passively just sit back and do nothing expecting that in time, you will grow and get better. Being passive will be your enemy to growth and time will not be your friend.

Therefore, to make time your friend means to add some things to time in order to make time your friend. To stop criticizing yourself and cutting yourself down means that you need to start thinking of ways to add something to your life. Far too often, we look at getting rid of something as the solution rather than adding something. As a Christian, we all want sin, habits, hurts and addictions to just stop and we become impatient with our lives and our sins.

So let’s say you feel overweight and you want to lose 50 lbs. So a goal of wanting to lose 50 pounds is good but how much time have you given yourself? Time will prove to be your enemy if you think it must be done in 30-60 days. You will put so much pressure on yourself that you will fail to lose these pounds and thus over time become harsh on yourself by concluding you will never lose weight. You will think of yourself as a failure and see no growth and view time as your enemy because you negatively conclude you are not getting better.

But the best way to view time as your friend is to figure out what do you need to add to your life. To get rid of something you have to add something. To lose 50 pounds you are going to have to add some accountability partners to help you use time as your friend to lose the weight. Adding supportive and accountable friends to your time schedule helping you to stay on course to lose the weight is something that is good to add to help you. Far too often, when we want to change, we do it alone by ourselves in isolation thinking over time we can fix ourselves.

But time will only work when we add something to our lives just like the parable in Luke demonstrated that adding fertilizer to the tree will bring growth. When you don’t add, time will not be your friend and you will become critical of yourself. The challenge for many Christians that I meet is that they want to fix themselves and become uncomfortable when learning to trust someone else. But time can work when you add good things to your life to help you grow. Thanks for reading and if you need help, give me a call or view my website.