Imagine these lovely roses being cut and chopped off.  Do you think this is an enjoyable experience?  If plants felt pain, I bet it would hurt.  Try pressing a pruning shears against your skin and see what it feels like.  Pruning is a lot like deadheading your flowers.  The more you trim off the dead and cut off the old blossoms, the more the plant will produce.

The dictionary defines pruning as a removal of unwanted matter.  The cutting back of parts of a plant to allow for better shape and more growth.  The trimming away of unproductive branches or flowers will always lead to better yields.  This applies to people just like it does to plants.  When we leave the waste on a plant it continues to draw strength from the root systems, which takes away from new growth.  Some plants cannot produce new buds or blossoms until the dead ones are removed.

Many Christians, in fact most if we are honest, carry around a lot of dead weight.  This often is in the form of bad memories, past hurts and failures, and broken relationships.  We carry them around so long that we forget they are still holding us back, or we get so accustomed to them that we fail to even recognize them as hindrances.  God wants us to be free of these things that so easily distract and deafeat us.  That can be very painful and often we would rather “let sleeping dogs lie”, than deal with the pain.

Remember that God loves us so much. He would never hurt us or cause us distress that wasn’t necessary for our spiritual growth.  When Jesus or the Holy Spirit come to us with the pruning shears, it is with love and compassion.  It is with tenderness and a desire to help us grow in a more productive way.

A bush doesn’t know when it needs pruned.  Flowers don’t realize the signifigance of deadheading.  But, the Master Gardener knows what is best for all things and He will do the best job of knowing when and where to cut the worthless stuff from our lives.  We must trust Him to do the work in us and to provide whatever we need to walk through the pruning process.