Dead Grass and Flowerless Plants

Early every winter I notice the trees are like sticks, the grass a light brown, and the plants have no blooms. It’s not attractive, but that’s the nature of changing seasons. Every year vibrant summer colors fade into grays and browns. The grass grows dormant, trees shed their leaves and plants die or go into hibernation.

Every week in our church’s morning worship service, we recite Isaiah 40:8 after we read the Scripture. It’s a somber passage.

Two verses before this, the grass is identified as people, and the fading flowers are our faithfulness. That makes me one blade of grass in an uncountable number of worldwide grass blades. What Isaiah is implying is with the millions and millions of people over the thousands of years of human existence, my life is fleeting.  Even my faithfulness to God and his Word has faded. But “the word of God”; his countenance, knowledge and wisdom rules over all of his creation and is not governed by time.

How small does that make you feel? Can my importance be changed or am I just a grassling in the biological lifestyle of life? I’m born. I live. I eat. I get old. I die. Pretty stark! What has to change to give me significance?

 As Christ followers, we know and believe that Jesus changed everything. What would have been a withering, gray, temporal, existence has changed.  We became holy in front of the holy God through a holy Christ that gives us hope and eternal significance.

Peter explains Isaiah 40:8 in 1 Peter 1:23-24. In earlier verses he describes how great our salvation is and commands his church to live lives of holiness, loving one another. Then comes our passage.

“…you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.”
 
“All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever.”
 
Here is that passage again, but with vibrant hope.  The “word of the Lord” has given us a hope that is not bound by time, position, accomplishment or circumstance. The word is Christ and that makes all the difference. We become significant.  We do not fade away. We are not dead grass. We have an exciting expectation of a vibrant presence with the living, holy God.