THE DIVINE ORCHARDIST

I want to grow, but I’d rather not have to deal with all the ups and downs that come with it. I want to grow, but I’d prefer it didn’t hurt. I want to grow, but I’d rather not have to answer to anyone else. In other words, I want to be like Christ, but I want to do it my way. Do you think that will work? If I told this to Dr. Phil, I can imagine him asking, “How’s that working for you?” The answer: not so great.

If we’re honest, most of us would choose a spiritual growth plan that looks a lot like a pampered houseplant sitting in a sunny window. We’d want filtered water at just the right time, maybe a little Miracle-Gro snack, and we’d only grow a new leaf when we felt like it.

We want our transformation into the image of Christ to be comfortable, easy, and completely under our control. We’d like to avoid anything too hot or too cold, anything sharp, or anything that might mess up our plans. Sometimes, we act like God’s main job is to keep our lives set at a perfect seventy-two degrees, just like a good thermostat.

But God isn’t an interior decorator running a fancy plant shop. He’s the Sovereign Orchardist, the kind of farmer who isn’t afraid to get dirt under His fingernails. He’s not interested in growing a decorative fern that wilts if you leave the door open. He’s after strong, deep-rooted, fruit-bearing trees that can stand up to a storm. As Dallas Willard and C. S. Lewis remind us, God’s goal for us isn’t comfort, but Christlike character.¹ That means the process is slow, sometimes messy, and always aimed at making us more like Jesus.

When Paul gives us that big promise in Romans 8:28—that “all things work together for good to those who love God”—he wasn’t just giving us a nice saying for a coffee mug. He was describing God’s hands-on plan for our lives. In God’s economy, the “good” isn’t a bigger bank account, an easy life, or a perfect reputation. The “good” is character. It’s God changing our hearts, so we love like Jesus. But how does God do this? Not in a climate-controlled greenhouse. He uses three things: Change (the seasons), Adversity (pruning), and Community (the orchard). If you’ve been feeling a little beat up, exposed, or crowded lately, you’re right where God does His best work. So let’s put on our work boots, step out of the greenhouse, and see what God is up to in your soul.

Part I: The Spiritual Weather Report—How God Uses the Seasons

We live in a culture obsessed with perpetual summer. We want ongoing productivity, high emotional energy, endless sunshine, and visible success every single day. If we aren't constantly blooming or throwing off fresh fruit, we assume we must be broken or that God has somehow mismanaged the thermostat. But the Bible, written by people who actually lived with the soil, has a radically different take on the calendar of the soul. Ecclesiastes 3:1 famously declares, “To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.” Galatians 6:9 warns us not to lose heart, for “in due season we shall reap.” In the providence of God, seasons aren't random accidents; they are deliberate designs meant to shape what we call the Christian Character Tree.

The Cryptic Blessings of a Brutal Winter

If you want an apple, peach, or cherry tree to give you sweet, heavy fruit in the fall, you have to let it go through a tough winter. To most of us, a fruit tree in winter looks like a lost cause. The leaves are gone, the branches look like bare bones, and nothing seems to be happening. If you’re like me and not much of a farmer, you might think the tree is dead and ready for the woodpile. But those who know trees talk about something called “chill hours.”²

Fruit trees actually require a specific number of cumulative hours between 32°F and 45°F during their winter dormancy. This freezing environment is not a punishment inflicted upon the tree; it's a biological necessity. Without this prolonged, bitter exposure to the biting cold, the tree’s internal growth inhibitors won't break down properly. If the winter is too mild, the buds will fail to break properly when spring arrives, and the subsequent fruit crop will be meager or non-existent. The tree literally needs the cold to clear the path for future fruitfulness.

So, what about those howling winter storms? The driving winds that threaten to snap the trunk in half? Botanists have a twenty-dollar word for it—thigmomorphogenesis—but basically, trees get tough by getting beat up by the wind.³ When the wind beats on a tree, it actually makes the trunk thicker, and the roots dig deeper. The wind makes the tree unshakeable. Who would have guessed?

The Orchestra of Spring, Summer, and Fall

After winter does its quiet work, the other seasons take over. Spring is when the tree wakes up, buds break open, and blossoms show up everywhere. It looks beautiful, but it’s risky—a late frost can wipe out the whole show. Spring also means the tree has to rely on bees and bugs to do their job, so it can’t go it alone.⁴

Summer is when the real work happens. It’s hot, it’s tiring, and the tree has to pull water from deep in the ground to help the fruit grow. There are no shortcuts in summer.⁵ Then comes fall, the big harvest. The tree’s strength is tested by the burden of all that fruit. As soon as the harvest is over, the tree starts getting ready for winter again.⁶ That’s a pretty amazing cycle, isn’t it?

Translating the Weather to the Soul

So, what does all this mean for us? In God’s plan, we don’t merely stumble into hard times by accident. God uses the seasons of life to shape us into the image of Christ. Take Spiritual Winter, for example. This is the dark night of the soul, the dry desert season. Dallas Willard wrote that real spiritual growth happens where no one else can see—in the deep places of our hearts.⁷ Your spiritual winter might be that time when you feel numb, your ministry seems dead, and God feels silent. You wonder, “Where is God? Has He left me?” I’ve been there and will probably be there again.

But don’t lose hope: God is counting up your “chill hours.” He’s using the cold silence to break your habit of depending on emotional highs or the praise of others. He’s teaching you to live by faith, not by feelings. The storms of financial trouble, grief, or criticism are making you stronger, not weaker. Your roots are going deeper, so you can handle what’s ahead. Remember, God is always in control of the temperature. The cold is never a mistake, even when it feels miserable.

When Spiritual Spring comes, it brings new life and fresh insight. Suddenly, the Bible seems alive, prayer becomes a joy, and new habits begin to take root. But spring is also a time to be careful. We have to watch out for the ‘late frosts’ of pride, complacency, and patting ourselves on the back. If we get proud in the spring, we’ll lose our blossoms before they ever become fruit.

Spiritual Summer is the hard, ordinary middle of life. It’s the long, hot stretch of daily faithfulness when no one is watching, no one is cheering, and nothing seems exciting. It’s raising kids, going to work, paying bills, folding laundry, and yes, serving in the church nursery. This is where the “Fruit of the Spirit” goes from being just a pretty idea to something real and lasting. Then comes Spiritual Fall, the season of mature wisdom. This is when your character is strong and sweet enough to help others—when your years of struggle become a deep well of comfort for those who are hurting.

Part II: Snip, Snip, Ouch—The Radical Reality of Pruning

If the changing seasons don’t make you uncomfortable, the Vinedresser’s shears will. Jesus didn’t sugarcoat it in John 15:1-2: “Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit.” Think about that. If you’re not bearing fruit, God cuts you off. If you are bearing fruit, He still cuts you—so you can bear even more. In God’s orchard, there’s no coasting. The more you grow, the more God works on you.

The Horticultural Horror of Pruning

To someone watching, pruning a fruit tree can look like you’re just tearing it apart. The orchardist stands there with big clippers, cutting off what looks like healthy growth. Why do this? Because fruit trees naturally want to show off with lots of leaves and branches, but not much fruit.⁸ Left alone, a tree will use all its energy to grow a thick, leafy canopy. It looks great from a distance, but there’s a problem with all that unpruned growth. Let’s look at a few reasons why.

First, there is Light Blockage. The thick outer leaves absorb all the sunlight, turning the inside of the tree into a dark, barren wasteland.⁹ Second, there is Air Stagnation. A bushy tree traps ambient humidity, turning the interior into a luxury resort for fungal diseases and insect infestations.¹⁰ Third, and most deceptively, there are Water Sprouts. The tree will spontaneously shoot out vertical, incredibly fast-growing branches. They look amazingly vigorous to the untrained eye, but they are completely sterile parasites. They suck up massive amounts of the tree’s resources, producing zero fruit while starving the legitimate fruit-bearing wood.¹¹

I’ve wondered before—does pruning hurt the tree? While trees don’t feel pain like we do, pruning is still a big shock to their system. It leaves open wounds. That’s why the best time to prune is late winter, when the tree is dormant.¹² If you prune in the middle of summer, you can actually drain the tree of what it needs to live. The orchardist cuts away the dead, diseased, and damaged branches and gets rid of those fast-growing water sprouts. When it’s done, the tree looks pretty sad—bare and chopped up. But come spring, the roots send a flood of energy to what’s left, and the tree grows stronger and produces sweeter fruit.

Bringing the Shears into the Christian Character Ecosystem

So how does this pruning apply to us? Unlike a fruit tree, we have egos, and we don’t like being cut back. We tend to fight, complain, and try to bargain when God starts pruning. We often mistake God’s loving discipline for punishment.

C. S. Lewis captured this brilliantly in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I used it in previous blogs, but it fits so well here, I use it again. Eustace Scrubb, an incredibly greedy boy, is turned into a literal dragon due to the rotten state of his inner character. To be restored, he tries to scratch off his own dragon scales, but every time he peels off a thick layer of skin, there is another hard, ugly layer beneath it. He can’t cure himself. Finally, Aslan the Lion looks him in the eye and says, "You will have to let me undress you." Eustace describes the experience: "The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt."¹³

That’s what spiritual pruning is. It’s when God removes the things in our lives that puff up our egos or keep us from real growth. What does God prune? He cuts away the dead wood—empty routines, stubborn sins, and wrong ways of thinking. But sometimes, God even prunes good things: a successful ministry, a comfortable friendship, a big career goal, or a favorite hobby. Why? Because even good things can become like ‘water sprouts’—growing fast, making us look good, but draining our energy and leaving us too tired to grow real fruit like love and peace.

Does it hurt? Absolutely. It can feel like loss, rejection, or failure. I’ve been there myself. You look around and see others who seem to have it all together, while you feel exposed and empty. But God only prunes to give us more life and make us more beautiful in the end. The pain isn’t punishment—it’s God’s loving discipline.

Part III: The Sacred Grove—Why Believers Must Grow in Orchards

Now let’s step back from the single tree and look at the bigger picture. In our Western churches—and yes, even among Southern Baptists—there’s a popular but dangerous myth: the idea of the “Lone Ranger Christian.” We like to picture ourselves as strong, solitary oaks standing alone on a hill, needing no one else. We want a personal relationship with Jesus, but we’d rather skip the part about being connected or accountable to other believers.

But the Bible doesn’t support this Lone Ranger idea. God doesn’t save us to be scattered, isolated trees. He plants us together in a big, well-planned orchard. Psalm 92:13 says, “Those who are planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God.” God isn’t interested in growing us alone. He wants us side by side with other believers—even the messy ones.

The Biological Brilliance of the Orchard

If you ask someone who studies fruit trees, they’ll tell you that planting a single tree out in a field is a recipe for failure. Fruit trees are meant to grow together. There are some big advantages to being in an orchard instead of standing alone:

First, Cross-Pollination. Various popular varieties of fruit trees—especially apples and sweet cherries—are completely self-unfruitful. A single, isolated Red Delicious apple tree can produce millions of gorgeous blossoms, but if it stands alone, it will never produce a single piece of fruit. It requires a completely different variety of apple tree planted nearby to act as a cross-pollinator. The genetic diversity of the orchard row is the literal source of life for the individual tree's fruit production.¹⁴

Second, The Windbreak Effect. When a severe summer thunderstorm rips through a valley, an isolated tree takes the full, unhindered force of the wind across its entire canopy. It has no protection. In an orchard, however, the trees form a collective canopy buffer. The outer rows take the initial brunt of the storm, acting as a living windbreak that greatly reduces wind speed. Furthermore, under the surface of the dirt, their root systems interlock and graft into one another, turning the entire orchard floor into an underground slab of mutual stability.¹⁵

Third, Underground Communication. Scientists have discovered that trees in a healthy orchard are connected underground by a network of fungi—what they call the ‘Wood Wide Web.’¹⁶ Through these underground connections, trees share water and nutrients. If one tree is struggling, the others help it out. It’s all pretty amazing.

The Christian Character Tree Ecosystem: Life in Community

So, what does this mean for church life? Simply put, you can’t grow into the image of Christ by yourself. You can read every theology book and listen to sermons online, but you won’t learn real patience unless you’re around people who test it. You can’t develop Christlike endurance if no one ever lets you down. The church is God’s way of smoothing out our rough edges.

To see how this works in practice, let's examine the three-tiered community model used by church movements like the Soma Family of Churches.¹⁷ I reference this because it has a more organic feel than many of our other structures in our churches. I have also found this to be the most beneficial in new church plants. This divides local church life into three different structural sizes: DNA Groups (Micro), Missional Communities (Medium), and Congregations (Macro). Let's look at how the orchard applies directly to these three relational spaces.

1. DNA Groups (The Micro-Orchard of Three)

A DNA Group (typically consisting of three men or three women who meet bi-monthly for intensive spiritual processing) is the direct equivalent of close-range hand-pruning and structural root-grafting. In a group of three people who know you deeply, there is absolutely nowhere to hide. You cannot hide your water sprouts or your diseased habits behind a wall of noise from a big church gathering. It is a relational space designed for radical, gut-wrenching honesty and the direct, surgical application of the gospel.

This micro-scale is uniquely designed to expose and dismantle your hidden personal sins and blind spots that you hide from everyone else. This is where you confess that your marriage is on the brink of structural failure, or that your professional ambition is actually driven by a toxic vanity. In a DNA group, your brothers or sisters can see the crossing branches of your personality quirks and help you apply the bypass pruners before they cause long-term rot.

2. Missional Communities (The Mid-Sized Row of 12 to 25)

A Missional Community is like a row of fruit trees planted close together. It’s a spiritual family that eats together, shares what they have, and lives out their faith side by side. If the DNA group is like surgery, the Missional Community is the busy living room where you practice your faith in real life.

This mid-sized group is where the fruit of the Spirit really grows. Why? Because with twenty different people, you’re bound to be around folks you wouldn’t pick as friends. There’s the loud one, the awkward one, and the one who always forgets to bring a dish to the potluck. In other words, it’s God’s way of teaching us to love people—even when they drive us a little crazy.

This mid-sized group is where the crucial dynamic of cross-pollination happens. You see another family facing a major crisis with unshakeable gospel grace, and their quiet patience pollinates your own anxious home life. When a member faces a devastating health diagnosis, the Missional Community transforms into a living windbreak. They organize the meals, mow the lawn, and stand shoulder to shoulder to absorb the kinetic energy of the crisis so that the individual tree isn't snapped in half by the storm.

3. Congregations (The Macro-Orchard of 70 and Up)

Finally, there is the Congregation—the large corporate gathering of around seventy people and up. In our contemporary culture, it is incredibly easy to cynically view the large Sunday morning congregation as perfunctory or something of an outdated tradition. But in the grand design of the Divine Orchardist, the larger congregation serves as the ultimate macro-canopy windbreak.

When the truly catastrophic, category-5 existential storms of human life slam into us—such as the sudden, heartbreaking death of a child, or a terminal medical diagnosis—a tiny DNA group or a mid-sized Missional Community can easily find themselves completely crushed by the sheer, overpowering weight of the tragedy. They can rapidly run out of emotional bandwidth and material resources. But a large, established congregation provides a massive, intergenerational root matrix and an immovable structural canopy that has stood the test of time.

When you are walking through the deepest valley of your life, and your soul is too weak, weary, and broken to pray or sing, the collective roar of a hundred voices surrounding you carries your faith like a spiritual slipstream. The larger congregation provides a beautiful perspective of the entire human lifecycle. More than a few times, people have said to me, “I don’t know how people make it through life without a church family.” The young, stressed-out married couple looks across the aisle and sees an elderly believer who has walked with Jesus through fifty years of widowhood, still raising her hands in praise. The congregation reminds us that our little tree is not a freak anomaly standing alone in a desert; we are part of an ancient, sprawling, and completely unshakeable grove. This is what we all need. We need this not just to build Christian character but also to maintain it.

Conclusion: Welcome to the Dirt

When we look at Romans 8:28 through this orchard lens, it changes how we see our lives. We stop thinking that unexpected changes mean God messed up. We stop seeing pain as random punishment. We stop treating church as just another thing on our to-do list. Instead, we realize that everything is part of God’s good plan.

The biting cold of your spiritual winter? God is using it to break your pride and prepare you for growth. The painful cut of God’s pruning? He’s removing what drains you so you can bear real fruit. The challenges of your Missional Community? That’s God teaching you to love like Jesus. The big congregation? That’s your windbreak when life gets hard. God is growing you into a strong, fruitful tree, anchored in His grace. So when you feel the cold of winter, the sting of pruning, or the squeeze of community, don’t panic. Trust the Master Orchardist, dig your roots more deeply into Jesus, and let Him do His good work.

Endnotes

1. Here are two of the works by these two men, which highlight the goal of Christian character: Willard, Dallas. The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1998. This book by Willard has been the most impactful in my life, aside from the Holy Bible. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. HarperOne, 2001.

2. Westwood, M.N. Temperate-Zone Pomology: Physiology and Culture. Portland, OR: Timber Press, 1993. p. 386.

3. Jaffe, M. J. "Thigmomorphogenesis: The response of plant growth and development to mechanical stimulation." Planta 114, no. 2 (1973), pp. 143-157.

4. Childers, Norman F., Justin R. Morris, and G. Steven Sibbett. Modern Fruit Science: Orchard and Small Fruit Culture. Gainesville, FL: Horticultural Publications, 1995. pp. 275-279.

5. Childers, Morris, and Sibbet. pp. 145-170.

6. Childers, Morris, and Sibbet. pp. 136-144.

7. Willard, Dallas, Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2002), 22.

8. Turnbull, Cass. Cass Turnbull’s Guide to Pruning: What, When, Where & How to Prune for a More Beautiful Garden (Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2004), pp. 161–176.

9. Turnbull, pp. 20-39.

10. Turnbull, pp. 182-189.

11. Turnbull, pp. 23-28, see also 182-189.

12. Turnbull, pp. 182-189.

13. Lewis, C. S. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952; later HarperCollins editions), ch. 7, “How the Adventure Ended.”

14. Free, John B. Insect Pollination of Crops. London: Academic Press, 1993. pp. 431-466.

15. Bailey, Liberty Hyde. The Principles of Fruit-Growing (New York: Macmillan, 1897), 79–94, especially 79–85.

16. Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Knopf, 2021, pp. 165.

17. Vanderstelt, Jeff. Saturate: Being Disciples of Jesus in the Everyday Stuff of Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015), 83–122, especially 93–122. This is one of the best books I’ve read on this three-layered approach. I used this with several of our new churches that were started when I was the director of church planting for Oklahoma Baptists from 2017 to 2020.