A Well-watered Garden

A Well-Watered Garden

The LORD will guide you continually, giving you water when you are dry and restoring your strength. You will be like a well-watered garden, like an ever-flowing spring. Isaiah 58:11

After Corrie ten Boom’s family was arrested for giving refuge to Jewish people, and before the Nazis sent her to a concentration camp, Corrie was alone in a jail cell for four months. She later described those months as a hard time of “plowing.” She thought there would be nothing left of her after the cruelties of being incarcerated. Though she was desperate, she suddenly began to see God’s side of things: that she was like a field being plowed and weeded. In the darkness of solitary confinement, Corrie remembered pastor Charles Spurgeon’s words: “What a privilege it is to know that I am a field under heavenly cultivation, not a wilderness, but a garden of the Lord, walled by grace, planted according to a divine plan, worked by love, weeded by heavenly discipline, and constantly protected by divine power. A soul so privileged is prepared to bring forth fruit to the glory of God.”

As Corrie meditated on those truths, she saw how heavenly discipline was cultivating her by pulling out the weeds of sin and how God had planted her where she was according to his divine pattern. She wouldn’t be in jail a moment longer than God thought was necessary. In yielding to the Lord as the field does to the farmer, letting him shape and prepare her for what was ahead, she adapted to her lonely time of God’s plowing and cultivation and was prepared to be with Christ in life and in death. —CHERI

Lord, how I thank you that I am a well-watered garden, walled by grace, planted according to a divine pattern, tilled by love, weeded by heavenly discipline, and protected by your divine omnipotence and power.

What are you? A wilderness or a garden for the Lord? If you are a wilderness, come to Jesus; He will not reject you. He has changed many wildernesses into gardens full of flowers and fruit.

—CORRIE TEN BOOM (1892–1983), HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR, AUTHOR