The summer storm last night brought down a huge gum tree in our paddock. Well most of it anyway. The top two-thirds came down in a splintering crash of branches and leaves. Today I’ve been out with the chainsaw to make a start on cleaning up the wreckage.

I was rather surprised to see this consequence of last night’s gale. The tree was one of a cluster of nine large gums growing at the end of our paddock. Earlier this year I felled one of them for winter firewood. It was already dead when we bought the property. When I looked at the other eight trees I figured that they looked healthy and would be good for many years yet. I was wrong – and this morning I saw why.

The inside of this huge tree was rotten to the core. The trunk of the tree won’t even be useful for firewood. It was only the outside shell of the tree that still functioned. Underneath the outer bark layers sap was still flowing to the upper branches and those limbs were still remarkably sound and healthy. I could see what had happened. The weight of the canopy, with its still-healthy limbs and foliage, could no longer be supported by the decaying trunk of the tree. All it took was one of our regular summer storms and the trunk snapped right there where the still healthy branches forked out from the trunk.

This morning, while wielding the chainsaw, I did a little thinking about that tree trunk beside which I was working. It reminded me of the parable Jesus told about the two builders. One of them built on sand, only to see his house collapse when the storm came.

I thought back to my younger days in the office at the drawing board. One of the girls working there was very attractive and I suspected that at one point she was fishing for a date with yours truly. That never happened. The reason was that under the beautiful façade there was some stuff that I found rather ugly. For one thing, she was highly critical of my views of what constituted a Christian. Being a Christian was not putting your faith in Jesus Christ and becoming His follower. In her words: I was born in Australia and Australia is a Christian country and that makes me a Christian. Her language could at times be quite “colourful” and the way she treated some of the other girls in the office was disturbing. And yet one could not help but admire her beauty – and she certainly knew how to use that to her advantage. She was like this gum tree. Outwardly, a wonderful looking gum tree; inwardly, rotten to the core!

Am I being unfair? Judgmental? I don’t think so. At the risk of mixing metaphors the Bible tells us that the Lord God needs to take out our heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh. I guess that’s the big difference between humans and my ruined gum tree. This gum tree started life as a healthy tree but somewhere along the line the rot set in – with inevitable consequences. In contrast we humans come into the world with the rot of sin already born into us. David makes that so very clear in Psalm 51: “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” It’s only as we are born again that God deals with the rot that is at the core of our being.

That gum tree triggered one other thought. Some weeks ago in family devotions we were reading the verses in Ephesians 6 where Paul calls on children to “obey their parents in the Lord”. We’ve been using “Old Story New” by Marty Machowski for our family devotions. In his comments on this text Machowski at one point says, “It is only by believing in Jesus that a child wants to obey.” At that point our daughter put the book down and complained that this statement was so wrong and unfair…! She had non-Christian friends at school who did obey their parents.” It took some explaining to highlight that the operative word is “wants”. When the human heart still has the rot of sin we so often still get some wonderful outward conformity to the will of God. But it’s like the shell of my decrepit gum tree – it’s an outward show. Perhaps it is motivated by the threats of parents if obedience is not forthcoming, or perhaps the hope of reward if they are obedient, or even simply because a force of habit was trained into them already as ankle-biters. It’s only when Jesus changes our heart that we then truly WANT to do what is pleasing to Him.

John Westendorp