SCT 8: Winter is for pruning

by Darren Rusco

Note: I'm working on a book about hearing God's voice. The process of writing is a slog for me, so I decided to work it out through blog posts, hoping that would help me get ideas out to print, and also give readers a chance to feedback and help form the end product.

Chapter 8

Winter is for pruning

While the point of this book is to stray away from concluding that our lack of hearing is due to God’s lack of speaking, there will indeed be seasons where God is quieter. I think these seasons are exceptions to the norm, but they do exist. And we need to acknowledge and accept God’s purposes of silence. Human nature tempts us to permanently dwell in one of the extremes of either “God always speaks” or “God never speaks.” Undoubtedly this will lead to disappointment because it creates expectations disconnected with God’s nature. In reality, we must hold the tension that, at times God’s voice is real and clear, but at other times, even when our hearts are fertile soil, God’s voice seems far off.

David held this tension well in the Psalms. He wasn’t afraid to live in the depths of both realities. For example in Psalm 29 we read statements such as:

The voice of the Lord echoes above the sea…

The voice of the Lord is powerful…

The voice of the Lord is majestic…

The voice of the Lord splits the mighty cedars…

The voice of the Lord strikes with bolts of lightning…

The voice of the Lord makes the barren wilderness quake…

The voice of the Lord twists mighty oaks…

Wow! It sounds like David was intimate with God’s voice. He writes this poem with confident declarations as though he might have recently experienced God’s voice with loud clarity. Is this always your experience? If you wrote an honest Psalm about God’s voice, would you use the same descriptions David used? Perhaps on some days, but don’t feel bad if that’s not your normal prayer life. Have a look at the previous chapter, Psalm 28:

I pray to you, O Lord, my rock. Do not turn a deaf ear to me. For if you are silent, I might as well give up and die. Listen to my prayer for mercy as I cry out to you for help, as I lift my hands toward your holy sanctuary.

That’s a different tone than the confident declarations of Psalm 29. These are words of a man who was utterly dependent on the voice of God. Out of the silence he claims there is no use in going on. That’s how important hearing God’s voice is to David. Look at his words in Psalm 22:

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why are you so far away when I groan for help? Every day I call to you, my God, but you do not answer. Every night you hear my voice, but I find no relief.

I appreciate David’s honest communication through the Psalms. Christians are so tempted to tidy up the messiness of Scriptures. Or to put a spiritual facade over our circumstances to make everything appear heavenly. But when it came to God’s voice, David knew the realities of both worlds. Very few people knew the Lord like David, yet he was very familiar with the silence of God as well.

But just as much as we should not live in the extremes of “God is never silent”, we should also never settle for the stagnant middle. Look at David's desperation for the posture to which we are invited: “If you are silent, I might as well give up and die.” Perhaps David is writing poetry with exaggerated language, but do you depend on God’s voice so much that the alternative silence makes you give up entirely? David’s walk with God is marked by the reality that, even though God can and will be silent, he will not accept that as his normal. Silence simply is not tolerable. Yet how often do we walk quite comfortably without God’s voice? David’s prayer invites us to depend more on God’s voice than we ever have. So while we need to understand God can be quiet, we can passionately contend for his voice all the more.

Did winter kill my tree?

Instead of using the metaphor of the wilderness for God’s silence, I like to call it the winter. Imagine you were the first person on earth, not yet familiar with the changing seasons. If you arrived in the spring or early summer, you would experience warmth and growth. As summer moves on, your plants are thriving with vegetables. Trees are green and full of leaves with an abundance of fruit. Summer is easy! But picture your first autumn. What is happening to the trees? The leaves appear to be dying off and the fruit is gone. Adding water to the soil provides no relief for the change in the trees. And then winter comes. The cold drives away the leaves and there is your tree, stripped of its summer beauty. If this were your first winter, you would conclude your tree is dead. What happened? Did I kill the tree? We need to understand seasons with God’s voice. Psalm 29 is a summer Psalm. Psalm 22 is a winter Psalm.

But now we know much about trees in the winter. We know about the value of pruning a tree in the winter. We know how the roots become established. We know winter is not permanent, but rather a season. We know when the warmth comes, the tree will come back to life with buds, blossoms, leaves, and more fruit. Even still, the tree looks barren and stripped away; sometimes even dead, in the winter. And so it is with our own lives.

Winter has its way with the land as well. Soil is not intended to perpetually give crops but instead must rejuvenate. God was wise when he instructed that the land must observe a Sabbath every seventh year (Leviticus 25:2). Jesus referred to our hearts with the metaphor of soil. Do you suppose the same principles apply? The soil of our hearts will need a dormant season in order to rejuvenate. Can we accept this reality?

My first winter season without God’s voice caught me off guard. I had years of hearing God regularly. Sure, there were short spurts of silence, but it never lasted long. But winter came when I didn’t know what winter was, and I responded like I described above – I thought the tree was dead. I found myself spiritually lethargic, not energized to pray. If I managed to pray a few words, I never heard back from God. Without realizing a winter season was upon me, I spiraled into some unbelief. I wondered if I had been hearing God all along. Perhaps I was just spiritually looney?

During this time I wrestled with the greatest doubts of my Christian life. God seemed so distant that I actually began to doubt his reality. In my life, I have witnessed outstanding miracles and supernatural occurrences of God’s voice. Yet there I was in the winter questioning it all. Furthermore, I was a senior leader and minister in a mission organization. How could I care about the mission of Jesus if I wasn’t even sure about Jesus himself? And so doubt was brought into my calling and ministry life.

In this winter season I was scheduled to teach a seminar on physical healing. I dreaded the event because I wasn’t sure what I even believed about healing anymore. Yet it was too late to cancel. So there I was, teaching hungry believers how to administer healing, while I was filled with unbelief. Part of my teaching is to encourage people to increase their expectation, as that is the important connection to faith, all the while my expectation was low. I asked for a volunteer who needed healing to come forward so I could demonstrate how I prayed for them to the broader group. They were healed on the spot. I wasn’t expecting that! I came home and told my friend Kris about what happened and then he asked me to pray for his back pain. He loved running but for years was unable to run due to back injuries he sustained from his time in the military. He was so faith filled, what was I to do? So again, with little expectation, I offered him some feeble healing prayer and then went home. A few days later, Kris showed up at my home unannounced. He told me his back was fully healed and that he had run miles everyday that week since we prayed. He didn’t want to tell me until he had a chance to confirm it by successfully running for a few days. I shook my head in disbelief, this time not because of the healing, but because of who God is.

You might think this healing miracle brought me out of the winter. But no, I stayed there longer. I am embarrassed to say, these healings made me frustrated with God. It made me respond to God like the prophet Jonah, who was upset with God’s mercy. In time I came to see I had a twisted contentment wallowing in my self pity and I was unhappy that God wanted to bring me out.

Thankfully, despite my coldness over that season, God still managed to do a work in me. In hindsight I can see that my roots of identity and calling were established deeper than before, and many branches were pruned. Looking back, the mystery and mercy of God were abundant in that winter season.

The mystery of pruning

Pruning is one of those Christian metaphors that seem to be commonly misused. A few people leave a church and the leader announces pruning. In reality, pruning is painful, messy, and takes quite a long time. Theoretically we should embrace pruning, because it is a work of Jesus, but this pruning should scare you. It’s an invitation for Jesus to remove unhealthy branches and roots in your life, correct wrong beliefs, restore things that are broken, and identify the presence of lies. And usually, we are unaware of all these present issues. That’s why the process is so painful. That’s why we never know how long the winter will last – because Jesus is dealing with blind spots, and if we could see the spots, we wouldn’t be blind. But blindness means we can’t see the end of the road and we have to trust Jesus to get us there.

I picture this winter season like the painful work of surgery. And isn’t surgery fascinating? That a surgeon can open up a human body and take hours to remove something or repair something, or even add something - all while the person lies there asleep - and then patch them up and ultimately send them home better than ever. Yes Jesus loves us enough to do these operations in our lives. But we need to know that during the actual surgery, the surgeon is right there, doing the necessary work, but conversation during the surgery is not realistic. When the surgery is over, you’ll have a long chat with the surgeon on what happened and how much healthier you are. For certain, God is always near during the winter. You likely will feel the opposite, but distance is not in the character of God. He is near.

And so it is vitally important to prepare for the winter long before its arrival. Be wise! When you are walking in the warmth and easy abundance of the summer, that is the time to prepare for the coming of winter. If you don’t, the devil will do more in the winter than he should be allowed.

Establishing Strongholds before the Winter

When I mention the word “stronghold,” what comes to mind? This is a common metaphor in Christianity most often referred to in the negative sense, or a work of the devil. For example, Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 10:3-4:

We are human, but we don’t wage war as humans do. We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments.

A stronghold has this idea of a fortified place, difficult to overtake once it has been established. Paul talks of strongholds that should not be in place, and how we need God’s weapons to remove them. We are also aware of how believing lies of the devil can create strongholds in our lives. Sometimes we call this bondage. Once in this place, we often need help breaking down these strongholds through prayer ministry.

But if the devil and the world have the capability of creating strongholds in our lives that are difficult to tear down, how much more so should we be able to create a Jesus stronghold in our lives, a stronghold of truth, and how much more difficult should it be for the devil to tear it down?

Asa was a godly king in the kingdom of Judah. When he came to rule after his father, he got right to work tearing down pagan shrines and altars while the country had a season of peace from war. The story goes on in 2 Chronicles 14:6:

During those peaceful years, he (Asa) was able to build up the fortified towns throughout Judah. No one tried to make war against him at this time, for the Lord was giving him rest from his enemies.

God allows seasons of attack from our enemy and God gives seasons of peace and rest. Wisdom tells us to work hard during the seasons of peace to build up strongholds so we can be well prepared for a time of attack.

For example, we do this through establishing solid foundations of our identity in Christ during the fruitful season so that when our identity comes under attack in the winter, we stand firm because we built a stronghold around our identity. In times of peace, we work on the idea of being a Christ pleaser and not a people pleaser, so that in the winter when criticism comes from people, we don’t crumble under its weight.

Foolishness tells us the summer season is endless, and therefore planning for winter is not necessary. But winter will come for everyone. It's healthy to address it and even welcome it. Winter is not a judgment against you. How easy it is to believe the lie that you did something wrong to bring in the winter. But no, God, in his good plans for people, will function quietly in our lives in order to accomplish the difficult pruning, which will bring about a deeper abundance.