There are plenty of aid projects that have come and gone in our area over the years. One project involved teaching people how to graft fruit trees. We have many grafted mango, cashew, and orange trees in our village from that project (and even one or two avocado trees). The idea of grafting provides an important illustration for our teaching.
Early on in the teaching we used the illustration of a tree branch to illustrate the principle of death. Death is the absence of life. When we cut a branch we separate it from its source of life, the sap that comes up through the trunk. The branch might not look like it is dead right away, but the moment it was separated from its source of life it died. Now all that is left is for the branch to start demonstrating that death occurred by drying up and withering away. During the second week of teaching we hung up a bunch of different kinds of branches and watched them all dry up and wither away. Some went quickly and some took their time but in the end they all withered away. In the same way Adam and Eve’s sin caused separation between us and God. We were cut off from the source of our life. We are dead on account of the absence of His life within us. We might eat and drink and breathe and walk and bear children but we are spiritually dead all the while. When we die physically in the state of being spiritually dead our bodies will decompose and our spirit and soul will go to the place of eternal punishment. With that basis having been established in previous lessons we talked on Monday afternoon about grafting.
Grafting involves cutting the branch or stalk of tree. As soon as the cutting is complete the branch is dead. If it is left in this state it will wither and dry up. It only has a short window of time that it can be grafted (either into the original plant or into another plant) and be able to “take.” If too much time elapses between the cutting and grafting it will not take. In the same way we humans are all born spiritually dead. We have a limited time to be reconnected to God, our source of life. Our short window for being reconnected to the source of life is as long as we are physically alive. While we are still physically alive we can be reconnected spiritually to our source of life. If we wait until we have died physically we are past the point of being able to be reconnected spiritually. It is imperative that we be reconnected spiritually while we are still alive physically. Our eternal destiny is at stake. Just like the branches of some trees wither away faster than others, so each one of us is on a different schedule. Only God knows how much time each one of us has. If we do not submit ourselves to being grafted within our short window of opportunity, it will be too late for us.