Do You Need a Transplant? {Psalm 1:3}

When your growth seems dormant and withering has become normal, maybe it’s time for a transplant.

Meditate on Psalm 1:3 with us this week.

A Bigger Pot

Leaves were dropping off my fiddle leaf fig tree. We’d had it in our kitchen in the same pot for 20 years.

But I was afraid to transplant it, for fear it would die altogether. It was once Jeff’s grandparents’ plant. They had given it to us years ago, and we wanted it to stay alive, especially since the grandparents are now gone.

I finally agreed to the transplant. We bought a bigger pot. We bought the dirt. And we dug in.

Now we had to see if it would survive the repotting.

Get Your Transplant

This week’s memory verse, Psalm 1:3, is also about transplants. As believers in Christ, each one of us has received a transplant already. We were growing in one place, then Christ entered our lives and transplanted us.

The Hebrew verb shatal in Psalm 1:3 is translated as “planted.” But scholars suggest the word has a more specific meaning: “transplanted,” to remove something from an undesirable location and place it in a desirable location.

Maybe a plant. And maybe a person.

To walk straight and strong in our journey with Christ, we need nourishment, water, Sonshine. While Christ provides much of that simply through His grace, we also can proactively seek these things alongside Him by positioning ourselves to better receive them.

Through time spent in the written words, with the Living Word, with fellow believers, in service to the needy, etc., we, too, can develop deeper roots. And as we grow downward, we also grow upward.

And as Psalm 1:3 suggests, we, too, as a healthy tree, will also bear fruit.

. . . In due season. Immediate growth isn’t promised. Nor is immediate prosperity in ways we typically measure prosperity.

But we will bloom. Through our separation from the wrong things (Psalm 1:1) and through our meditation on godly things (Psalm 1:2), we will mature into blessed things (Psalm 1:3).

My fiddle leaf fig is doing well. No more leaves have dropped since the transplant. The stems seem strong and the green seems greener.

Transplanting was the best move after all.

Memorize This Week

He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.
Psalm 1:3 (ESV)