Rooted In the Soil of God’s Word

DEBORAH PRATT | Life Assurance Ministries’ Online Moderator |

Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude.—Colossians 2:6-7 

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.— Ephesians 3:14-19

Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became His counselor? Or who has first given to Him that it might be paid back to him again? For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen.— Romans 11:33-36

According to the church I was raised in, I was saved when I was baptized as an infant. Then I had the opportunity to confirm my faith when I was twelve years old in our confirmation process which was completed over three years in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades in my K-8 parochial school. It was there I learned Luther’s Small Catechism which included the explanations of the Ten Commandments, the Apostle’s Creed, and other specific items that Luther considered foundational to life in the faith. We also memorized Bible verses starting in second grade. I was a good, generally compliant student and never questioned how all this was derived. 

In eighth grade, I remember when one pastor asked us what the meaning of the bread and wine was in communion, I answered, “It represents the body and blood.” The pastor brusquely stated, “That makes you a Baptist,” (like it was an epithet)!  Maybe I didn’t read that day’s lesson, but I was unaware of denominational differences, except as I was taught them.  I was also unaware that God, in the deep, unseen, hidden place in my heart, was putting a stamp of redeemed ownership on my life regardless of my affiliation at the time. 

I suspect I heard a lot more than I consciously digested over those years. For example, I remember in youth group painting a tabletop for one of those huge cable spools for the youth meeting room. It was to visually describe the spreading of the Gospel at and after Pentecost, with a center that sent out paths and offshoots of paths, all of which eventually covered the surface. The youth room furniture is long gone, but I remember that lesson and painting that tabletop and the book of Acts it represented. 

I tried the after-high-school denominational college, but it was just what was kind of expected, and after a particularly insulting and unfortunate encounter with the college president, I left.

I also remember one youth outing when we met with other youth groups from Michigan in a large convocation in Ann Arbor. I became friends with one of the other attendees, and we stayed in touch throughout the next year. Suddenly, she announced that she had become agnostic. I wrote a long letter to her, defending the truth and existence of God as well as the many evidences He gave us, not only in the Bible, but in the world around us. It didn’t make any difference to her, but it did to me—I knew then that I had a solid fundamental faith in God and the basics of the faith. 

Then high school was done. My predictable faith environment was behind me then. I tried the after-high-school denominational college, but it was just what was kind of expected, and after a particularly insulting and unfortunate encounter with the college president, I left.  

Figs: My Timeless Metaphor

Fast forward. Last fall, I wrote about my journey so far with fig trees, those potted and those in-ground. I wrote about them when it was time here for them to be going dormant with colder temperatures encroaching; the ones in pots went into the garage to sleep for the winter, and the ones outside had elaborate coverings put on them with the hope that they would not rot, be eaten by rodents, or die back to the ground from the cold (not very successful due to sharp temperature swings at the wrong times…). 

About that time, someone in a fig forum kindly offered me some cuttings to try to start in case I needed a winter activity to distract me from dwelling on the swaddled fig trees out there on the tundra. It was a pay-it-forward kind of gift, which was genuinely nice considering how many fig-cutting purveyors charged $10 or more per cutting plus shipping. So, this kind person sent me a dozen cuttings from four different fig tree varieties—Chicago Hardy, White Madeira, Olympian, and Florea – all of which I knew nothing about, except Chicago Hardy. I had ten or so from pruning my own in-ground Chicago Hardy trees, so I had around twenty cuttings to attempt to start. (Go big or go home.)

As usual, there are as many opinions about how to start cuttings as there are stars in the heavens (only a slight exaggeration). One fellow said he just took his cuttings off his trees and stuck them in dirt, and that worked just fine for him. Others considered his method with trepidation, which I can now understand. Many kinds of containers were suggested, from plastic bags with cuttings in them, to cups with cuttings in them inside plastic bags, to the professional’s choice – “tree pots.” So, I tried a few different containers, and mostly one type of soil that wouldn’t generate the dreaded fungus gnat, and away I went. 

There were strong opinions on whether to use clear containers (so one can see the roots as they develop, but too much light on roots weakens them), wash cuttings, soak them in pure coconut or kelp water, abrade the ends that get stuck into the soil to let the cambium contact the soil directly, wrap the tops in parafilm, and a multitude of other techniques to hopefully ensure a robustly-rooting cutting. Roots best develop on cuttings that are mature – have hardened so to speak – and come from sturdy, well-nourished stock. I ended up using a mix of clear (so I could see roots) half-liter water bottles with the tops cut off, some “tree pots” (tall, flimsy, square black plastic containers), and one lone soup container from the Chinese restaurant. 

Truly, the best advice I got was simple—to not overwater them and to not pester them a lot. One fig forum contributor said, “Don’t love them too much.” (!) After a while, I understood what he meant. It was tempting to hover. The biggest problem is how difficult it is to tell how wet the soil medium is (too wet = rot). Most moisture probes don’t work well with the kind of soilless mix that works best for the cutting. The person who invents a functional moisture probe for this kind of endeavor will retire comfortably. 

This first stage of rooting cuttings is one of the several transition points in going from unrooted cutting to potted tree; this transition could go very well, or it could go very poorly. A cutting can put out leaves before the roots develop in the unseen depths of the growing medium, so seeing leaves isn’t a guarantee that roots are there to take up moisture and nutrition. To my delight and surprise, most of my cuttings developed roots, and the ones I lost were too small, or too green, to have developed the right layers to support root growth. 

Maturity Can’t Be Rushed

The next critical stage is moving the cuttings into pots. In the forums, I kept seeing, “Don’t up-pot too soon.” It’s tempting to see all those beautiful roots and think they are ready for a bigger, roomier pot; not so much. One woman provided the simplest but pithiest advice: “Figs don’t mind a bit being root-bound. Let them develop those heavy, brown, mature roots, which may take several more weeks than expected. Be patient!!”

Figs away from their typical temperate climates don’t like major changes, so a wise cutting expert recommended a process that makes the new pot environment nearly equivalent to the cutting’s current environment. Same medium, same moisture levels, same light. (And one room converted into a temporary fig nursery!) Once the cuttings have adjusted to their new roomy digs, they are less likely to be disturbed by slight changes in their environment and will eventually be robust enough to get acclimated to outside in the spring (next year) after frosts are past. Many fig cuttings are lost at this point because the changes aren’t well-managed. 

Because this is the world God created for us, though for a time darkened by the brokenness of sin, I often see analogies in the natural world. This fig cutting endeavor has made me think more about roots and what it means to be rooted and grounded and growing up into Christ and how much Paul said to his children in the faith about it. I began thinking back about that table painting I had done in high school, and I thought of the parable of the sower and the seed and wondered where in that growing process I was during that part of my spiritual life.  

I look back now and think: I was a cutting then; I was just stuck in some familiar dirt, and who knew what would happen next? I believed in the Trinity—but did I know that from the Bible? What did or didn’t I know about the nature of man according to the Bible? Back then, as a high school student painting a parable of Jesus, I had no idea how many ways I could go wrong or what could sabotage my spiritual growth. I had been given a diet of doctrine as a child that I was expected to learn and accept, but I don’t recall being told why any of it was true. I lacked depth and accuracy in my understanding. 

I’ve heard that it is often easy for a former Adventist to get sucked into another cult or into atheism out of complete disillusionment with any system of beliefs; God gets thrown out with the bathwater, as it were. 

From what I have come to understand from listening to former Adventists, leaving their familiar but wholly bent religious environment is full of trap doors and pitfalls (perhaps a weak analogy, but a little like everything that can go wrong in up-potting a fig cutting). I’ve heard that it is often easy for a former Adventist to get sucked into another cult or into atheism out of complete disillusionment with any system of beliefs; God gets thrown out with the bathwater, as it were. 

Formers say that coexisting with family and friends who remain embedded in Adventism is just plain hard and often painful, both because they are still unbelievers, but also because they may be persistently dissuasive, hostile, uninterested, or fully reject the believing family member. Sometimes, formers are able to find a community of born-again believers fairly quickly; other times, it seems desperately difficult, especially to find somewhere where people will listen to the unique experiences and history formers bring to the pew. 

Sharing The Burden for Adventists

In many ways, my journey has been very different from most former Adventists’ paths. I’ve never had to contend with rejection due to becoming a born-again follower of Jesus Christ. I’m not well understood in my family, but that is different from what many formers experience. In some ways, though, my journey has been similar. For a year after I graduated from college, I studied the Bible daily with several notable radio program Bible teachers (the denomination of my childhood did not broadcast anything regularly except for one Sunday morning program, but I didn’t know the difference at the beginning). I began to see some major differences between the doctrines I learned as a child and what they taught, and what was this thing called the millennium, anyway?? 

After taking a textiles class at Andrews University (ten minutes south of where I live), where I was introduced to Ellen White and her Reformed Dress (including research time in the resource room), I began to meet a wide variety of people who considered themselves Adventist. But I knew next to nothing about their doctrines. Why didn’t I know anything about them, living so close to an Adventist community that was five minutes from one of my denomination’s sister churches and twenty minutes from mine at the time? Why didn’t I know anything about them and what they believed except that they ate differently and went to church on Saturday? 

Why didn’t my own church body talk about this? The closest we got was a short “Bible” study on “Our Church and Others,” which used Walter Martin’s position on the identity of Seventh-day Adventism. I only began to learn when I became good friends with some Adventists and determined to learn what was different because somehow, I knew I could be misled if I didn’t understand the hidden differences, even though the group I know are genuinely kind and loving people. 

It wasn’t until God led me to the Former Adventist Fellowship and the former Adventist apologetics community that I realized I had to be fully intentional in an ongoing way about not just the basics but all the roots of those basics, and then on into the fathomless depths of the riches of God’s Word.  It helps me immensely to hear what Nikki or Colleen used to think about Bible concepts when they were Adventists, and then they dive deeply into the Word to see what it actually says, through a solid, consistent hermeneutic. 

When Nikki and Colleen talk in the Former Adventist Podcast about what they believed about various Bible doctrines, and when they counter those previous beliefs with what the Bible truly says, it helps me understand my Adventist friends so much better as I learn more myself. I can evaluate whether they understand who the true Jesus is, what His true and completed atonement is and has accomplished, and where they are in their own journeys in the real Bible versus the poisonous roots of their historical, systematic teaching. 

Sometimes it seems that my little group’s Adventist leader wants to evade doctrine and “just love Jesus” and apply the very select portions of the Bible that they study to their daily lives (we tried Romans once, but I had never sensed so much discomfort in that little group as I did when we were reading through Romans 1—the hot potato of the Pauline letters—too judgey!). I long to see them study not just selected Bible “stories” but study widely and deeply so that the Word pushes them to question what they have long held as “truth.” But God can move in each of them through His own way with them, so I have to rest in that. 

I keep praying, often in the words of the verses at the beginning of this article, that since God’s Word does not return void, there are deep and lasting roots being formed in them, even if they aren’t aware of it, that will deeply anchor them in God’s truth and lead them fully out of Adventism. †