The world of nature around us is an endless source of spiritual truth; like the seemingly worthless thorny stem, often called a brier, that a gardener I know of deliberately dug out and then planted in his rose garden. People thought he was mad to do it – putting that miserable looking plant amongst the flowers, but he knew what he was doing. He used a sharp knife to make a slit in the brier, then he grafted it with a rose. When summer finally came the most beautiful roses were blooming on that old thorny brier, not because of what came out of it so much as what the gardener put into it.

It’s a wonderful illustration from nature of a great spiritual truth that the Bible expresses this way: ‘If anyone is in Christ – that is grafted in, joined to Him by faith – he/she is a new creation; the whole things have passed away. Behold new things have come.’

God’s offer of spiritual transformation is open to us all.’