Short and sweet, the little coneflower held its own all summer long. This newer variety, or “Pow Wow” series, is a great little pop of pink at the edge of the perennial border. We loved it so much that we carefully saved the seeds in the hopes that its offspring would be at least almost as beautiful, and not nearly as expensive.
Coneflowers, or echinacea, provide color in July and August when most of the other perennials have withered away or have ceased flowering. It is for this reason that we wanted to propagate more.
It would have been no surprise to find that the seeds did not reproduce exactly the same as the parent plant. There are other varieties of echinacea nearby that could have mixed with the gene combination, and rendered plants that were far different than the plant that the seeds came from.
What was a little surprising was that no seeds germinated. None. Not even sickly plants.
Come to find out, some plants are sterile. Oh, not the native coneflowers nor the ones created by careful cross-pollination. But many of the man-made newer varieties cannot reproduce at all!
Nature wins. God wins. Always!
We are being bombarded by self-proclaimed progressives with the idea that same-sex unions are all about love, and that “love wins” when we accept this lifestyle that is clearly condemned in Scripture.
Nothing could be further from the truth. God is love. God always wins.
What possible reason could there be for telling God that we have a better idea, and that we celebrate our own inventions by labeling it as “love?”
“Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
“You are my friends if you do what I command you” (John 15:14).
Love = obeying God’s commands. Sexual urges are a totally different thing than love.
Satan has successfully promulgated the lie that sex equals love in a heterosexual context. He is now busy extending that lie to homosexuality and even the idea of multiple partners.
Take a lesson from a man-made plant. It takes a male part and a female part of a flower to make a viable seed. We all learned in elementary school Biology class that the pollen from the stamens must find their way to the pistil of the plant to combine its genetic material with that of the developing seed in the plant’s ovary.
Simply put, some lifestyles are against nature (Romans 1:26, 27). The inability to reproduce demonstrates this fact.
The subject of love is covered at great length in the Bible, including love for a man by a man. David loved Jonathan, but it did not REPLACE his heterosexual lifestyle. It was a brotherly love!
If we do not understand the simple “birds and the bees” in plant and animal life, we are being willfully ignorant. There was a time when God winked at such ignorance, but “God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent” (Acts 17:30, NASB).
Love wins. But please do not confuse love with doing what you want, to the exclusion of the teaching of Scripture. Those who love God are becoming weary of the misuse of that phrase.
God wins. God’s love wins. The only way we can access God’s ultimate gift of his saving power is by allowing the blood of his beloved Son to wash away our sins, not by embracing the sin and pushing his love away.
Do you want love? REAL love? God is the source.