Are You Making Honey?
Bees go shopping for raw ingredients within a couple miles of their hive by taking fresh nectar from flowers. They are at the mercy of whatever is in bloom to make what they and many other species depend on. The nectar content of some flowers can be really high—especially in the spring. Other flowers may produce very little to none.
Nectar is usually very watery. Bees have to work nectar from a 5% to 50% concentration of sugar until they make that thick, sweet paste we call honey. They gather the nectar into their crop, not their stomach, and then expel this when they return to the hive, working it over and over in their mandibles until it becomes thick enough to store in the hex-shaped cells. If they put it in as plain nectar, it would run right back out and not stay in the wax foundation. If they just swallowed the nectar, they would have nothing to live on through the winter. The whole colony depends on the worker bees to not be selfish. The young bees in the hive cannot go out and get their own food. The queen and the drones all depend on the workers to do their job to bring back a harvest of food they can all benefit from for the winter.
After harvesting the nectar, house bees work this sweet syrup into honey much like a person might work taffy to thicken it. Sometimes they have to put unfinished honey product into the wax cells and then cure it by fanning their wings until it has become thick enough to keep well. Then, they cap it off so everyone stays out of it until they need it in case of a drought, winter, or other time when there is no fresh food supply.
Too many people suck down God’s sweetness only when they feel they need it. They go dry all week long until Sunday. One day, they hit a crisis and they have no reserve to draw on. Suddenly they are hitting their faces on the floor and crying out to God in desperation. They run to other believers for “encouragement” and “strength” to get through a trial. What they should have been doing was building up a reserve supply for the day of need. However, in our instant-fix, microwave-it-now society, we have little sense of storing up for the future. If we have forgotten how to do this in the pantry, how much worse are we missing this in the spiritual realm?
We should not hit spiritual emergency mode. Can you imagine Jesus walking around, “Wow, I am going through a battle right now. Where is God when I need Him? I need a break through right now. Father, I need a blessing.” That is an almost blasphemous analogy, but that is how most of God’s children are today in America. We live from spiritual high to spiritual high. We go to praying when a need hits rather than walking in His Spirit at all times. We need to be putting some of God’s Spirit back, so to speak, so that we have what we need in the time of distress. When some go to conferences and camp meetings they spend more time at the restaurants, shops, and other social gatherings than in His presence.
Bees don’t run around in the winter panicking for something to get them through. They have prepared ahead of time. In our spiritual springtime, we should grow deep in God so when spiritual winter hits, we have plenty to draw from. This, however, is not just a resource we store up individually for ourselves. We do not have enough to give others if we only get enough for our own selves.
Bees develop honey by continually chewing on the raw resources God has provided. We cannot be satisfied at having the nectar of God’s presence. We must cultivate it. We work it with our mouths by quoting scripture, speaking in tongues, and worshiping Him. When God speaks to you, mouth it, repeat it, focus on it. Don’t live on spiritual welfare, expecting to have everything handed to you when you need it. Dwell in Him richly, speaking the things of God in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs (Colossians 3:16).
We take His raw ingredients and work them over and over until they thicken into something deep and rich in our lives. We draw on these resources later, and they become what others can draw on as well. The fruit of the Spirit is a lot more mature than the nectar of the flower—it takes development and growth for the world to find something they can feast on from their lives. You cannot bless someone by speaking in tongues to them, but you can bless them by speaking from the golden stores of the Spirit you have cultivated over the years of knowing Jesus. We must chew on God’s Word, we must dwell on Him, we must linger in His presence so we too can say “my meditation of him shall be sweet” (Psalm 104:34).
I remember once when I set out to memorize the Gospel of John, I had spent many days on one chapter and not gotten a lot out of it. One day, I had mostly mastered the passage and went for a walk with my dog down the road, quoting this chapter of words from Jesus. As I walked and chewed on God’s Word, suddenly it dawned on me what that passage meant. Wow! That was a powerful set of verses! How deep and rich the flavor of that scripture. What had started out as a watered-down syrup of thee’s and thou’s became a life-giving passage I could feed on. It gave me strength as I saw my Savior in a closer, more meaningful way.
2 Comments
FANTASTIC Analogy of what we get back what we put back. LOVE IT!!!!
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