After a wonderful afternoon in the mountains of Massachusetts we arrived home with two gallons of wild blueberries. They were wonderful to look at but they were full of leaves and little sticks. It would take hours of tedious separating to clean them by hand. Then I remembered seeing a picture in my Bible of people winnowing. I remembered a statement John the Baptist made about the coming Messiah. He said in Matthew 3:11, “I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
Going to my attic I brought down an electric floor fan. Putting it on a barrel and turning it on we began to pour the blueberries from one bucket to the next in front of the fan. In just a few minutes we had the cleanest blueberries in town. All the leaves and all the little sticks were on the floor blown past the bucket now containing the ingredients of many breakfasts and muffins to come.
What a great metaphor John used. Jesus came to winnow out His fruit from that which will be burned. It sounds pretty frightening until one remembers each of us can be part of the fruit if we will only respond to the urgings of the Holy Spirit. The choice is ours.
Written by Roger Bothwell on July 14, 2002
rogerbothwell.org