Pounded

Ruth 3:6 “So she went down to the threshing floor and did everything her mother-in-law told her to do.”

Do you know what was done on the threshing floor? Yes, that’s right. Threshing. Now, to be perfectly honest with you, I had to look this up. I had a general idea of what threshing was, but I wanted to be sure. To thresh means to strike repeatedly, in order to separate the seed from the chaff. In other words, you pound the stuff until you separate the good from the bad, the useful from the useless, the valuable stuff from the garbage. Another form of this word is thrashing. And we all know what it means to receive a thrashing.

Did you notice that in order to get to the threshing floor, Ruth had to go down? Boy, I could write an entire book on that. But the long and short of it is, we are all a little bit like the barley. We have the potential to be useful, to be valuable. But until we spend some time on the Lord’s threshing floor, we will have a bunch of useless garbage hanging around our souls.

God wants us to be like Him – loving, kind, compassionate, forgiving, generous, . . . holy. He knows for most of us, in order to become like Him, we’ve got to have our old sin natures pounded out of us. And in order for that to happen, we usually have to go down. Far down. To the bottom.

The funny thing is, we all want to have great worth. But apart from true saints and lunatics, there isn’t one of us who would choose what we have to go through to become godly. There isn’t one of us who would say, “Okay, God, pound it out of me! Give me a good thrashing! Just beat me until there’s nothing left, so I can be who You want me to be!”

Yet, I speak from experience. The thrashings, the poundings I have received from this life really have helped me get rid of a lot of my garbage. The difficult things I’ve experienced have made me wiser, more loving, more compassionate. They have made me gentler, kinder, more generous, more forgiving. I never would have requested the threshing floor. I wouldn’t want to do it again, though I’m sure at some point I will. But you know something? I’m glad God loved me enough to see my potential. I’m glad He allowed me to be pounded.

Dear Father, Thank You for seeing the value in me, and not discarding me with the chaff.

Amen