Turning Over New Ground: Tillage vs. Cultivation
From late summer to early fall, I spent quite a few hours sitting on a tractor getting food plots ready for fall. My brother-in-law recently bought a new six-foot tiller, and I’ve been more than happy to help him put some hours on it.
There’s something satisfying about tilling up a food plot.
We start by knocking down whatever has been growing there. Depending on the plot, we’ll mow it, spray it, or sometimes do both. Then comes the tiller.
You drop that thing into the ground, engage the PTO, and start moving.
The rear tires begin to crawl.
Slowly,
Behind you, the field begins to change.
The tiller digs into the ground and turns everything over. The weeds that were standing there disappear. The grass gets chopped up. Roots are ripped loose. All that old vegetation gets pushed down and mixed back into the soil where it can begin to decay.
Pass after pass, what was once a field full of weeds and unwanted growth becomes something completely different.
Fresh dirt.
A clean seedbed.
Ground ready for something new.
There’s something beautiful about looking back after that last pass. A few hours earlier, the plot might have been covered in weeds, grasses, and plants that you never intended to grow there.
Now it’s ready for seed.
As I’ve spent those hours going back and forth on the tractor, I’ve found myself thinking about what that tiller is actually doing.
It’s turning everything over.
And I can’t help but think about repentance.
We sometimes make repentance more complicated than it needs to be. At its heart, repentance is a turning. It’s recognizing the direction we’ve been going, turning away from sin, and turning toward God.
And when the Gospel meets us, God doesn’t simply ask us to make the old field look a little better.
He gives us new life.
There are things growing in us that don’t belong there. Sin has taken root. We’ve spent years cultivating desires, habits, priorities, and ways of living that were never what God intended for us.
Then Jesus meets us there.
And the ground gets turned over.
That’s one of the beautiful things about the Gospel.
“This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!" — 2 Corinthians 5:17 NLT
The Gospel isn’t God handing us a rake and telling us to clean things up enough that He’ll accept us.
Jesus has already done the work we could never do.
He died for our sin. He rose again. And when we repent and put our faith in Him, He forgives us and gives us new life.
The old gets turned under and something new can begin to grow.
But here’s the thing about freshly tilled dirt: It’s not the finished product.
Nobody spends hours preparing a food plot just so they can stand at the edge of it and admire how nice the dirt looks.
The whole reason you worked the ground was because you intended to plant something there.
So you grab the seeder.
You begin broadcasting seed across that freshly prepared ground. Clover. Brassicas. Turnips.
Whatever you’ve chosen for that particular plot.
And then you wait....
Rain falls.
Seeds germinate.
Roots begin to grow.
Eventually that field that once looked like nothing but dirt begins turning green; and I think there’s another picture of the Christian life there. When Christ gives us new life, that’s the beginning—not the end.
We begin learning His Word.
We learn to pray.
We gather with other believers.
We learn obedience.
We begin serving.
We begin loving people differently.
Seeds are being planted.
Roots begin going down.
And slowly, sometimes almost imperceptibly, God begins producing something in us that wasn’t there before - fruit.
But anybody who has ever planted something knows that the crop isn’t the only thing that wants to grow.
The weeds come back too.
That’s where I’ve been thinking about another word lately: cultivation.
Tillage vs. Cultivation.
I was sitting in a Sunday School class when I heard this teaching many years ago. From the mouth of a farmer came truth about the difference in tilling and cultivation.
Tillage and cultivation can look similar. Both involve working the soil.
But there’s an important difference.
When I’m tilling a new food plot, I’m not particularly concerned about preserving what’s already growing there. I’m trying to turn it over. I’m preparing the ground to start something new.
Cultivation is different.
When you’re cultivating, there’s already something growing that you want to protect.
You’re not trying to destroy the field - you’re tending it.
You walk through and look for the things that don’t belong. A weed here. Unwanted grass there. You're looking for something beginning to compete with the crop you’re trying to grow.
And instead of turning the entire field over again, you deal with those things specifically.
You pull the weed.
You spot-spray the problem.
You cultivate around the plant.
Because there’s something good growing there that you don’t want to destroy.
I think that's a pretty good picture of the maturing Christian life.
God has already begun His work in us. There is fruit growing, but there are weeds from time to time also.
Pride.
Bitterness.
Lust.
Greed.
Selfishness.
An unforgiving spirit.
A habit we’ve allowed to hang around a little too long.
And sometimes the Holy Spirit puts His finger directly on one of them.
That right there. That doesn’t belong in this field.
The answer isn’t to tear everything up and wonder whether God ever did anything in us at all. It’s time to cultivate.
Confess it.
Repent of it.
Pull the weed.
Let God continue tending the ground. In John chapter 15 - Jesus explains the process.
He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.— John 15:2 NIV
The pruning isn’t evidence that the Gardener has abandoned the plant.
Pruning is evidence that He’s still working on it.
Maybe that’s one of the differences between tillage and cultivation.
There was a time when the field needed turned over - if you haven't made that new start - there is no better day than today.
But maybe there’s something already growing there - and the same God who prepared the soil, planted the seed, and brought the rain isn’t finished tending His field.
When I was a younger boy, thinking about becoming a man, I had a pastor share a verse that gave me so much hope.
being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. — Philippians 1:6
Paul didn't write those words to give us permission to live comfortably with sin. Far from it. He wrote them to remind believers of the faithfulness of God.
The same God who began the work will be faithful to finish it.
That's an incredible promise.
Because some days, when I look at my own life, I see more weeds than fruit. I see places where I still struggle. Things I thought I'd overcome. Areas where I know God is calling me to grow.
But today I'm reminded that my confidence isn't in the condition of the field. It's in the faithfulness of the One tending it.
He hasn't abandoned His work.
He's still pulling weeds. Still pruning branches. Still cultivating the life He gave me.
And He'll keep working until the day I stand before Jesus.
So the next time you look out over a freshly tilled field, remember the beauty of what Christ has done. The old has gone, and the new has come.
But don't forget to look at what's growing.
Maybe there's a weed you've been ignoring. A little patch of sin you've allowed to take root. Something Holy Spirit has been asking you to surrender.
Don't ignore it.
Confess it. Repent. Let the Lord do His work.
Because God didn't turn over the soil of your life just to leave you with a clean field.
He intends to grow something beautiful.
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