Imagine cutting a single rose off a rose bush and sticking it in a glass of water. It looks good and smells good but really it’s dying. It has been cut off from its source of life. You can feed it champagne, buy it designer accessories and play it uplifting music all day long, but in a few days you’d see that it really was lifeless. Just like the rose, people are cut off from the “life source”. God is the source of real life but because of our disobedience we can’t have any of it. I’ve met people who argue, “But I feel great about my life”. Sure, but so does the rose in the glass of water… for a while! The Bible says that we are all “dead in our transgressions” (Ephesians 2:1). That’s not a good situation to be in. Fortunately, God has a solution that deals with the problem. – In botanical science, there is a process known as ‘grafting’ which allows us to take a single rose stem and restore it back onto the branch from which it came. There it receives new life from its source. God has being doing a similar thing for centuries. When someone becomes a Christian, they are instantly joined back to their life source – God.

Source: adapted from John Dickson, Hanging in There, p.13-14