Wednesday, February 01, 2006

fruit inspectors

This timely reminder just in from HomeWord's Robin Dugall, What Fruit Are You Growing?

Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down. Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”
— Luke 13:6-9

According to Jesus, there is only one way to see if something is alive – check its fruit. I don’t know where we got this misconception, but many of us really don’t expect much to happen in our lives as Christ-followers. We “signed up” for a relationship with God. We said “yes” to Jesus, but for many of us, we expected that would be the end of the deal. We would receive forgiveness of our sins and a ticket to heaven when we die, but anything beyond that was not part of our plan. Unfortunately, the Bible is clear: Not only does Jesus want to give us the promise of heaven and spiritual blessing, He wants to get involved in our lives. He wants to plant something within us that is going to take root and begin to change the way we live, impacting the actions, decisions and character of our lives. In other words, Jesus expects to see something grow within us as a result of His presence in our lives.

If you garden or are in the habit of planting things, you know that once you plant something, you expect it to grow. In fact, you expect a specific plant or fruit to come from your hard work. If you plant corn, you expect to see corn eventually. If you plant tomatoes, you expect to see tomatoes within a few months. That’s natural. Things that are alive grow and produce fruit. If your planting yielded nothing or something different than you expected, you would take decisive action. It is the same way with spiritual fruit. Jesus expects that once His Spirit has taken root in our lives, fruit will be developing and growing. Remember, things that are alive, grow! If the fruit of the Lord – traits such as love, joy and peace – are growing in you life day-by-day and year-by-year, something good is going on! If not, something is wrong. And according to Jesus’ parable quoted above, things are going to have to change! To fail to produce fruit is to fail to provide the people around you a witness to the presence of God in the world. Do you know you have huge fruit-bearing potential? You do! Once you believe this and allow God to do His gardening work in your life, slowly, but surely, you will see your life bear a steady crop of spiritual fruit.

Two key reminders here:
  1. if you don't like the fruit in your life (or community if you are a leader), then check what you are sowing...that stuff you don't like didn't come out of nowhere.
  2. be careful when you are judging...be sure it is the fruit you are evaluating and not the appearance of the tree
I have a lot to learn in both areas...

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1 comment:

Lynn Terry said...

This was a terrific post! I was sharing something similiar in my own journal in a post titled Bearing Fruit.

It would be so beautiful to see all Christians nationwide to become so Spirit-filled and bearing their good fruit in their daily life, and in one accord.. that the whole world would have to look and say “Those people are truly blessed! I want what they have! That is the God that I want in MY life!”

reftagger