Imagine that you had an apple tree in your yard and that it was able to speak. Your speaking apple tree was placed right next to where you park your car, so every day you had to walk right by it. All winter, spring, and summer long, the apple tree loudly said to you, “I just wanted to remind you that I’m an apple tree. I will grow apples, apples that are healthy, delicious and nourishing! My roots are strong, and my branches are about to grow and produce. Just you wait and see how much of an apple tree I really am and the abundance of apples that
I give you.”
Fast forward now to September, October, and November. It’s finally the season for apples and you obviously can’t wait to go and retrieve them. Your apple tree spent several months now hyping up these apples which would add to the excitement of the harvest. You may even have told family and friends to come pick these apples with you, based on what the tree said. The time has finally arrived; it’s autumn and the harvest is here. We’re going to have fresh apples, pies, cider, juices, caramel apples; apples galore and plenty to share.
As you approach the tree you can’t believe your eyes. On the branches of the apple tree that convinced you with its words, there’s no healthy apples hanging. You search the branches and can’t find one apple that is appealing to the eye or nourishing to the body. They are all rotten already, not to mention small, and the rest have worms already eating through them. All of the apple tree’s words didn’t amount to anything at all. Your apple basket is completely empty and you’re even questioning if this tree is an apple tree at all.
A tree isn’t known by its words; it’s known by its fruit.
In the modern-day Christian Church in America, we’ve made it all about the hype. Large signs, flashing lights, freshly painted buildings, and newly paved parking lots. We fill up large, expensive conference centers with people who are excited to see the latest best-selling author. We are high on hype, everyone is, because the tree has been telling us daily to get excited for its coming apples.
While there certainly isn’t anything wrong with being excited or the building looking tidy and presentable, the whole point of it all is the apples, the good fruits being produced in us and through us. All the outside hype should be with the goal in mind to challenge us, change us, and turn our hearts into such a healthy apple tree that many are being nourished through our words, deeds, and our character as a whole. Certainly not perfect character, but good, nonetheless.
Can people who are hungry spiritually, physically, and emotionally come to find nourishment at this tree? Can someone walk in right off the street and tell immediately that this is as healthy an apple tree as the huge sign says outside? Can someone who doesn’t speak the same language as the people inside yet knows something about fruit trees, simply look at the tree’s branches and see how healthy they are spiritually?
Can the poor find sustenance in this tree? Can children who are abused, outcasted, and damaged find safety in its branches? Can people who don’t fit our agenda or clean up nicely enough to enter the fancy conference center? Can they sit in the tree’s shade and find a place to rest for a moment? Is the lonely traveler, the vagabond welcome to pick from this tree? Is Jesus truly the one tending to this tree? Pruning, watering, nourishing, and growing it as only He can? Or is there a different gardener at work that has yet to produce any good fruit?
Will there be good fruit on this apple tree when the time for harvest comes?
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.
– Galatians 5:22-23
