Do We Get It Backwards?

When you go to the grocery store, you typically see beautiful fruit in the produce section. Most of the time, when you purchase your selected fruit or vegetable, you greatly enjoy it when you eat it. I doubt that you spend much time – if any – thinking about what it took for the farmer to produce that fruit. If you ever do, I doubt that you suppose that the first thing that the farmer did was to work on perfecting that fruit. You will suppose that he first was concerned – in the case of a fruit – with the selection of the tree and making sure that everything in his power was done to cause the tree to be healthy. He anticipated good fruit to be only the final outcome of the process – not the starting point.

Though Paul’s penned words regarding the fruit of the Spirit are illustrative of a great parallel versus literal reality...like trees bearing fruit...the parallel remains true when it comes to how you finally possess the fruit of the Spirit. (Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. - Galatians 5:22-23) You cultivate the Spirit in your life, and the final outcome is good fruit. Long before Paul penned those words, Jesus had already used almost exactly the same illustration regarding trees and fruit. He said that a good tree cannot bear bad fruit and that a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. You can thus know the heart of a person by their outward actions. Matthew 7:16-17. You may have heard lessons challenging us to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit. Is that backwards? Should we not be cultivating the Spirit and then anticipating the outcome to be good fruit? I hope that we all know quite well that cultivating the Spirit is the process of studying the Word, “praying without ceasing”, actively following the Word in practice, and asking for and watching God act in our lives to unceasingly be a blessing to those around us and all people whom we encounter.

-Howell Todd

#MaysvilleMessenger