Let me re-draw in your mind this mental picture…we have been looking at it since last Sunday. Picture your life as one of many plants that make up the landscape called life. (The Bible uses this metaphor in many places)

Let's be honest…Some plants are prettier than others but have no real value. Some plants live, it seems, to choke out the life of the plants next to them. Some plants are nothing but thorns and live to poke others but some plants are full of thorns and hurt a bit if you get close to them but the plant itself still seems to still produce some good…. You get the picture???

All plants produce seeds in order to reproduce, but some plants house their seed/s in a bigger, pulpy, good looking shell that we call the plant's fruit.

It's that picture that Jesus applies to our lives. You are to be a fruit bearing plant. Part of being a Christian, the process called sanctification, is God pulling the thorns off of us, or changing us from choking the life out of others to nurturing others. He strips away the "pretty on the outside but worthless on the inside" facade…. But most importantly Jesus demands that our lives become fruit bearing lives.

Our relationship to God must include our willingness to stop being useless or even harmful to others….. and to start bearing fruit with our lives.

The question we wrestled with last Sunday, and again on Wednesday evening was:

Some said …I don't know…what in my life constitutes fruit?...

This is my 30^th year of preaching and until last week I had never seen this before. It was one of those encouraging times, as a preacher, when you're sitting at your computer and you feel like God gives you a little "gift" nugget that is one of the secrets of life.

Here it is… The chief function of fruit is nourishment!

The juicy red apple is not just a glorified seed holder. God could have made every tree, bush, and vine like the pine tree with all the seeds bunched into a cone. None of us would mistakenly cook up a nice pine-cone pie. No… we go looking for some succulent piece of fruit.. we take the seed out…it can be planted in the ground and make a whole new vine, completely independent of the fruit it was housed in.

But the fruit itself…apart from any other part on the tree or vine… is designed to provide nourishment!

Fruit never grows for its own benefit! The chief function of fruit is too give nourishment to others!

So the answer to: "Is my life bearing fruit" is simple: Simply answer the question:

Is my life nourishing other people? Are parts of my life designed solely to feed others? Do the people around me consume parts of what I invest into them and the nourishment they receive from my life causes them to grow in their own lives?

Let me make a couple of comments here…I'll come back to this later… but I want to get these thoughts floating around in our minds.

1) Fruit bearing trees don't eat their own fruit… the fruit is always to benefit someone outher than that tree. ( You could probably stretch the metaphor and say that if nobody eats your fruit it can fall off your tree and rot and provide fertilizer for more of your own personal growth….but if that's your whole purpose for existing you really need to get a life!)

2) Fruit bearing trees don't eat their own seed. In a perfect environment….Somebody else eats your fruit then puts the inner seed back into the ground to grow even more fruit bearing plants.( let that thought hover…I'll get back to how to invest your fruit and seed for the greatest future crop.

II. Fruit Inspecting: I gave you, last week, four aspects of our lives that qualify as fruit:

1) Temperament- disposition - how you act toward others 2) Time- that you give away purely… for the unselfish nourishment of others 3) Talents- Your willingness to share your God given special abilities 4) Treasure- Your willingness to give away your resources, purely, to benefit others.

Why did I put these things in the fruit list? What would make these four things fruit, while other parts of my existence would be bark, or stems, or even thorns. If somebody bumps up against my life and they run into a thorn they are not going to be particularly nourished as a result. (We all know that happens!) If somebody munches on a stem or a branch in my life they are just going to get dentures full of wood.

So… Besides the fact that fruit is nutritious what are some other facts here that will increase our understanding about what makes fruit….fruit?...

Fruit is renewable! Bobi Hoecker gave her sister one of her kidneys. Thank God He made her with two. You can only make that gift twice and your giving is done. I'm sure we could build a metaphor here about giving away our legs or heart but the truth is once you do that once or twice, that's the end of the story.

Fruit is something that when you give it away, you don't end up with less… you ultimately end up with more! The more a fruit vine produces…if it is harvested correctly, and the dead wood around it cut off…. The bigger the next crop will be!

Giving away fruit doesn't leave you with less it leaves you with more! When your life produces fruit and you nourish others with it… you don't find yourself diminished by that amount… God gives you more back than you gave away.

This is so hard for many people to get…I'm not sure why. We try to make it a matter of addition and subtraction. I have twenty four hours…I give away two… I'm now short two hours. I have a thousand dollars…I give God a tithe of 10%...I'm down to just 900.00.

If I could just help you understand this…. That's the way it works in human mathematics. That's not the way it works in heavenly mathematics. When the fruit comes off the vine at just the right time…the same vine, in that place, grows an even bigger juicier pod than before. Do you see that? I'm not making this stuff up…. This is a universal principle laid out in the Bible and I can't make it any plainer than the Bible does….

 2 Corinthians 9:6 Remember this—a farmer who plants only a few seeds will get a small crop. But the one who plants generously will get a generous crop. 7 You must each decide in your heart how much to give. And don’t give reluctantly or in response to pressure. “For God loves a person who gives cheerfully.” 8 And God will generously provide all you need. Then you will always have everything you need and plenty left over to share with others. 10 For God is the one who provides seed for the farmer and then bread to eat. In the same way, he will provide and increase your resources and then produce a great harvest of generosity in you. 11 Yes, you will be enriched in every way so that you can always be generous. (NLT)

If you hang on to every penny you have…if you hoard every minute of every day to be used for yourself you will never have enough of either. I've discovered that some people just never quite grasp this end-over-end heavenly logic. It just doesn't make sense to them that if they give some of their limited resources away… they will not end up with less… they will eventually end up with more.

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People get upset with Pastors for talking about this stuff. Why are you asking me to give up my money?... Why are you trying to shame me into volunteering my time?... Why are you trying to force me to teach a Sunday School class or work on the new church?... You just need to get up there and preach the truth of the Bible and quit meddling in my personal life!........ (right!) ......

I couldn't be a good Pastor and know that this was a fundamental truth of the Bible and not share it with you. I've watched so many people, here, over the last seventeen years, finally catch on to this truth about giving. I've watched some of you go from having a few hard little pieces of fruit in your lives to having branches full of nutritious fruit from which you are constantly feeding many in this Body.

I've seen people in this church who didn't have enough money to pay their bills, and certainly didn’t have enough to give God a tithe (10%) go ahead and start giving to God anyway, and I've seen those same people go on to not only have enough for themselves but they have, eventually, been able to give much larger amounts to building these churches in other countries or building the new church on Huffman Road.

How could I possibly know that this was one of God universal principles that never varies from culture to culture, or generation to generation… and not share it with you.

This Cycle of Reciprocity goes beyond the positive fruit in our lives. It's even true of our negative characteristics. Watch this….

Luke 6:35 “Love your enemies! Do good to them. Lend to them without expecting to be repaid. Then your reward from heaven will be very great, and you will truly be acting as children of the Most High, for he is kind to those who are unthankful and wicked. 36 You must be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate…….  

Let me apply this back to the first "T" on our list. Temperament/Disposition.

1) Temperament- disposition - how you act toward others... As we grow, in Christ, our attitudes and actions (fruit) should become more and more nourishing to those our lives affect.

Why would I include this in the list of fruit?... This one, the Bible literally calls our fruit.

Galatians 5:22 But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!

You can apply the Luke 6 passage we just read to each one of these. When you give away patience it will nourish those you give it to. Amazingly, when you give away that piece of fruit you are not left with less patience but with more… The next batch that grows is bigger and more nourishing than the batch you gave away. Your love, and kindness, and faithfulness will grow in direct proportion to how much you use what you have to nourish the lives of others. That's why it’s called fruit… and when you give it away… the next crop will be bigger than the last…

Let me expose the negative side of this principle… I've seen people who don't/won't apply this principle in their lives… but they still want to reap the benefits of the principle.

God, I need more time… OK how much time have you given away…. Duh, none, that's the problem… I don't have enough time now… I can't give away time when I don't have enough. (Do you see how self-defeating this process becomes?)

I've watched people… (I am not talking about, or even thinking about, anyone here today) I've watched people who were struggling with the time constraints in their lives… they finally decided that something had to go out of their busy schedule…. Guess what they decided to eliminate? _____________ Exactly!

They traded their fruit-bearing activities so that they could have more of the benefits that only bearing fruit can bring! The same thing, often, happens with the giving of money. When people get tight financially, the first thing they often eliminate is their financial gifts to God and others…. Which is cutting off the very thing that would have brought more of that fruit into their lives.

I never see who gives what in this church…It is very carefully kept from me by design…so I can say this with absolute detachment:

If you are tight financially (and many are) the worst thing you could possibly do is cut off fruit bearing in that part of your life. If you do… it will have exactly the opposite effect of what logic tells you that action will produce.

Fruit given away always produces, richer, fuller, more nutritious fruit, every time, in every circumstance, without fail…

Jesus compares giving away the fruit of what God has blessed us with… as the ultimate type of eternal investing…

Picture Englebert going over to First National and giving them a withdrawal slip for 1000.00. The financial associate (teller) looks up his account and says. I can't honor this withdrawal because you didn't make any deposits….

Time

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Fruit of Spirit