Good & Bad Fruit // Lesson from the Garden

Hello darlings!

Summer is coming to an end.
This was clear to me as I was out in our garden harvesting the last of the delicious plums from the tree in our backyard. They were littered all over the ground underneath the tree.
As we have been quite busy, we weren't able to keep up with the amount of plums this tree was producing.
So as I was trying to salvage as many good plums as I could from the ground I had to pick through the already rotting plums to find the good ones.

I would see a plum that looked perfectly fine but as I picked it up and turned it over I found that it was either rotten or being eaten away by half a dozen bees.

This formed an analogy in my mind.

Sometimes a Christian's life will look great on the outside or from the side they show the world but in reality they are rotting on the inside.
They put up a front, a show, to make it look as though they are following Christ but in the shadows they lead a life of sin.

Jesus called out the Pharisees and scribes on this very issue. On the outside the Pharisees appeared to lead righteous lives. But their hearts weren't in it.
They were not actively pursuing a relationship with the Lord.

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness.

So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness."

Matthew 23:27-28 (emphasis added)

Lets look at the root of this problem.

"A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit."

Matthew 7:18

I believe that this, shall we say heart condition, is a result of an 'unhealthy' or 'diseased' heart.
Like the Pharisees, we can sometimes have knowledge of God and the Bible and do all the Christian things, but in our hearts we don't personally and intimately know God and so cannot follow him well.

There needs to be a balance or head knowledge and heart knowledge in our walk with Christ.

Challenge

Here is a challenge for us all.

- Does your heart resemble a lovely juicy plum or a bad rotting plum?
- What fruit is your life producing?

"For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit."

Luke 6:43

As I was reading the verse above I read further into this chapter and discovered Luke 6:45.

"The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.

Luke 6:45

So my point is this, if we truly treasure God and His Word and seek a relationship with him, our hearts are 'healthy' and our lives will produce fruit.

Let us all be real Jesus-loving, Christians whose lives produce much fruit the radiates Christ!

I hope my rambling made sense and that you got something out if this post.

keep blooming,