Week 16, Day 5: Known By Our Fruit

Today’s Reading:  Matthew 9:1-10:42

Some thoughts from yesterday’s reading…

In Matthew 7:15-23, Jesus told His audience that a tree is known by the fruit that it produces.  A tree cannot deceive a person by producing something different than its kind.  He tells us that grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor figs from thistles.  A person knows what kind of plant to go to if he wants to get grapes or figs.  Jesus went on to say that a good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor could a bad tree produce good fruit.  So, you can tell a good tree by the kind of fruit it produces, and a bad tree by its fruit.

The application for us is that we are like the “trees.”  We can know the nature, or character of a person by looking at the fruit that they are bearing.  Are we, as Christians, bearing good fruit for God?  Or is our “fruit” something less that satisfactory?  This passage gets to the heart of many people’s attitudes.  How many people want to talk about how faithful they are to God, and how much they do in service to Him, but when you start looking, their “fruit” tells you a completely different story?  In verses 21-23, Jesus addresses those who would say that they were doing the will of God, but were not really putting the instructions of Jesus into practice.  Jesus was not (and is not) going to be deceived by those who simply tried to serve Him with words, but ignored the deeds.

It is interesting that in these verses, there were people who claimed to have done many things in the “name of Jesus”, and yet His response was that He never knew them.  Even though they may have done “something”, it was not what Jesus was requiring of them.  Their fruit was bad because it was not the kind of fruit that Jesus was looking for.  The same thing can be true today.  There are many people who are active “in the name of Jesus”, but they are busy about things that Jesus has never asked them to do.  We need to abide by the Word that has been revealed so that we can know that the fruit that we bear is good fruit, and acceptable to Christ!

We certainly don’t want to hear the words found in Matthew 7:23.  But, if we are not faithful to Him, then we will have to hear them.  We need to tend our trees, so that we produce fruit that will last into eternity!

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