Tag Archives: fruit

Do you need a trim or a pruning? (John 15:1-4), April 4, 2017

Today’s Podcast

Thanks for joining me today for “A Little Walk with God.” I’m your host Richard Agee.
I’m not a gardener as anyone who knows me can attest. But I do know the difference between trimming and pruning. We don’t mind trims, but most of us don’t care for pruning very much.
Scripture
1. John 15:1-4
2. Jesus: I am the true vine, and My Father is the keeper of the vineyard. My Father examines every branch in Me and cuts away those who do not bear fruit. He leaves those bearing fruit and carefully prunes them so that they will bear more fruit; already you are clean because you have heard My voice. Abide in Me, and I will abide in you. A branch cannot bear fruit if it is disconnected from the vine, and neither will you if you are not connected to Me.
Devotional
1. I don’t have any fruit trees in my yard anymore. I do have several bush and I try to keep them reasonably shaped so I don’t get nastygrams from my Home Owners’ Association.
  1. Want to keep them all about the same size and shape
  2. Don’t want sprigs poking out everywhere
  3. Want them to be need and attractive from the street
  4. I trim them occasionally to make them look okay when driving past the house
  5. I have never pruned them
2. Took a trip to Disneyland a few years ago
  1. Bushes formed in the shape of cartoon characters
  2. Takes careful pruning to ensure each branch retains the right amount of foliage and grows in the right direction to form those familiar shapes
  3. Pruning takes away what might look like good healthy branches, but they are not contributing to the purpose for which the gardener planted that particular bush
  4. Looks good, but the wrong direction, the wrong growth, non-contributor to the cause
3. Fruit trees are like that
  1. Orchards filled with trees that are not very tall
  2. Produce extraordinary crops
  3. Every branch that doesn’t produce fruit is removed
  4. It doesn’t contribute to the purpose for which the tree was planted
  5. Just soaks up nutrients that the fruit bearing branches could use to produce more and better fruit
4. Jesus wants to do that for us
  1. Prunes us
  2. Wants to take away everything that doesn’t produce fruit
  3. Wants to remove the things that just soak up time and energy with no purpose
  4. Wants to transform us into His likeness
5. Doesn’t want to just trim the edges to make us look good from a distance; wants to prune us to make us better, more productive in His kingdom
If you want to learn more about my church, you can find us at SAF.church. If you like the devotional, share it with someone. If you don’t, tell me. I hope you’ll join me again tomorrow for “A Little Walk with God.”

The Voice Bible Copyright © 2012 Thomas Nelson, Inc. The Voice™ translation © 2012 Ecclesia Bible Society All rights reserved. In accordance with the requirements for FTC full disclosure, I may have affiliate relationships with some or all of the producers of the items mentioned in this post who may provide a small commission to me when purchased through this site.

Produce some spiritual fruit (Luke 6:43-45) October 8, 2016

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Today’s Podcast

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Today’s Bible reading plan:

Read it in a year – Acts 5-6

see the whole year’s plan [here](http://www.bible-reading.com/bible-plan.pdf)

Today’s Devotional

Luke 6:43-45
Jesus: Count on this: no good tree bears bad fruit, and no bad tree bears good fruit. You can know a tree by the fruit it bears. You don’t find figs on a thorn bush, and you can’t pick grapes from a briar bush. It’s the same with people. A person full of goodness in his heart produces good things; a person with an evil reservoir in his heart pours out evil things. The heart overflows in the words a person speaks; your words reveal what’s within your heart.

What do Jesus’ words mean for us today?

We don’t know much about fruit trees in our modern society. We go to the grocery’s produce aisle and get our fruit from all over the world and it just sort of shows up. And we get apples and oranges and grapes and strawberries and every other kind of fruit almost any time of year. We get pretty spoiled because we assume that everything just grows all the time because we can get it all the time. Sometimes the prices fluctuate pretty wildly and we don’t always understand why.

Of course the reason is that every fruit has its own growing season. And some of the fruit we get in the off season comes from some pretty exotic places or from large greenhouses where they can regulate the artificial sunlight and temperatures to simulate the natural environment where the fruit normally grows. We forget it costs a lot to artificially create what God makes for us for free. So we complain about the high prices of fruit, but pay the money or move on to something that is a little less expensive.

If you really look at the fruit that comes into the market, you’ll find that some is better than others, even among the fruit in the bin. And if you eat enough fruit from the store, invariably, you’ll come across a piece or two that really looks good, but really tastes bad. Why? I don’t know. I’m not an arborist, but I can come back to this verse and tell you that it was a bad tree that grew that bad fruit. And I would bet that when the grower finds out that the tree is producing bad fruit, that tree will be cut down and replaced with seed or sprouts from a good tree.

Fruit orchards and farms are continually planting and replacing trees and plants to get the best fruit and the best harvest possible. Even in those fancy greenhouses, some of the plants must be replaced because something will happen within the seed or the mix of nutrients or the way a stalk or limb grows and the fruit will not meet the standards set by the growers or the buyers. The grower rips out the bad producer and replants a new one expecting a better return.

So what does fruit have to do with us? God made us to produce fruit. Not the kind you eat, but spiritual fruit. The kind Paul talks about in his letter to the church in the city of Galatia. God created us to produce unconditional love, joy, peace, patience, kindheartedness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. But unlike fruit trees that only produce one kind of fruit, He wants us to produce all of these all the time. Paul talks about fruit, not fruits of the spirit. God wants to see all nine of these develop in us as we walk with Him each day.

Just like a good arborist, God will work on our lives to help us produce a good crop of these characteristics if we let Him. Sometimes that process will be painful. Sometimes it’s necessary to chop off branches that are not producing fruit or that are diseased. Sometimes it’s necessary to prune the limbs so they can better use the nutrients in the soil. Sometimes it means we will go through some pretty tough trials for God to shape us into the person He intends us to become. Just like those trees in the orchard or the plants on the farm, careful tending produces the best crops.

Sometimes I think it’s a little unfortunate that most of our kids have never been to a working farm. They don’t understand the nature of life and death as well as past generations. They don’t understand the cycle of life that begins with a tiny seed, goes through the growing season, produces a harvest, and provides seed again for the cycle to begin again. They don’t know the work it takes to put food in the markets where we push our carts around and pick the vegetables and fruit we want to consume. We’ve lost a lot of the wonder of nature because of our urban and suburban lifestyles.

So do you want to learn about Jesus’ words and really put them to heart? Go visit an orchard. There is probably one not too far from where you live. Make a day trip of it one weekend and learn about growing fruit. Find out from the grower the process of taking care of those trees and find out the story behind that bushel of fruit he sells. Then with that knowledge in mind, let God the perfect gardener help you produce the best spiritual fruit you can.

The Voice Bible Copyright © 2012 Thomas Nelson, Inc. The Voice™ translation © 2012 Ecclesia Bible Society All rights reserved.
In accordance with the requirements for FTC full disclosure, I may have affiliate relationships with some or all of the producers of the items mentioned in this post who may provide a small commission to me when purchased through this site.

The solution to logs and specks (Luke 6:41-42) October 7, 2016

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Today’s Podcast

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Today’s Bible reading plan:

Read it in a year – Micah

see the whole year’s plan [here](http://www.bible-reading.com/bible-plan.pdf)

Today’s Devotional

Luke 6:41-42
Jesus: Speaking of blindness: Why do you focus on the speck in your brother’s eye? Why don’t you see the log in your own? How can you say to your brother, “Oh, brother, let me help you take that little speck out of your eye,” when you don’t even see the big log in your own eye? What a hypocrite! First, take the log out of your own eye. Then you’ll be able to see clearly enough to help your brother with the speck in his eye.

What do Jesus’ words mean for us today?

You meet all kinds of people in a lifetime. And you meet all kinds of people in the military. While part of the Army’s Medical Department I ran into all kinds of folks. One in particular I thought about when I read these words today was a physicians’ assistant who worked with me for a while when I was a young officer. One of the responsibilities of the medical platoon I ran at the time was watching over the health of the soldiers assigned to the battalion to which it was assigned. The PA was the primary care provider for that platoon and so for the battalion.

It always amazed me when I heard him talking to soldiers about how they should change their diets, exercise more, or take the meds he prescribed for them. This was in the days just after the Viet Nam war and sometimes NCOs and Warrant Officers and Officers were not always what you would call kind in their instructions to subordinates, and this PA could string together expletives like no one I’d ever heard before in my young life.

The reason I bring up the way he talked to soldiers about their bad habits in their unhealthy living is because he smoked like a chimney. He had a 2 1/2 pack a day habit and smoked unfiltered camels. And worse still, he usually had a plug of tobacco in his mouth while he smoked! Talk about an unhealthy habit. Unless you have lived on a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with no communication since 1960, you know how bad smoking is for your health. Proven increased lung, mouth, and throat cancer rates. Proven increased heart disease. Proven increased incidents of birth defects in fetuses. Proven addictive behavior for those who smoke. The statistics from study after study show smoking is one of the worst things you can do to your body.

But my PA…smoking like a chimney the whole time he chewed out a soldier for his bad health habits. Could he not see the log in his eye before trying to tackle the speck in his brother’s eye? It was no wonder the soldiers under his care didn’t listen to his advice. How could they? He was a hypocrite. He talked to these eighteen to twenty year old kids about their vices when as a forty year old, he violated them all.

Am I guilty of doing the same? Are you? It’s worth some introspection more than just every once in a while. We need to be on our guard because it’s an easy game Satan will use with us. “Hey, look what she’s doing. As a new Christian, you need to teach her the ropes before she gets too far out of line.” “Hey, did you see him? He better get himself straight or he’ll be headed straight to hell with that attitude.”

It is so easy to find the faults of others and never see those in your own life. We get comfortable with ours. We don’t notice the harm our habits reek on us, but we can almost always see the pain others cause. It’s an amazing thing built into our DNA as part of Adam’s race. We just seem to look for the bad in people instead of looking for the good and in turn, we recognize our best but not our worst.

So what do we do about it? How can we stop the cycle that seems almost impossible to stop? First, a good rule to adopt is the one my grandmother taught me that I’m sure you’ve heard before. “If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all.” That will stop the criticism.

Second, let Jesus become Lord of you life. He will begin to show you the things you need to change about you. But He won’t just point them out, He will help you fix them. He will transform you and make you more like Himself. He will help you bear fruit like love, joy, peace, patience, kindheartedness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. He will make you better than you could ever become on your own.

Third, when Jesus is Lord of your life, you will begin to see others the way He sees them. Jesus always seemed to see others the way He created them. Remember what God said about everything He made at creation? It’s recorded in Genesis 1. And God saw that it was good. So He finds the good in His creation because He made us and know why He made us. He knows we can be redeemed from the sin infested world in which we live. When He lives in us, we can see others through His eyes and see the good in them.

The Voice Bible Copyright © 2012 Thomas Nelson, Inc. The Voice™ translation © 2012 Ecclesia Bible Society All rights reserved.
In accordance with the requirements for FTC full disclosure, I may have affiliate relationships with some or all of the producers of the items mentioned in this post who may provide a small commission to me when purchased through this site.

Beware false prophets (Matthew 7:15-20) February 3, 2016

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Today’s Podcast

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Today’s Bible reading plan:

Read it in a year – Psalms 12-18

see the whole year’s plan [here](http://www.bible-reading.com/bible-plan.pdf)

Today’s Devotional

Matthew 7:15-20
Jesus: Along the way, watch out for false prophets. They will come to you in sheep’s clothing, but underneath that quaint and innocent wool, they are hungry wolves. But you will recognize them by their fruits. You don’t find sweet, delicious grapes growing on thorny bushes, do you? You don’t find delectable figs growing in the midst of prickly thistles. People and their lives are like trees. Good trees bear beautiful, tasty fruit, but bad trees bear ugly, bitter fruit. A good tree cannot bear ugly, bitter fruit; nor can a bad tree bear fruit that is beautiful and tasty. And what happens to the rotten trees? They are cut down. They are used for firewood. When a prophet comes to you and preaches this or that, look for his fruits: sweet or sour? rotten or ripe?

What do Jesus’ words mean for us today?

There are a lot of false prophets out there now days. They were around in Jesus’ time, thrived during the days of the early church, and keep on truckin’ today. In fact, if I read my Bible right, they will be around until Jesus comes again. And guess where they do their best work. If you guessed in the church, you’d be right. It’s sad, but true.

They come in with all the right words. They look religious. They quote long passages of scripture to prove their point. But when you look at their lives, they are empty shells with nothing inside. No real life. Nothing to show on the inside that would point anyone to Christ and His truth. Yet many will fall for their flattering words and mystic sounding phrases and follow them anywhere. Just look at the number of people that followed Jimmie Jones and David Koresh. Those two made national headlines because of the scores of people who died because of their false teaching, but there are dozens like them that don’t get the mass attention but are just as dangerous.

The false teachers typically pick a verse or two and blow it out of proportion to the rest of scriptures. They hang their hat on those few scriptures and build a religion around them. Then work to convince the ignorant that everyone else is wrong. I did say ignorant and it has nothing to do with IQ. It has to do with whether or not you study God’s word. Not the flavor of the month the false teachers give, but God’s word. Dare the false prophets to use any other translation than their own and see what happens. See, the beautiful thing about God’s Spirit working in the lives of His servants is that all the legitimate translations I’ve every read, and I’ve read about 30 of them through from cover to cover at this point, all say the same thing about God, Jesus, His Son, salvation by faith, good works as a demonstration of faith, a final judgment for all people who ever lived, an accountability for our actions, eternal destinations for those who believe in Jesus as the way of salvation and those who do not.

Every single translation I’ve read says the same things about those essential elements of the Christian faith. Without exception. So when someone tries to introduce something that contradicts the greater voice of all those translations that survived through centuries of scholarly criticism, I question the single voice. Those false prophets will try to twist scripture the same way Satan tried to twist scripture in his temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. The issue is, how do we discover the false teacher from the real thing?

The answer is simple. First, know the scriptures. Read God’s word and test what your teachers tell you. Go look it up for yourself. Put those thoughts and instructions back into the context of the whole Bible and the whole story or passage from which it came. Don’t let your teacher take a phrase or verse or two out of context and twist it around. Jeremiah 29:11 is one of my favorites for pointing out how we can twist scripture. It’s a great verse. Jeremiah gives the exiles a great promise from God: For I know the plans I have for you,” says the Eternal, “plans for peace, not evil, to give you a future and hope—never forget that.

What we seldom remember, is that God’s plans included continued exile for another 70 years, then only a small remnant of those who departed would return. Jeremiah wrote these words in around 570 BC. Israel didn’t have sovereign reign of their land again until the peace accords after World War II. That’s 2500 years before their future and hope of a sovereign nation came to fruition. So be careful what those prophets tell you. Go look it up! See what’s right! Listen to God more than you listen to man!

Second, look at the fruit of the teacher. Does he or she produce good fruit? Do you see the fruit of the spirit evident in his or her life? Do he have to fake it? Do his children tell you he’s the same person at home that he is at church? How does she treat those who work for her? Do you see good fruit there? How about at the grocery store and other places in public? Is he short with waitresses or does he treat them with the same gentle spirit you would expect from Jesus? What fruit do you see? It doesn’t take long for tree to show the kind of fruit it bears. Just look around and you’ll see it. Follow the good fruit bearer. You’ll be glad you did.

The Voice Bible Copyright © 2012 Thomas Nelson, Inc. The Voice™ translation © 2012 Ecclesia Bible Society All rights reserved.
In accordance with the requirements for FTC full disclosure, I may have affiliate relationships with some or all of the producers of the items mentioned in this post who may provide a small commission to me when purchased through this site.

Pruning the vines (John 15:1-17) December 23, 2015

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Today’s Podcast

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Today’s Scriptures

Today’s Bible reading plans include:

Ready -John 15:1-17

Set – John 15-17

Go! -John 15-18

John 15:1-17
Jesus: ¹ I am the true vine, and My Father is the keeper of the vineyard. ² My Father examines every branch in Me and cuts away those who do not bear fruit. He leaves those bearing fruit and carefully prunes them so that they will bear more fruit; ³ already you are clean because you have heard My voice. ⁴ Abide in Me, and I will abide in you. A branch cannot bear fruit if it is disconnected from the vine, and neither will you if you are not connected to Me.
⁵ I am the vine, and you are the branches. If you abide in Me and I in you, you will bear great fruit. Without Me, you will accomplish nothing. ⁶ If anyone does not abide in Me, he is like a branch that is tossed out and shrivels up and is later gathered to be tossed into the fire to burn. ⁷ If you abide in Me and My voice abides in you, anything you ask will come to pass for you. ⁸ Your abundant growth and your faithfulness as My followers will bring glory to the Father.
⁹ I have loved you as the Father has loved Me. Abide in My love. ¹⁰ Follow My example in obeying the Father’s commandments and receiving His love. If you obey My commandments, you will stay in My love. ¹¹ I want you to know the delight I experience, to find ultimate satisfaction, which is why I am telling you all of this.
¹² My commandment to you is this: love others as I have loved you. ¹³ There is no greater way to love than to give your life for your friends. ¹⁴ You celebrate our friendship if you obey this command. ¹⁵ I don’t call you servants any longer; servants don’t know what the master is doing, but I have told you everything the Father has said to Me. I call you friends. ¹⁶ You did not choose Me. I chose you, and I orchestrated all of this so that you would be sent out and bear great and perpetual fruit. As you do this, anything you ask the Father in My name will be done. ¹⁷ This is My command to you: love one another.

Today’s Devotional

From today’s background scripture God might say:

Here again I gave My disciples a metaphor that was very clear to them, but perhaps not as clear to you, so let Me explain a little. Vineyards grew everywhere in Judea. Almost everyone had their own small vineyard, in fact. Anyone who owned property grew a small garden to raise some vegetables and grapes. Vegatables to eat and grapes to drink. Wine was important to everyone because the surface water in Judea is exceedingly poor to drink. The rivers flow fast and pick up a lot of dirt and silt as they flow down the mountainside. You just can’t drink it. So from an early age, wine with meals just happens.

Fermentation allows the alcohol in the wine to kill the bacteria in the water with which children’s wine is commonly diluted. But everyone drank something other than surface water in My day. So everyone knew about vineyards and how to grow grapes. You probably get grapes from your grocery and may have never seen a vineyard except in pictures. But it’s hard work to maintain a good vineyard. The growers take great care of their vines.

Those branches without fruit, though, take up precious water and nutrients from the soil and do nothing except grow useless branches and leaves without giving anything back. So the grower cuts off those branches, removes them from the vineyard and burns them. They aren’t good for anything. They’re not strong enough for making things. They’re hollow, but porous, so you can’t even use them as straws. They’re crooked so not really useful at all. They usual have a foul odor when you burn them, so they’re not even good for kindling. So the grower makes a pile of the branches, lets them dry and burns them in a great heap.

The good grower also cuts off the runners from the branches that grow fruit so that those runners don’t take away extra nutrients from the fruit. Once again, those runners are useless, so they also go into the heap and end up as part of the blaze. If you’re the vine, the cutting might sound painful, but it is necessary for production of the best crop.

The same happens metaphorically between God and His creation. Those who do not obey Me and therefore do not obey Him, are like the branches that do not produce fruit. He cuts them off and burns them in the fire. They will forever be separated from Him at the end of time. Those who do follow Me and therefore obey Him, He still prunes so they produce the best fruit possible. Pruning is an important part of the growing process. He cuts away those parts of us that are unproductive, ineffective, useless to His plan and His kingdom. It may seem painful when He prunes things from our lives, but remember the Father is God, the Creator. He knows how best to use you and how best to help you grow. Trust Him to prune your life for your best advantage as the perfecter of your faith.

The Voice Bible Copyright © 2012 Thomas Nelson, Inc. The Voice™ translation © 2012 Ecclesia Bible Society All rights reserved.
In accordance with the requirements for FTC full disclosure, I may have affiliate relationships with some or all of the producers of the items mentioned in this post who may provide a small commission to me when purchased through this site.