The Fruit part 3
I want to link a few memory verses together tonight. The first one, since we're talking about the fruit of the Spirit--which is love--is John 15:5 (NLT), "Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing." The vine and the branches. One of the quintessential pictures of God and man. I love it. I think it's so perfect. The vince produces the fruit and the branches bear it. What God has filled us with is what we can give to each other. You can't give what you don't have and you can only give what you do have. So it's important to know what you have. Which is the other verse I want to use today: "A tree is identified by its fruit. If a tree is good, its fruit will be good. If a tree is bad, its fruit will be bad" (Matthew 12:33 NLT). And you guys probably know by now that I'm not going to focus on dwell on the "bad." What I see in this verse is that we can understand ourselves by understanding the tree we are grafted into. When we understand that it is JESUS producing the fruit, we know that fruit will be good. Your true identity is who you are in Christ, which is who Christ is in you. Your true identity is Jesus--God in the flesh, love in a body. God in YOUR flesh, love in YOUR body. So instead of looking AT the mirror and seeing all the surface stuff, all of your mistakes and misdeeds and what have you, we need to start looking INTO the mirror and seeing Jesus. We need to see our roots, if I can say it that way. See where we REALLY come from. See our DNA, which, Spiritually speaking, is the Divine Nature of the Almighty. If the tree is good, the fruit will be good. We are branches of the Tree of Life. The tree is not just good... it is God! And God is love. The fruit (of the Spirit) that the Tree of Life produces--in us, and through us, and as us--is love! A seed can only produce after it's own kind, right? You can't get oranges from apple seeds. The incorruptible seed that is Jesus can only produce one thing: Love. That's the good fruit. That's what we bear. And by bearing it, I mean, that's what we present to the world. That's what we give. Guys, we are living epistles, right? Literally God's love letter to the world. We are the visible face of the invisible God. We are the thing that people can see, and hear, and experience, in order to see, and hear, and experience God's love! God works in mysterious ways because He works through people... and people are mysterious as could be! People do things that don't even make sense to themselves. People are messy. LIFE is messy. Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you deal with it. If you have the tools inside you to deal with it, you can make things better--for you and for those around you. If you know and believe that you have love inside, you can give that love. What you believe is inside you WILL come out. That's how faith works, and that's how powerful faith is. And faith works by love! Love is all-powerful. Which doesn't mean MOST powerful, it means ALL of the power. So we don't need to give anything else power over us. We can live... and love. We can live... BY loving each other. By letting the love inside of us come out (by knowing and believeing that it's in there). We can bear the fruit (again, of the Spirit, which, again, is love) by loving each other. Letting what's inside come out. Filling ourselves to overflowing with what we've already been filled with. Feasting on love--the literal love feast--and sharing that meal with others. That's what this life is all about!