By Ashlie Miller
While many are trekking to farms to select the perfect pumpkin, my family was behind on getting to the apple orchard. As my husband puts it, “You don’t go to an apple orchard because you need apples. If you need apples, you go to the grocery store.” This excursion was to connect with our adult son in Western NC at a midway point where we could enjoy lots of time together for the day – Hendersonville, NC.
Because it is nearing the end of the apple-picking season, we should have considered the scavenger hunt that lay ahead of us. For several rows, it was more like a search for one good apple. Fermented, rotting apples blanketed the ground beneath the trees. They were beauties from a distance. Bright reds and supple greens. But for human consumption, they were less than desirable – riddled with holes, yellow jackets, other bugs, and mushy.
After hiking several rows back and moving toward the center of the rows, we victoriously discovered ripe apples in abundance on the trees. It took no time for a family of 7 to fill up a bushel box.
There are so many words to describe a delicious apple: crisp, tart or sweet, crunchy, juicy, delectable, rosy, or maybe golden, shiny, ripe. Those aren’t separate things, but multiple characteristics – each one as important as the other – of one fruit.
Such is the case with the fruit of the Spirit. Rather than some Christians having one variety of fruit and others having another, each should be growing in all aspects through their journey of sanctification. At first glance, Galatians 5:22-23 looks like a list of things a Christian should achieve by hard work. But another list, the works of the flesh in verses 19-21, are the exhausting works of sensuality, never bringing the satisfaction of the fruit that God brings forth in the life of a Christian believer.
“Ah, but I know many nonChristians who display love, joy, patience, etc.” God, in His goodness, has given common grace to all humanity. After all, God made each of us in His image. Since He is a God of love, joy, patience, etc., it is only natural that His creation would display some of those qualities. But much like the rotting fruit on the ground, separated from the tree, those qualities eventually disintegrate. An earthly, temporal display of love and goodness is not the same as an enduring, eternal fruit of love and goodness.
Further, when we focus on the fruit rather than God, we work by our own efforts to have something that resembles fruit. And that work leads to sins of debauchery and taking things into our own hands to manipulate what looks like love, joy, and goodness. In the upside-down world we manifest, that ends up looking like perversions of love, spiritual efforts that deny God’s authority, and a multitude of offenses in our relationship with others (again, see Galatians 5:19-21 for that list).
Works of the flesh are exhausting and unfulfilling because it is a result of my own narcissism. It pretends to care about others, but really, it is an effort to heal myself or prove myself to others by my own efforts. Fruit is evidence of the submission of the work of the Holy Spirit when I focus on God first and then others. One of these things pretends to love others but idolizes self at the expense of others; the other is true selfless, sacrificial love that trusts God to provide all good things to and through us as His children.
