The fruit we bear
No matter who you or what you believe in, we are all growing into something. Every day, we make choices in our life that impact what we ultimately grow into. From a Christian perspective, we grow into what God has planted within us from the very beginning, our identity in Him as His sons and daughters. Or, we can let that seed wither and grow something else in our garden. The choice is ours.
And anything we grow outside of what God intended won’t really give us what we want. It won’t last. If it’s sweet, it will eventually turn sour. If it’s vibrant, it will quickly fade.
Let’s say you’re a Gardener. And you’re responsible for what grows in your garden. Every garden has basic needs to flourish - plenty of water, access to sunlight and lots of weeding. Under this thoughtful care, the seed will grow tall and strong in its thriving environment.
But let’s say you do the opposite: you completely ignore it. The ground will get infiltrated with rocks and other objects, sucking away all the soil-enriching nutrients. The garden will be left to the wills of its own environment, so weeds thickly spring up in its place.
Instead of grabbing a pair of tough gloves and carefully removing all the weeds, you still water your garden. But now, what’s the problem? While your seed may be getting that water, you’ll also be watering the weeds. And while barely noticeable at first, they will slowly overtake your seedling.
In either scenario, you’ve neglected the weeds.
Taking this out of the analogy, if you want to grow as a Christian, you must remove the weeds from your life before they overtake your life. If we aren’t vigilant, our life will veer further and further from God.
It’s incredibly easy to live an apathetic life and to lose your focus on God. In our Christian life, there’s no drifting or coasting. If we start to coast or go on auto-pilot, our own desires will take over. Because we simply don’t automatically choose God. You may still do things like go to church, have Christian friends and read the Bible every once in a while. But if God isn’t your focus, you’ll do those things out of obligation and not out of love for Him.
If you’re honest with yourself, are you compelled by His character? Or has He become quite bland to you or even unattractive? You may have been avoiding to ask yourself those deep, hard questions of coming to grips with your relationship with God. But if you never confront them, you’ll grow anyway. You’ll just grow away from God. And your church-going, Bible reading, ad-hoc prayers will be nothing more to you than following a habitual norm you’ve set for yourself.
So your garden will grow other things. And you may not even notice that the seed God gave you has already been smothered by the weeds coiled around it. You’re busy tending to other things.
Or perhaps you aren’t apathetic at all. Maybe you love the idea of God in your life. Your life looks very similar to that of a Christian, but you lack a real genuine love for God. In your garden, you may have gone to the store and purchased other seeds that looked like the one God gave you and planted them instead. You believe that your version of God and the gospel is better than God Himself.
So, you do all the Christianly things, but very different fruit bursts through your soil. You may have convinced yourself that your knowledge of God is better than others, so you look down on them. Judge them even. You serve God at church, in your home and at work. But you do it so you feel better about yourself, not out of a genuine desire to love and please God.
You are so content in your spiritual status that you are blinded to the garden you are tending. But you water away, growing stronger and stronger in your spiritually empty garden.
Regardless of the garden we grow, we are always watering something. And what we water gives it growth in our lives. And eventually, the fruit we bear grows up.
What are you watering in your garden?
