Everyone who knows me knows I love bananas and eat a lot of them. A lot of people don’t know what good fruit looks and taste like. Some people think bananas with brown spots mean they are bad, and useless. I was in a final last semester and had gotten one hour of sleep so I pulled out a banana with some brown spots and the kid behind me (still taking his test mind you) said, “please, don’t eat that”. One thing I bet he didn’t know is that brown spots don’t destroy the nutrition in this delicious fruit and can actually make them sweeter in the end.
Stay with me guys, I promise there is a spiritual point to all this.
Now take Avocados for example. They can go bad fast & sometimes it can be hard to tell what you’re really getting. You come home ready to eat a guacomole and cut it open to find out it’s not good and you just throw the whole thing out.
The same thing can be true with our spiritual fruit. Things in our life can be seen as dead and therefore nothing can come from them. Thankfully we have a God who can bring LIFE through death.
This morning I was reading Romans 7 for my She Reads Truth Romans plan and the Lord helped me see and learn things that are too good not to share. Often, we don’t see the fruit as it is being produced, like Annie’s husband who planted a avacodo pit in the ground and didn’t really think about. Other times we see the hard grueling labor of grafting, and transferring the plant from pot to pot untill its ready to make a beautiful apple tree in the ground.
Romans 7:4 says, “Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God”.
Being the apple tree in one season of life, and feeling like you’re working to bear that fruit and it is just dead can make you wonder if God even sees them? Do they matter? I often wonder this with my studies. What is going to come out of this in the next year? Is there a fruitful tree waiting for me on the other side?
In another season, being the avocado tree is hard because throughout the process you feel like nothing is changing and it’s a slow process. All you see are the dead days, and you still ask the same question you ask of the apple tree, “does this matter? does God see this tree?”
When Jesus came back, fully alive, he gave us a way to die to the flesh and alive to Christ, and to become a new creation. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come”.
Romans 7:4 tells us we belong to God, so dear friends, take heart, God sees you. You matter. He brings death to life. He can take what seem like the slowest most barren places in your life and bring them to life! God can take the grueling work of the apple tree and bear many apples from it.
So often, we look to the finished project. The people we are pouring into, direct results from the work we are doing, or whatever it may be for you. Perhaps we should be looking to the beauty in the steps of the apple tree, the fruit our fruit produces. The apple trees for the years to come — people of the people you pour into.
Take heart friends, nothing is of waste. Everything is a tool in God’s toolbox.
Things take time — sancitification is a life long process.
My hope is that our apples, or oranges, or whatever type of fruit the Lord is pruning in your life this season, whether easy or hard, that it is helping us ever get back to the complete and perfect garden in a beautiful communion with God.
caseyhopes 