Good Fruit, Bad Fruit

 

We’ve all heard the adage, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” It’s a clever, rhyming way to encourage the regular consumption of fruits and veggies for our health. My fiancé, Andrew, takes this seriously. He absolutely LOVES apples and buys multiple bags during his grocery trips to make sure he doesn’t run out. For his recent birthday, Andrew’s parents got him a bag of apples from a local orchard. They were pretty apples, and Andrew was excited to try them. But he was incredibly disappointed when they turned out to be bad. They weren’t bitter or visibly rotten, but the texture was wrong, and the flavor was bland. 

 

Andrew enjoys apples, loves his parents, and dislikes wasting food. But none of that stopped those apples from ending up in the trash. They weren’t worth eating because they didn’t measure up to what an apple is supposed to be. 

 

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus explains the importance of fruit in recognizing the quality of a tree:

 

“You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16-20 NASB). 

The quality of the fruit is indicative of the quality of the tree. Bad fruit like Andrew’s apples indicates a bad tree, while good fruit indicates a good tree. So too does the fruit indicate the quality of a belief system. This can be a little more obvious when the beliefs are significantly different from what the Bible teaches. These kinds of beliefs are rotten apples, easily spotted if one examines the fruit. But there are some bad fruits that are harder to spot.

The church I grew up in before Grace held some pretty legalistic beliefs. There was a heavy emphasis on rules and doing things the only right way. While there was an outward denial of the prosperity gospel, it was certainly implied that doing all the right things in the right way would result in a “blessed” and prosperous life. The fruit of those teachings in my life has been a tendency to rely on good works to be accepted. It has taken years of unraveling to begin to understand the gospel as a truly free gift independent of my own efforts. I still struggle to give myself grace when things don’t turn out perfect, and I continually have to remind myself not to judge others based on small differences.

This is the kind of belief that takes the truth and twists it just a little bit. It may look nice and shiny on the outside, but it doesn’t measure up. It’s a bad tree that results in bad fruit. I don’t believe that the people at that church had bad intentions, and I still care for them. But that should not prevent me from examining and removing the bad beliefs from my life.

What are the good and bad fruits you see in your life? If you see bad fruit, I encourage you to examine where it came from. Is there a belief or teaching you need to unravel and replace with a tree that bears good fruit?

 

--Concetta Swann