How Fruity Are You?

So, here I am once again at 4 in the morning because I can't seem to sleep... This thought is actually long overdue though. See, this thought occured to me when I was on spring break in the lovely Hampton, VA visiting my amazing friend Lindsay. We were eating cereal and I can't remember exactly what the name of it was, but it was some kind of strawberry cornflakes or something like that.

Anyways, the back of the box had random facts about fruit. One of them gave the definition of what a fruit is and does. It said something along the lines of "fruit is the fleshy part that surrounds and protects the seed inside." Instantly, strangely enough, this made me think of spiritual fruit.

Christians are called to live by the fruit of the Spirit, to be fruitful in reproduction and good deeds, and to bear "good" fruit. Why is fruit listed SO MANY times in Scripture?

I think it's simple. The Gospel (if you don't know what I'm referring to as the Gospel, check out the first two posts) is referred to as a seed many many times in Scripture. Ahhh, coming together now? We, as Christians, are entrusted....big word, entrusted to God's amazing story of salvation, which is the precious seed.

We, as Christians, are the very fruit that protect that precious seed from being taken away by Satan's clamy hands. Each Christian bears some kind of fruit but the heart of that person determines whether that fruit is good or whether it's bad (Matthew 12:33).

We've all bitten into a soft and maybe somewhat brown apple and it didn't allow much to satisfy you right? It was somewhat easy to get the core of that apple because the fleshy part around it gave way easily. Don't be that brown apple. Fight and protect against that little evil green worm that wants to eat away at you and take your very gift from you.

Friends, we are that very flesh that surround the seed of everlasting life. Adam made the mistake of blending in that nastiness of sin and blemish into our perfect fruit in the beginning so that now we inherently produce bad, weak fruit, but we have a chance to change that. We have been given the opportunity to have our bad tree chopped down so that the new and good one can grow in its place.

One last thing--the purpose for fruit is also to disperse that seed to other areas to reproduce that same type of fruit. We, as the seed-bearers, need to take this job just as seriously as protecting the seed. The seed is what brings life to a desolate area. The seed is what we were created to guard and share. Remember, the amount of seed you have is infinite--don't be greedy.