Good Apples and Bad Apples

Jesus taught you would know a tree by its fruit. He went further in the analogy to say that He was the vine/trunk and we (His followers) are the branches. He talked about the branch bearing fruit, good fruit, fruit that will last.

Paul continued this analogy and said that there are two trees, a cultivated tree (the tree of life) and the wild tree (a tree that leads to death. Hmm, could this be the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?).

He also stated that each branch (person) bears fruit according to the tree it is living out of. A branch that is living according to the wild tree (the selfishness of fallen man) will produce one kind of fruit (which is bad/sinful/wrong) and the branch living according to the tree of life (the Spirit) will produce another kind of fruit (which is right, just, love, joy, peace, etc.).

There is a whole lot of talk about producing good fruit, but the questions is: Where does the fruit come from?

The reality is the fruit comes from what's inside the tree. The branch is an extension of that tree. The Fruit is what it is because of what is on the inside, not because it tries to be something different.

Another important thing to remember is that no branch is perfect; perfectly good or perfectly bad. There is no branch that is all good fruit. Even good branches have a few bad apples from time to time. There are very few branches that have all bad fruit. Even some of the worst of branches have at least a couple good apples here and there.

The key issue is what vine/tree am I (the branch) connected to? The kind of tree I'm a part of will determine the primary kind of fruit I produce. But, in the fallen broken world death does exist and so from time to time we will all have some bad apples even on the best of branches.

Do we accept the bad fruit? No! Do we cut the branch off and throw it away because of a bad fruit here and there? No! According to Jesus the only branch that was going to be cut off and thrown away was the branch that didn't produce any fruit (John 15).

We need to aspire to be the best branch we can be, allowing the Holy Spirit of God to prune out those areas of our life that are unproductive branches, so we can be even more fruitful.

We also must remember that if the overwhelming majority of the fruit being produced in our life is bad fruit we really need to check and see if we are really connected to the right tree.

One more thing to remember is that growth and more fruit come because the branch allows the life of the tree to flow through it (it's a giver), not hold on to it for itself. The more fruit bearing a branch is, the more the live of the tree is flowing through that branch, thus the greater the experience and fuller the life of that branch.