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The Lesson of the Fruit Tree
January 3, 2006
Greetings in the Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ,

Is there a lesson we can learn from the fruit tree? It is often used as an illustration in the New Testament both by Jesus and the writers of the epistles. So, I would suggest that the answer is “Yes, we can learn several lessons from the fruit tree.” Pay close attention dear pastors. The lessons you can learn will help form the proper audience for your sermons and therefore will be of eternal value to the same.

Lesson #1 - Fruit trees planted near a water source flourish even during times of drought and stress. Jesus told the woman at the well that He could give her living water that would “spring up into everlasting life.” Sheep are the fruit trees pastors. You are the husbandmen. Your job is to prune and feed us fruit trees every time you step behind the pulpit. Church meetings should not become a safari for new fruit trees. If you ensure that we stay close to the source of living water, by preaching from the Word, and feed us the Bread of Life, and prune away our dead branches of sin, then we will bear the seeds for other fruit trees. And one piece of fruit has many seeds for new fruit trees. Someone once said, “Man can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the apples in a seed.” A well-watered and properly pruned orchard can withstand many days of drought and heat stress. And each tree can produce thousands of pieces of fruit in its lifetime with each piece having dozens of seeds. Talk about growth potential!

Lesson #2 - The further from a source of water a fruit tree gets, the more it must be babied and cared for. This is an illustration of an age old truth: sinful man is prone to wander (sounds like an old hymn we don’t sing much anymore). We become enamored with the glitter of the world and generation by generation, the new trees keep getting further from the Living Water. Nothing can replace Jesus Christ dear shepherds! Not feeding the poor, not living Christmas tree programs, not Easter cantatas, not cool marketing campaigns on radio and TV. You must keep your “orchard” close to the Living Water and prune away the dead branches of sin to keep the fruit trees healthy. If you are constantly trying to plant new fruit trees, your emPHAsis will be on the wrong sylLABle. There’s not enough of you to go around to ensure that a bunch of baby trees are well watered while neglecting the pruning of your mature trees. That will only result in a very large, sickly orchard.

Lesson #3 - No matter what you do to or for them, non-fruit bearing trees will never bear fruit. Don’t waste your time trying to grow your orchard too fast. Sometimes in your haste to plant new fruit trees, you get some Bradford Pears or, worse yet, cedar trees whose rust disease can ruin the fruit of an entire orchard. Bradford Pears look just like the real thing as a seedling, but when grown they never produce one pear. They never will. The flowers are beautiful, but the blooms stink. And cedars are trees, but not only do they never bear a beneficial fruit, they will ruin all of your apple trees. Care for the orchard you have and it will produce more fruit than you can stand. Don’t waste the rest of your orchard in your haste to plant new trees. James 3:12 says, “Can the fig tree, my brethren, bear olive berries? either a vine figs?” You don’t have the time to chase down and sort out all the Bradfords from the real pear trees. Let your pear trees do that! That’s what they do naturally and without effort (if watered, fed and pruned)!

Lesson #4 - Fruit is the first thing to go when a fruit tree is stressed. If you cease feeding, watering, and pruning your orchard, guess what’s going to happen? Your greatest multiplier of itself (fruit trees) will cease bearing fruit. Fruit trees do this rather naturally. To save themselves during times of stress, they will stop bearing fruit. Pastors, do not put your orchard in a position of having to save itself. Don’t be so busy trying evangelize new trees that you neglect your greatest source for new trees—your mature trees. Again, I remind you that an orchard full of young saplings and starved thirsty mature trees will bear no fruit because it is either too immature or it is sick. And don’t pollute your orchard with weed trees like cedars and thorny trees. They will add to your tree count at the start but will eventually kill off your fruit bearing trees. They will kill your orchard! In other words, evangelization is done primarily in the marketplace not the sanctuary. See where Scripture records that Jesus, the disciples, and the apostles talked to sinners. They were in neutral public places (not havens for sinners such as brothels and bars nor the synagogue). Remember Jesus talking to the women at the well, Zaccheus in the tree, Nicodemus at night, Phillip with the Ethiopian on the road, and Paul talking to those gathered around the monument to the unknown god. The model for your conduct is always Scripture dear ones. And the scriptural model says Jesus taught church people about His Father and the Kingdom of Heaven in church and evangelized in the marketplace where the sinners were. AND, unlike today’s popular church growth junk, Jesus made it difficult for wanton sinners and rebellious believers to understand how to enter the Kingdom of Heaven by speaking to them in parables. Jesus was not “seeker sensitive.” Jesus knew that anyone that did not believe in Him was headed straight for Hell. Give them any label you want—seeker, pre-Christian, the sought—they’re all still headed to eternal damnation unless they accept the marvelous, loving gift of Jesus Christ’s redemptive work on the Cross. God have mercy on the pastor that comforts the hell-bound visitor by referring to him as a seeker or pre-Christian (as if that’s some sort of virtue).

Lesson #5 - Fruit just happens to a healthy tree. Did you ever stop to think that the reason all of Jesus’ word pictures or parables worked so well was because He created the sources for every one of them? Yes, read Genesis One and John One again. John 1 says, “In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the light was the light of men.”

When Jesus used the fruit tree for a word picture about the Kingdom of Heaven, He fully understood it because He created all fruit trees. Their magnificence and variety all sprang from the unfathomable mind of God! This is just one reason why I am so greatly offended at Christians replacing the Creation account with something as ludicrous as Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution or Hugh Ross’s progressive creationism. These fairy tales completely undermine our ability to comprehend the awesomeness of God and His ways as we read Scripture.

The most profound thing about fruit trees is that they just have fruit. It’s not something they toil over, go to the gym to work out for, travel to conferences to learn how, or get an advanced degree so they can execute a strategic fruit-bearing plan. They don’t do yoga, stand in healing circles or have contemplative prayer (the latest name for transcendental meditation) or any other New Age (old Devil) stuff. No, fruit trees just are. They bear fruit—IF they stay near a good water source, are fertilized properly and pruned often.

You are the husbandmen pastors of the Assemblies of God. Ask God in your daily devotions to plant deep in your heart the lessons of His fruit trees. Are you properly caring for the orchard God has put under your care? Or are you looking over the fence at the other man’s orchard? Or “pining away” for all the trees you see in the forest, wishing you could make your orchard look grander by adding them to the mix?

God help us to learn from your Creation and pattern our lives with its wonder-working precision and orderliness.

For the Gospel’s Sake,

Brother Mike

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