Bearing Fruit For The Kingdom Of God Series

I think some Christians think of their lives this way. It is so difficult to bear fruit for the Kingdom. It is so difficult to be joyous, to have peace. The tree does not bear fruit by striving, but by abiding, by being what God has designed it to be, the tree bears fruit.

2. Fruit of the Spirit

One of my favorite verses in the Bible is in Galatians 5. READ Gal.5:19-25.

The word ‘fruit’ is singular there, the fruit of the Spirit. One of the fruits of the Spirit there is faith. So if you ask believing you will receive anything. It is not something that you make yourself work up. Faith is something that is a direct result of our relationship with God. As you come into a deeper relationship with Him, as you abide in Him, your faith is built up, because you see that He is faithful.

If we lack this kind of spiritual fruit, we need to ask God to give us the Holy Spirit. If you are angry and bitter and do not have joy and are depressed, you need to pray for the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is a gift from God. A lot of psychologists would lose their money if a lot of Christians would just ask for the gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus said that the Father will give to anyone who asks, and He will give it.

3. Fruit of our lips

Hebrews 13:15 – “Through Him then, let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that give thanks to His name.”

Out of the abundance of our hearts, the mouth speaks. If from our hearts we have cursing and complaints and murmurings that means that is what is in our hearts. God wants to replace that then.

I was reading this week an article by Bryan Doyle. It talks about humming birds.

Humming Birds have race car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight.

They are tiny little birds and their hearts beat 10 times a second. So even if you put your huge ear to its chest, it would be hard to discern the heartbeat.

The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine.

The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long.

Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

What kind of heart do you have? Is it beating to the rhythm of songs of praise to God? for eternity? Or is your pulse set to the city, the job, the constant striving for possessions and property, the ways of the world, the pulse of hell?