Fruit is the natural result of a healthy plant producing what it was supposed to produce (Genesis 1:11–12). The word fruit is frequently used in the Bible to indicate a person's outer behaviours that are the result of a person's heart condition.
Good fruit is that which the Holy Spirit produces. The fruit of His Spirit includes love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, according to Galatians 5:22-23. The more we give the Holy Spirit full freedom in our life, the more we see its fruit (Galatians 5:16, 25). "I picked you and designated you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last," Jesus informed His disciples (John 15:16). Righteous fruit bears eternal fruit.
Jesus informed us exactly what we needed to do in order to grow fruitful fruit. "Abide in Me, and I in you," he said. As the branch cannot yield fruit unless it is rooted in the vine, neither can you unless you are rooted in Me. "I am the vine, you are the branches; whomever abides in Me and I in him bears abundant fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing" (John 15:4–5). To survive, a branch must remain firmly linked to the trunk. To be spiritually productive, we must remain firmly connected to Christ as His disciples. The vine provides strength, sustenance, protection, and energy to a branch. If it is severed, it immediately dies and ceases to be productive. We are like a branch broken from the vine when we disregard our spiritual life, ignore the Word of God, stint on prayer, and keep portions of our lives from the scrutiny of the Holy Spirit. Our lives have become pointless. To "live in the Spirit and not fulfil the lusts of the flesh," we need daily surrender, daily communication, and daily—sometimes hourly—repentance and relationship with the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:16). Staying intimately connected to the True Vine is the only way to "produce fruit in old age" (Psalm 92:14), "run and not grow weary" (Isaiah 40:31), and "become weary in well-doing" (Proverbs 3:5). (Galatians 6:9).
Pretense is one of the counterfeits to bearing good fruit. We can become experts in rituals, language, and "acting Christian" while experiencing no true power and generating no eternal fruit. Even when we go through the rituals of serving God, our souls remain self-centered, resentful, and joyless. We might easily fall into the trap of the Pharisees of Jesus' day, evaluating ourselves based on how we think we appear to others and ignoring the private area of the heart where all good fruit germinates. Even if our lives are full with church-related activities, we are not dwelling in Christ if we love, desire, pursue, and dread the same things that the rest of the world does. And, too frequently, we are unaware that we are leading pointless lives (1 John 2:15–17).
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