FRUIT-BEARING
FRUIT-BEARING
The maturity of the plant is the great matter, for there is no fruit without maturity. It is a study both interesting and inscrutable how the variety of seasons and temperatures contribute to the maturity of plants. The gardener cannot alter the seasons, but he does all he can to remove every obstacle in the way of maturity, for his eye is on the happy consummation, and like the husbandman he has long patience for it. He looks for fruit. What is a garden without fruit? What does a gardener toil for unless for fruit?
The first thing for one who is for Christ here, is to be a disciple, and the mark of a disciple is not that he is alive and happy, but that he bears much fruit. Fruit is action resulting from abiding in Christ. It is life so matured that it expresses itself, but necessarily the [p. 164] expression is in keeping with that in which it is matured. For instance, a pear-tree is alive, but when its life is matured it bears ripe pears, and this is fruit. We live in Christ, and as His life is expressed in or by us there is fruit. You might be visiting the poor all day and giving away all you had, and there might be no fruit in any of it; and you might be sitting alone, and there might be fruit in the way your heart was going out in prayer for the Lord’s interests. The first lesson in bearing fruit, and without which there is never any, is that “without me ye can do nothing” (John 15: 5). It comes from abiding in Him. He leads me into the activity that pleases Him, and then I am a disciple - a scholar of His; not yet a friend, which is the next step, nor a witness, which is the highest (see John 15). A gardener is not satisfied that a pear-tree should do very well and bear much fruit one year - he is disappointed unless it does so every year. A saint has a great advantage over a plant, for he knows not only the desire of the Gardener, but he knows also the mind and heart of the Master for whom and from whom he may draw everything to please Him. You cannot awaken in a plant a desire to bear fruit. If it prosper it will, but in a saint in whom is once awakened the desire to bear fruit, to be His disciple, there is a turning to the Lord, there is a daily growing and cleaving to Him in order that he might not be in His garden as a pear-tree with leaves and blossoms only, but that acts in keeping with His own mind might be done by him.
We are each a peculiar specimen of grace; if you or I fail there is no second specimen to fill our place. The plant is there, but it has failed, and there is no filling up the blank, until the plant answer to the end for which it was placed in the garden. What I want is to promote in you the desire to be a disciple, to find yourself a channel through which the life of Jesus may be expressed, amid all the thorns and wild briars of this evil scene. “Holding forth the word of life; that I may rejoice in the day of Christ” (Philippians 2: 16). Oh! to be able to invite the Lord to “come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits” (Song of Songs 4: 16).