Bearing Good Fruit

By: Chris Spalding

Recently during the Small Group Hour (11:15am) on Sunday morning we had the students break up into groups and look at Luke 6:43-45. In this passage of scripture Jesus gives the illustration of knowing a tree by its fruit and through the discussion that took place between the students we had several amazing observations.  All of the observation and comments seemed to come back to a singular thought, “Garbage in, garbage out.” The difference between the good and the bad tree is all connected to the condition of a person’s heart.

 

As one of our sixth graders put it: “What ever you have going on inside you is what people are going to taste or see when your fruit is broken open.” This statement caught me off guard a little so I proposed the question: “What makes your fruit go bad or make you produce bad fruit?” The overwhelming answer was doing “bad stuff” or “bad things”. My next question naturally is along the lines of what is or what constitutes all that bad stuff? The easy Sunday school answer to that question is sin, but what is sin really? What qualifies as a sin? How often do we sin?

 

The rest of that day I began to personally really struggle with those questions, then the following day I was then handed an article from USA Today by one of my professors. The article was titled “Has the ‘notion of sin’ been Lost?” and it was filled with a series of quotes and stats that are very alarming regarding the fact that people do not look at themselves as sinners and that the rules of sin and morality have changed. The problem with this is that without us acknowledging that we are sinners or that we have a sin nature we belittle the awesome gift of Grace that Jesus’ resurrection represents.

 

All that to say my thoughts keep coming back to how our culture, and we as Christians have become tolerant of sin. I think it can be summed up by quoting a line from the song “3” by Britney Spears where she plainly says: “Living in sin is the new thing… Are you in?”

 

We call sin “doing bad stuff”, or we justify sin by comparing ourselves to others, and worst of all we ignore sin thinking we can counteract it through works by showing up to church and serving.

 

As I write this I realize that I am guilty of all the situations I mentioned before. I have ignored sin and served in hopes of offsetting the bad, I have become tolerant of sin in order not to offend people, and I have justified my actions to belittle their severity. It seems that even I have somewhat lost the “notion of sin” outside of religious conversations and teaching on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. How many of us know the right things to say and even proclaim or teach on Sunday mornings and in our small groups but when we are driving in the car or just outside of the walls of the church we act differently and let down our guard to the sin in our life?

 

My Prayer for all of us is that God would grant us discernment, through the Holy Spirit, that we may be able to identify the sin in our lives so that we may repent and seek forgiveness. I pray that God would give a spirit of humility so that we may be able to come alongside one another in love and help one another in dealing with the sins in our life. I pray that in doing this we may do the good works that God had set, before time began, for us to accomplish. It is my prayer that we would do these things so that we may be able to experience the surpassing riches of His grace and be filled to the fullest with the fullness of God.

 

Link to the Article:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2008-03-19-sin_N.htm