FLOWER GARDENS AND SKYSCRAPERS

FLOWER GARDENS AND SKYSCRAPERS

“Now the deeds of the flesh are evident…….But the fruit of the Spirit is love.” Gal 5:19, 22

Fruit suggests life. The Apostle writes, "the works of the flesh," but "the fruit of the Spirit." As a famous Englishman once forcefully put it, "The word works suggests the factory: the word fruit suggests the garden."

The finest works which man has ever wrought are all operations in the realm of death. If your quickly moving mind questions me about the flowers in the garden and tells me that they are man's work, I reply that it is where man's work ceases and God's begins that life proceeds. Man's work is always an operation in the realm of death. Take the amazing homes in which we live. It is useful, necessary, proper, but it could not be erected except as man handled dead materials. The tree in the forest with its rising sap and its budding life was no use to the builder. It must die before man could begin his work. The blocks and concrete begins to crumble and disintegrate the moment it is poured or laid. Man's works being operations in the realm of death, they contain within themselves the elements of break- up. While all these buildings were being erected, long before the builder put on the final stone with rejoicing, old Mother Nature with mossy fingers begins to pull it down, and, in spite of the fact that some might reconstruct and refurbish it, she is busy destroying it at this moment. As quickly as man works, his work crumbles and passes. That is the figure the Apostle used when he was speaking of the flesh. The works of the flesh are operations in the realm of death. The finest thing a man can do within his own self-centered life is a thing of decay and break-up, which perishes and passes and cannot abide.

Fruit is an operation in the realm of life, that mystic fact, which we all know by observation and none of us knows by final analysis and explanation. Life is of God as much in the flowering of a daisy as in the blossoming of stars. It owes its origin to God as surely in the sparrow as in the seraph. Fruit is God's work.

The word "fruit" presupposes life. There can be no fruit apart from life. The word "fruit" indicates cultivation. Fruit comes to perfection only in answer to the touch of cultivation. Fruit, finally, suggests sustenance. Fruit is a food. In these simplest thoughts concerning the word we have a revelation of the whole method of Christianity. Fruit suggests Christ active, feeding, nourishing, taking the one to the perfection of His Father (Matt. 5:48; Jude 24) which He was sent to bring about. Fruit reveals His faithfulness to the task He was sent to perform.