Bear Fruit! Not Just Leaves
January 18
For this reason we also, from the day we heard of it, have not ceased to pray . . . that you may walk (live and conduct yourselves) in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to Him and desiring to please Him in all things, bearing fruit in every good work.
—Colossians 1:9,10People who want to be leaders must have character in their dealings with others. They must keep their word. They must be people of integrity. In Matthew 21:18-19 we read about an incident in the life of Jesus. In the early dawn the next morning, as He was coming back to the city, He was hungry. And as He saw one single leafy fig tree above the roadside, He went to it but He found nothing but leaves on it [seeing that in the fig tree the fruit appears at the same time as the leaves]. And He said to it, Never again shall fruit grow on you! And the fig tree withered up at once. I used to feel sorry for that fig tree. I didn't understand this story at all. I thought, It wasn't the fig tree's fault that it didn't have any figs on it. Why did Jesus curse it? Some time later God showed me the reason. As this verse in The Amplified Bible notes, on a fig tree the fruit appears at the same time as the leaves. So when Jesus from a distance saw the fig tree with leaves on it, He went to it expecting to find fruit on it. When there was none on it, He cursed it. Why? Because it was a phony; it had leaves but no fruit. In the body of Christ, we must be very careful that we don't have just leaves and no fruit. We are not going to win the world with only a bumper sticker on our car, a Jesus pin on our lapel, a tape recorder slung over our shoulder and a big Bible and a stack of teaching tapes under our arm. We must have fruit because Jesus has said that it is by our fruit that we will be known.
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