MMmmmmm. I love apples in the fall of the year. I don't eat apples in the summertime, but when autumn comes, I love them. Funny. I've been talking about the fruit of the Spirit in my sermons all summer long. Now when I look out the church windows from the platform, what I see is a big apple tree in the neighbor's yard. Not crabapples. I have those. I used it as an illustration this a.m. (fruit should be seen)! These are nice, pinky green apples. Last week I picked one up off the ground (it had rolled over next to the church) and took a chomp. WOW! It was tart and sweet at the same time, and crisp and juicy! And they are just letting those wonderful apples fall to the ground. It is all I can do not to take over a paper bag and swipe them. No one is ever home for me to ask if I can pick some of their wonderful apples. It is beyond me why they don't pick them themselves.
But it does make me consider...what fruit is visible as others look at my "tree?" My spiritual tree, that is. When I looked at the neighbor's apple tree, I badly wanted to pick an apple, to sniff it's fragrance, to take a bite and see if it tasted as good as it looked.
Since scripture tells us to "...taste, and see that the Lord is good!" it seems to me that a Christian life should tempt the passerby to do just that...to find out just where the character traits of love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, and so on, come from!
How often has someone, in a spiritual sense, wanted to see if the Lord was indeed "good" because of the reflection of the Lord they saw in my life?
I'm mixing my metaphors, but it is a question worth pondering, I think.
The various fruit pictures I've used in this blog are from www.freefoto.com.
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