Salutary Good Fruit
Toyohiko Kagawa, a Japanese Christian once wrote:
"I read in a book, that a man called Christ, went about doing good. It was very disconcerting to me that I am so easily satisfied with just going about."
God's fruit trees were not planted merely to look good, but to be good for something. The "sin" of the fig tree is not that it was doing something bad, but that it was doing nothing-just taking up space in the vineyard. The Gardener turned out to be more than a caretaker in a graveyard, but one who invested himself in fruitless trees so that they might not only look good, but bear fruit-good for people to eat and be nourished. "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control" (Gal. 5:22-25). This is said of those who "belong to Christ," people who have undergone "cross fertilization"! In our troubled accident-prone, disaster-ridden world, might we not become "show-and-tell" trees that bear good fruit, samples of produce good for something, good for people in bad times?!
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