Cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit and Abiding in Jesus

So if you have gotten to know me at all during these past ten months that I have been in Cincinnati, you have probably come to know that there are a number of things that I really love.  First, I really love drinking tea, secondly, I really love creative pursuits like nature photography and painting in watercolor.  And thirdly, I really love being out and experiencing nature, and that includes hiking, gardening, visiting zoos, and visiting botanical gardens.  As for the last one, I have been very privileged over the years to spend some time in some magnificent gardens.  

So as we start our time together this morning, let me share a little bit about one of my favorite gardens. It is a garden that is over 2000 miles away from here on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada.  It’s a place called Butchart Gardens, and its absolutely beautiful, and I fell in love with it the first time I saw it way back in 2003.  Here is a pictureof perhaps its most famous garden and the garden where it all started, the Sunken Garden.  For more than 100 years, this particular garden has delighted visitors from all over the world, including myself, but it didn’t always look so beautiful.  

In fact, this particular spot was once home to a limestone quarry owned by Mr. and Mrs. Butchart that was mined until its limestone deposits were exhausted, and so what was once a beautiful, wild spot in British Columbia had become a large gaping hole in the land, a true eye sore that happened to be right behind where the Butcharts’ house was.  

Thankfully, Mrs. Butchart began to have a vision for this ruined piece of earth.  While she had never really gardened before she moved to British Columbia from Ontario, Canada, she had found that when she planted various seeds around her house in the fertile British Columbia soil, the seeds easily sprouted beautiful plants, and so she began to wonder if she could turn the old quarry into a garden.  

So with the help of her husband’s workers, she gathered up all the rubble in the quarry and made them into tall mounds of rock where she hoped to put terraced plants, she had massive amounts of topsoil brought onto the quarry’s floor, she dangled over the sides of the quarry walls and tucked in ivy into the various cracks and crevices, and then finally, she planted all kinds of beautiful flowers, shrubs, and trees on the quarry floor and in the mounds of rocks.  And, guess what, with the perfect amount of rain, sunlight, and nutrients in the soil, plants began to grow, and within a short time, the garden became a place of great beauty and immense interest to the surrounding community and to the world beyond. 

Thank goodness for this woman’s vision and her hard work in tending to this garden.

Her stewardship of her land resulted in great fruitfulness and immense beauty that has had a lasting impact.  

So, friends for the last couple of weeks, William has been talking about ways that we too can have a lasting impact in this world.  We too need vision and we too need to steward what God has given us, but what we are called to is far more exciting than planting an earthly garden, as exciting as I personally find that to be.   What we are called to is to build up the Church and to bear witness to the Kingdom of God.    What we are called to do has eternal impact. But the reality is that we can do very little of that if we do not tend the garden of our soul and let the Divine Gardener work within us.    

For the past two weeks, William has been talking about the spiritual gifts that God has given each one of us to build up the Church, to edify other believers in Christ, and to bring God glory.  Last week, William specifically spoke about a variety of spiritual gifts that God gives us, including healing, prophesy, speaking in tongues, as well as gifts in teaching, pastoring, prophesying, contending for justice, evangelizing, starting new kingdom works, and administration.  And there are more.  He reminded us that each and every one of us has some of these gifts, and that each of these gifts is needed. 

While some gifts may propel some of us to the center stage of the Church and other gifts may leave some of us in the background, all gifts are absolutely essential.  Thus, it is important as a church to celebrate them all and it important that we release each one of our members into their God-given gifts.  Here at the Mission Cincinnati, it is our sincere desire that we do this with each and every one of you.  If you are not yet quite sure what your gifts are, we would love to come alongside you to help you to discern.  Check out the resources we just sent out this week in the Mission Minute or do come and see us and we can discern with you.  

There is something else, however, we must also do as a Church, something that is perhaps even more foundational than releasing you into your gifts, and that is helping you to seek intimacy with the Lord and to cultivate the Fruit of the Spirit in your lives, and that is what we will focus on in our sermon today.   

Before we do that, however, let us start out by contrasting the Gifts of the Spirit from the Fruitof the Spirit because we may not fully understand how they differ and also how they work together; and from that starting point, we will dive into how we grow in the Fruit of the Spirit. 

So the Gifts of the Spirit and the Fruit of the Spirit do work together, but they are different.  The gifts of the Spirit, which William has been talking about these past couple of weeks, are spiritual capabilities that God gives us – they are action-oriented and are about doing mission in order to build up the Church and to witness to the Kingdom of God.  In some ways, you could say that these gifts are “instantly received”.  For example, a word of prophesy may come upon us suddenly.  Now, with certain gifts, we may have to nurture these gifts a bit, for example, it is helpful for a pastor gifted in teaching to go to seminary and to practice preaching and teaching.  There, however, is this sense that once you got the spiritual gift, you got it – you just need to employ it.  

On the other hand, the Fruit of the Spirit is about character or virtue, and note, there is just one Fruit.  While there are many gifts, there is just one Fruit, and that Fruit is about becoming more like Christ and is best encapsulated by the word love, and not love as our culture understands it, but love that is characterized by joy, peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, and self-control, as we saw in Galatians today.  This Fruit, this love, however, is not simply given to us by the Holy Spirit in its fullness when we become followers of Jesus, but it is something that gradually grows within us as we continually abide in Jesus –  as we continually open ourselves up to the presence of the Holy Spirit and allow Him to do work within us.  

So there is not this sense like with the Gifts of the Spirit that when you got the Fruit of Spirit, you got it.  No, rather, it is more like a seed that is planted in our souls when we become believers which needs continual nurturing and connection to its Divine Source if it is to grow, bud, blossom, and bear fruit.  

So, to recap –  the Gifts of the Spirit are about Doing God’s Mission and the Fruit of the Spirit is about Becoming Like Jesus. 

Now as you can imagine though, it becomes increasingly hard to do God’s Mission, to employ our spiritual gifts, if we are not cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit in our lives, so the process of cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit becomes foundational to our Christian lives and to our building up the Church.   

Paul even gets at this in 1 Corinthians 13 when he says, “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”

So friends, employing the Gifts of the Spirit that God has given us is an important call put upon our lives, but if we attempt to employ them without cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit in our lives at the same time, the results of our work can be varied.  Sometimes, we can be way less effective than we otherwise would be. Sometimes, we can burn out and give up. And sometimes, we can even do great harm in the process.  

I think we have unfortunately seen too much of this disconnect in the church, where we have trained and released gifted leaders into ministry, but we have given far less attention to the cultivation of their souls.  Being gifted and trained in any kind of ministry gift is not necessary equivalent to being an increasingly mature believer in Christ, one who is actively seeking to cultivate space for God and the development of the Fruit of the Spirit in their lives.

And honestly, friends, there is something even more tragic that happens when this disconnect occurs between the Gifts of the Spirit and the Fruit of the Spirit – and that is the missed opportunity to simply be with Jesus.  Sure, Jesus calls us to serve Him – to build up His Church, but He wants us to serve withHim.  It is meant to be a joint pursuit.  And moreover, Jesus sometimes simply wants us to be with him, rather to do something for him. Why?  Because He loves us and He delights to be with us, warts and all.  He just wants to be with us.  So, what that means is there will be some seasons in our Christian walk that will be less about doing and will be much more about being with Jesus.  

I have personally had a couple of extended seasons in the past decade of my life where I have not been in active ministry, but I did have a chance to cultivate my life with God on some deeper levels.  These seasons have been beautiful, and guess what?  Once I have returned to ministry from these seasons, I have been able to live out my spiritual gifts more effectively, not because I gained more skills during those times (which I wasn’t able to do, obviously) but because I had continued to grow in the Fruit of the Spirit in those times of Being with God rather than doing with God.

So for the rest of the sermon today, I would like us to focus on how we grow in the Fruit of the Spirit, in the virtues of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control and also how we move away from works of the flesh such as sexual immorality, idolatry, anger, jealousy, envy, drunkenness, and the others that are listed in Galatians 5.  

To do this, I would like us to reflect a bit on the image of Jesus as the Vine as found in John 15. Jesus says, “I am the true vine and my Father is the vinedresser.  Every branch in me that does not bear fruit, he takes away and every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes that it may bear more fruit. . . . Abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him he it is that bears much fruit for apart from me you can do nothing.”

In this passage in John, we see a simple truth.  If we want to grow in the Fruit of the Spirit and if we want to see great fruitfulness come from the employment of our gifts of the Spirit, we must abide in Jesus and He in us, and that abiding happens through the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.  But what does abiding mean?  

Well, abiding simply means to endure, remain, and live in Jesus while allowing him to endure, remain, and live in us, and as long as we do that, His life-giving presence, truth, and love can flow through us and can result in great fruitfulness in time, just as water and nutrients flowing through a plant, can allow it to bud, blossom and bear fruit in time.   But friends, as soon as we cut ourselves off from Jesus, like a branch being cut off from a vine, then we find ourselves spiritually withering and dying like a cut-off branch that physically withers and dies.  And obviously, no fruit comes from a dead branch.

So we must abide in Jesus, and we must also be pruned.  In the passage from John, John talks about branches that are not bearing good fruit that need to be removed altogether.  He also talks about branches that are bearing good fruit but nevertheless still need to be pruned so they can bear even more fruit.  

I don’t know how many of you are gardeners out there, but for anyone who gardens, you know that sometimes your shrubs, trees, or vines need to be pruned back so that they will ultimately be more fruitful.  

This is especially true if these trees or vines have been neglected for some time.  Long periods of neglect may even result in plants that virtually looks dead on the outside, but if you cut back some of the bark and dead branches, you will find a glimmer of life inside.  For fans of the classic book The Secret Garden you know that when Mary and Dickon find this abandoned garden that has been locked up for many years, it looks dead, and they wonder if it will ever have life again, but when they prune it, they find signs of life.  And when they then tend to it, it becomes a magnificent garden once again. 

And for thoseof you who enjoy visiting vineyards, you will probably know that those tending to the grapevines sometimes cut off some of the branches of the vine and even some of the fruit at times that is already growing because those branches and grapes are weighing the plant down or are of poor quality or have some other issue.  Thus, the people who tend to the vineyard prune the vines so these vines can ultimately have a greater yield of better quality grapes to be used in the wine-making process.  

So pruning leads to life and fruitfulness in the field of horticulture.  The same is true in the spiritual life.

Thus, at times we must also allow God to prune us, sometimes removing things out of our lives altogether that are ultimately deadening – perhaps certain habits and attitudes that are working against us growing in spiritual maturity, things that are weighing us down and could cause us to break off from the life-giving presence of Jesus our Vine.   

Sometimes, we must allow God to scale back other things in our lives, things that may in themselves be good things but are ultimately preventing us from moving towards greater fruitfulness.

So friends, God invites us to abide in Jesus and to allow him to prune us so that we can grow in intimacy with Him, and so that we might grow in the Fruit of the Spirit.

So the question that remains is how do we concretely do this.  As for the abiding, we must make regular space for God in our lives, including weekly worship with the Body of Christ and receiving Communion, weekly Sabbath times where we simply delight in God and His Creation, and regular habits of prayer, thanksgiving, silence, solitude, and Scripture engagement.  As for the pruning part, we must make space for regular times of self-reflection, opportunities to grow in self-knowledge, times to reflect on our all of our relationships, times of confession to God and others, and a regular opportunities for conscious giving up of habits that are “works of the flesh” or are otherwise getting in the way of more fruitfuness.   

There are a variety of ways that we can engage these habits or practices of abiding and pruning, and these ways will look different for each one of us, depending on our life stage, our work, our relationships, our particular wiring, and our season or stage of faith.  There is not a one-size-fits all “quiet time” so to speak that works for all of us.  But, no matter who we are and where we find ourselves in life, we must all engage practices that allow us to abide in Christ and to be pruned by Christ, but unfortunately our culture works against us at every step of the way. 

The busyness, the noise, the desire for comfort or so-called self-actualization, the continual pursuit for more stuff, and the continual pursuit of making a name for ourselves in one sphere or another takes us away from making space to be with God.  We must ruthlessly pursue space with God in our lives – perhaps, it means calendaring it in our days, weeks, months, and years.  Whatever it takes, we must do it.

Though achieving intimacy with the Lord and growing in the Fruit of the Spirit is ultimately a work of the Holy Spirit in our lives – it is not our own work – it does require that we tend our soul garden.  That we show up and abide in Jesus, rest in Him.  This is where we must “work out our salvation with fear and trembling.” 

If we think back to the story of Butchart Gardens that I told at the beginning of this sermon, you will recall that in order for a garden to grow, Mrs. Butchart needed to clear away the debris left in the abandoned quarry, she needed to lay down the soil and till it, and she needed to plant the seeds. Afterwards, once the plants started to grow, she needed to continue to tend to them – prune them back on occasion and make sure they had adequate water and nutrients.  After that though, the growth that happened was out of her hands. She had to wait and see.

We must do the same. Our souls are a bit like this abandoned quarry-turned-beautiful-garden.

Over the years, at times our souls have been stripped or assaulted through the sins of ourselves and the sins of others.  Sometimes because of the brokenness of this world, our souls have felt as if they have been completely laid bare and abandoned.  They have become desolate places.  

But at some point in our lives, we have come to accept Jesus and when we did that, a beautiful vine began to grow in the middle of this abandoned space and as we tended the ground around this vine, watered it, and allowed God to prune the branches,flowers and fruit sprouted up everywhere and the desolate space began to become a beautiful soul garden where we walk hand and hand with Jesus and we dream together of the Kingdom to come.  

However, in order for this garden to continue to flourish and grow, it needs constant tending – we must make sure that all parts of the soul garden remain connected to the Vine, Jesus, and we must submit ourselves to the gentle hand of this same Jesus, who is the Divine Gardener, who will water us and prune us through His presence, truth, and love.  And out of this relationship with Jesus, that comes through the power of the Holy Spirit making Jesus present to us, great fruitfulness will come.  And the world will take notice and the world will change. We just have rest, to abide in Jesus and wait and see what the Lord will do.  We may not see immediate quantifiable results.  We may even sometimes feel as if we are wasting time, but God will be present to you and fruitfulness will eventually come

Friends, it may not always seem easy to do so, but let us pray that we would make space for Jesus in our lives through various spiritual practices that will allow us to tend to the soul and to cultivate the Fruit of the Spirit.  I can promise you that when you show up, Jesus will show up too, and He will do the work that only He can do through the power of the Holy Spirit working within you.  He will grow Fruit of the Spirit in you, the virtues of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, meekness, and self-control, and then your spiritual gifts will be increasingly characterized by these virtues, as well.  If you need help discerning how to do this, how best to show up before Jesus, come to see William and I, and we would be happy to help discern this with you.  

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.  Amen