A tree is known by its fruit

In Matthew 7:16-18 Jesus said, “You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit.” And again in Matthew 12:33 and Luke 6:40, Jesus said, “each tree is known by its fruit.”

The logic of these statements is as powerful as it is simple. Jesus is saying that people are known and defined by the type of “fruit” they bear, just as a tree is known and defined by the type of fruit it bears. In other words, you can usually know what something is by what it does. This same principle applies to us individually as Christians, and to us corporately as the church. A person will be known by the “fruit” they bear – that is, by the things they do, just as a church will be know by what it does.

It is interesting that in Matthew 7:16 Jesus was talking to the people specifically about how they could recognize false prophets. His point was that they could tell whether a prophet was a true prophet or a false prophet by the type of “fruit” he bore, because certain types of fruit would be seen in someone’s life if he was a true prophet of God, and certain other types of fruit would be seen in his life if he were a false prophet.

This same thing is true of us as Christians. If a person is truly a Christian, then there are certain types of “fruit” that will be seen in their life. In John 13:35 Jesus said, “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” And in John 15:8 he told us that by bearing much fruit we both glorify the father and prove that we are truly his disciples. A true disciple of Jesus (“disciple” and “Christian” were synonymous in the early church – Acts 11:26) can be “known” by the “fruit” of Love being evident in their lives – particularly in their relationship with other Christians.

In Matthew 12:34, after calling the Pharisees a bunch of snakes, Jesus asked them, “How can you, being evil, speak what is good?” He then added, “For the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart.” This is truly an amazing connection between what is in our heart in abundance and what comes out of our mouth. The point Jesus is making to the Pharisees is that they simply cannot speak good if evil fills their heart, any more than he could speak evil, with good filling his heart. And the same principle applies to every person on the planet.

One of the most powerful examples of this is seen on the day of Pentecost. Once the Holy Spirit fell on the disciples of Jesus who were gathered together, we are told in Acts 2:4 that “they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit was giving them utterance.” Notice the connection – they were filled with the Holy Spirit, and then began to speak. Once they were filled with the Holy Spirit, their mouths immediately began to speak “out of that which filled their Hearts.” The disciples were experiencing what Elihu described in Job 32:18-20 when he said, “I am full of words, and the spirit within me compels me; inside I am like bottled-up wine, like new wineskins ready to burst. I must speak and find relief.”

As I said earlier, this principle of the mouth speaking out of whatever fills the heart applies to every person on earth. It is for this reason that Proverbs 4:23 admonishes us to, “Watch over your heart with all diligence.” In other words, we are to be careful what we give our hearts to, and what we allow to fill our hearts – or, as Jesus said, we are to “Make the tree good” so that its fruit will be good. And the surest way to do this is to always keep our hearts full of the word of God, and to “pray at all times in the spirit.”