A Good Tree Bears Good Fruit

A Good Tree Bears Good Fruit

Some people go out and start preaching as soon as they get converted. I don’t know if they do this because they dislike doing physical work or simply because their zeal lacks understanding. Maybe both.

It is reasonable to expect that a person who makes his living by preaching God’s Word should be able to provide help to the believers he preaches to. If he does, then he is a laborer worthy of his wages. He should also be able to preach the Word to sinners.

I once met a boy, about 17 years old, in Vardø, who had set out from southern Norway in order to evangelize in Finnmark. Although he was saved, he was completely ignorant of God’s ways. He sought out believers who, out of compassion, gave him what he needed so he wouldn’t freeze and starve to death.

Such preachers have not sent deep roots downward, which is the condition for being able to bear fruit upward. And as a rule, if a person is saved through these preachers, he falls away very soon because of a lack of mothers’ milk. Preachers like that are in need of milk themselves. They want to bring children into the spiritual world, but they have not matured enough to develop breasts, let alone give milk. Nonetheless, the believers they meet are usually of the same sort, so things continue in the same way—and on and on it goes.

A gardener once remarked that a good tree never bears fruit for the first few years. It takes time for roots to develop downward. Some preachers are so busy that all they do is rush around in a more or less “semi-conscious” state trying to work anywhere and everywhere. They have no time to meditate on the Word of the Lord day and night. They only want to produce fruit and are constantly searching for it. They consider anything related to the inner ways and establishing strong roots downward as a waste of time.

It must not be so with us. Give yourself plenty of time. Dig deep and let your roots grow. Later you can work outwardly; then you will go in and go out and find pasture.

For many years we have been busy digging deep, and we have been right to do so. Now it is time to go and try to reach sinners, so that spiritual children can be born and raised in the church. Don’t waste time and energy on wilderness wanderers who go around in circles in the hot desert. Most of them are defiled by stubbornness, and that has become as the sin of witchcraft for them. Let them have their forty years of wandering; they won’t be satisfied with anything less.

You, however, must enter the Promised Land and take the youth with you. Send down roots. Take your time and work diligently, and in due course, fruits will abound like a garden of the Lord, to the great dismay of our opposers. They will say, “It’s strange that these false teachers and deceivers are making such progress, those people we predicted would die and be destroyed in their infancy!”

This is what will happen. The Lord Himself has said that whoever kills you will think that he offers God a service—what a strange understanding of serving God. Can such rootless trees bear good fruit upward? I don’t think so.