How do you actually measure whether a person is healthy/growing?
Photo by
Rechelle Zammit
Anyone who has gone fruit shopping at the supermarket will have experienced this.
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You're in the fruit aisle and see the perfect apple. It looks perfect. So you put it through the feel test; it’s firm, not soft. It’s the perfect apple.
So, you buy a heap of them.
The issue is that when you get them home and take a bite, it tastes ... tasteless.
While it looked like a good apple and felt like a good apple, it didn’t taste like a good apple.
The frustration is that those apples passed every test except the very one that mattered. How it tastes.
I think a lot of us are living the apple. We can look like we’ve got it together.
Show up, say the right things, do the right things, and still leave the people closest to us with nothing to taste.
Which raises a question: How do you actually measure whether a person is healthy/growing?
We tend to measure it by how much we know, or the bad habits we’ve dropped. And while those things are good, they are all measures we grade ourselves by.
There’s a line in the Bible about what a life connected to God produces: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness.
Notice, every one of those is something someone else experiences.
You can’t enjoy your own patience; the person waiting on you does. You can’t experience your own peace; someone waiting for anger does.
In other words, what the Bible highlights is that true fruit is tasted, not self-determined.
Often in our attempts to produce what we believe is good fruit, we try to force it.
We’ll white-knuckle our way through kindness, or swallow our tongue to stay peaceful, and then wonder why it rarely lasts.
It doesn’t last because fruit is what happens to a tree that’s healthy. In other words, nobody tastes your effort; they taste your roots.
For some of us, this is your exact problem with the “church” and “Christians”.
You have tasted fruit that looks good, but was tasteless. And it has left you with a sour taste in your mouth.
And if I were you, and had tasted what you tasted, I’d bet I would have the same sour taste.
But here's what I've come to realise.
Bad fruit doesn't mean the tree is bad. It means that tree stopped drawing from its source.
Rob Wiltshire of Epicentre Church.
Somewhere along the way it started working harder at looking right than staying connected.
When you read through the story of Jesus in the Bible, the people he tasted sweetest to weren’t the religious people; they were the people outside the church.
The ones the church of the time had pushed aside as sinners.
In fact, the only people Jesus ever seemed frustrated with were the religious ones. The people who looked the part and left everyone around them hungry.
I’m not asking you to trust the church, nor trust me.
But what I am asking you to do is not write Jesus off because of fruit somebody else handed you.
Because here’s what I think you’ll find.
What left that sour taste in your mouth was never him.
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