P 3371 Cultivate Fruit. 

I love summer time when all kinds of fruit are in the shops and it seems like we are overloaded with choices. Any kind of fruit looks great to me. You know in the bible I can’t find one instance of anyone talking about dieting! Fasting – yes! Dieting – no! Father God has provided us with a tremendous variety of foods. He is the source of it all, including the fruity yumminess, because He caused every pleasant and fruit-producing tree to grow in the Garden of Eden. It was a fruit-bearing tree that seduced Adam and Eve! 

And today, I have a little theory I want to write about that. Here we go… inside any fruit there are seeds – most fruits have at least one seed. According to my little bit of research, most of the fruit we have today that are seedless, have been specially cultivated by horticulturalists to remove those seeds for our convenience sake. If you’ve eaten an orange with a great many seeds in it, you will understand why! 

If we look at the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, I think we will find that when Adam and Eve ate whatever kind of fruit it was, its seed was in there too. It also became part of them, not just the fruit. Inside any seed is the potential for many other trees to grow. When Almighty God banished this couple from His garden, they lost all access to the tree of life, because they’d disobeyed when they ingested the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, together with it’s seeds.

Now this couple had the potential to decide what was good and what was evil … because the seeds of knowledge, and the quest for power were growing inside them. They decided disobeying God was evil, that’s why they hid. They already had the potential to be like Him … without His WISDOM, MERCY and GRACE and DISCERNMENT etc.

Their disobedience robbed them of their holiness, and the access to Holy fellowship that God Himself gave them. That fruit of disobedience, that they chose to eat, was passed on to their offspring. Then God planted Himself into the earth in the form of His seed in a virgin’s womb. Jesus was planted and He lived here, He died and was buried here. A seed has to die to bear fruit.

Cain became jealous and killed his brother Abel. The seed of ‘whatever I don’t regard as evil’ is not evil, has become my new idea of truth. This was fostered the minute Cain entertained the thought: “Why didn’t God like my sacrifice?” Independent thinking is a very popular theme nowadays. It seems to me that truth is no longer fixed, because we have thrown away our access to the Tree of Life, the bible.  People are planted in the wilderness, instead of being planted by streams of living water. The bible points us firmly to our need of a totally New kind of Life – in Jesus! 

Humanity has been sowing trees ever since. Conversely if I think it’s good then it’s good!  EG. You can’t tell me what to do, because seeds of disobedience and rebellion have already been sown and cultivated in my life from birth! We can’t blame Adam and Eve, because we are personally responsible for what we choose to cultivate in our lives. Every interaction, every chosen course, every single choice … feeds and waters His seed in us … or the wrong seeds.

Jesus Christ hung on a fruitless ‘tree’ and HE became the Seed that died to foster our new life in Him. When we ask Him to live within us, we received the potential to cultivate the Tree of Life in us. I think that’s the abundant life Jesus spoke about. Not spectacular houses, piles of money or fancy cars. We can spread heavenly seeds wherever we go.. When we were born again, Jesus Christ gave us His life and put His seed, inside us, WE DON’T HAVE TO SIN ANYMORE. We have a choice. 1 John 3:9 – “No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God.” 

And Colossians 3:12-14 tells us what that seed looks like: “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.”

This new life we have today is about cultivating His seed, His new life within us — together with all its graces. Jesus died for us, to produce IN us, a new way to live. That way to live isn’t just about us having comfortable lives, it is about our enemy meeting an army of people sold out to spreading God’s love, everywhere. They are being trained in righteousness by the Spirit of the Living God. God’s love is not a theory, it is His grace, let loose so mankind can lay claim to their birthright – the tree of life and the different kinds of fruit that freely grow on that tree.

We’ve been misled by religion. You and I can’t cultivate His seed in someone else – it is their choice. But they still need to know they have a choice. We are His witnesses to everything He did, and is still doing in our lives every single day. His seeds of obedience, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, love, and joy and peace are now in us. We simply co-operate with the Holy Spirit and follow His lead, using the opportunities life brings across our path. 

The seed of eternal life has been sown into us when we said YES to Him. So we choose LIFE, the way our Saviour lived it. Now is the time to cultivate His fruit… and that’s my little theory. Bye. 👋

P 2675 Don’t let the lipstick/liposuction fool ya!

“But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for God does not see as man sees, since man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” 1 Samuel 16:7 NASB. 

My first thought when I read this scripture today was this: wouldn’t we all be better off, if we saw others like the Lord does?! What if we appreciated people’s hearts, more than the colour of their lipstick or the fact that they have no fat around their middle? I cannot believe our society vacuums away fat! YUCK!! Social media, movies, magazines, or even the news, all present a false view of this life. See that movie star? FAKE! The media lies to us and they get paid for it! The pretty, witty, fit, and powerful people are supposed stars, yet they have had more work done on them than a renovated broken-down house! Apparently, we enjoy being fooled by illusions. Sigh. You know, many pretty people have an awful lot of spak-filler plastered on. 

Now, let’s STOP and look at SomeOne worthwhile. SomeOne truly beautiful… let’s look at Jesus the way Isaiah saw the Lord in Isaiah 53:1,2.“He grew up before Him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him.”  Imagine that. Jesus didn’t actually need physical or scholarly attributes… yet people were attracted to Him like bees to honey. What was inside showed up on the outside. Hah! I’d like to get me some of that kind of surgery thank you Lord! Hmmm. Sometimes, when the spirit of nasty has grabbed me by the neck and I’m spewing unkind venom everywhere – I sure need some bad attitude liposuction!  Thank God for our Saviour!

Moving on … rather quickly…   that scripture from Samuel reminded me of another one: “So from now on we regard no one from a human point of view [according to worldly standards and values]. Though we have known Christ from a human point of view, now we no longer know Him in this way.”  2 Corinthians 5:16. Let me see if I can try to interpret that. We can’t know Jesus or anyone else, just with our brains. We are going to need open hungry hearts. More Lord!! 

Why is mankind so obsessed with outward beauty, physical strength, and brain power? None of that stuff lasts. People go to the gym every single day and they work out ….even in their eighties!🙄… Well, that’s nine kinds of ridiculous. Fancy spending whatever time you have left on earth, lifting weights and dieting! How tragic to live out a life not actually comprehending the things that really matter. I can’t see Moses in a gym, can you? He was too busy getting his work-out doing what God said!

Meanwhile, I can tell you personally that old age is a great leveller. You simply can’t feel superior in your intellect anymore, because you often end up forgetting the end of the sentence right after you just started it! And some days it is all I can do to get around our house. Since I decided to try to fly down the stairs, instead of just plain walking, one of my knees is out of sync with the other one. I could go on … but it would bore you to death … and I am definitely not a pretty person … so I can’t get away with that!

But, thanks to Jesus, inside me, right here, right now, I have a spiritual well that sustains me even when my body complains and my brain seizes up! BTW, I don’t believe in mirrors. My problem is that I keep looking for the 19year old I once was, in them. I’m definitely going to be disappointed on that one! A mirror cannot tell you who you are – God’s Word is the only mirror that is accurate. Praise God for a mirror that shows our true selves – and then it points to the solution!

Oh Jesus is so incredibly beautiful. He’s the One Who gladly laid down His life for His friends … that’s you and me. He has given all of us the greatest love this world will ever know. And He actually chose to do that so that for everyone – including those who are obsessed with how they look. HE LOVES them for free. The Lord Jesus and the Holy Spirit are our very Best Friends, our personal cheer-squad, and our life-coach on the road to eternity. We are sooo rich!!

The thing that makes this life wonderful isn’t what we have, or look like, or how smart we are — it’s what we can freely give away to others. Envy, disappointment, and causing others to feel like they are a waste of space – those things are terrible gifts to give someone else. LOVE enriches us all. But comparison and competition highlight lack and we live this life, the only one we will get, feeling deprived.

“Don’t be fooled by their outward appearance … the LORD looks at the heart.”  Skip the fancy red lipstick, the 100 one-handed push-ups … and do more bible study instead. Trust me, you will enjoy that life more. Why should any of us make some plastic surgeon/fitness trainer/make-up artist even richer? Bye. 👋

PS Today is our Anniversary. 37 years of being married to the man of my dreams!🎈🎈💕