When our family moved to California’s Central Coast, I (Bryce) began to try my hand at gardening. Several years in, our lettuces are providing daily salads, the nasturtiums spill over the planter boxes, and our berry bushes are being trained along trellises.
When we first moved, I knew nothing about gardening, but we had to cut back overgrowth and I watched tons of YouTube videos to learn how to get the soil healthy. While we were new to gardening, we knew that healthy soil would grow healthy plants. But to get healthy plants, we needed to invest time – to learn, to care for our fledging plants – and we needed to make adjustments based on factors like weather or a plant’s access to light.
Abundance – whether in a garden or our spiritual lives – doesn’t happen quickly. In both settings, growth requires vision, intention, and a plan to get there.
Jesus himself lays out the vision for a fruitful life in the Sermon on the Mount, his most famous sermon, found in Matthew 5-7. Toward the end of his sermon when he’s talking about false teachers, Jesus says this: “A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:18-20).
How will we recognize resilient, Christ-following disciples, and how will we discern them from false teachers or shallow teachers who are tossed by every changing wind of doctrine or cultural fad? Jesus says it’s by their fruit that we will know them. The fruit of our lives is displayed in our habits and practices, our desires, the way we treat our families and community members, and even how we interact on social media.
Interestingly, Jesus doesn’t point to external metrics – like how long disciples had followed him or how many people they had told about Jesus – as the key to spiritual growth. In many of our church cultures today, we look to our bank accounts, Bible reading checklists, or church attendance as primary metrics of success. These can be helpful markers of fruitfulness as gathering with God’s people and giving can demonstrate the fruit of God’s Spirit in his people, yet these are not the entire story.
And while Jesus commends the faithfulness of the servants in parables such as the parable of the talents (Matthew 25) or the parable of the Dishonest Manager (Luke 16), we don’t see faithfulness as the only way of thinking about healthy disciples. We often think about faithfulness as just holding on. Yet, the servant in the parable of the talents who simply did nothing with the coin he was given was condemned. Fruitfulness involves real fruit; it also involves real work, vulnerability, and risk. As the authors of “Resilient Ministry” note, “Fruitfulness includes a measure of faithfulness and a measure of success—valuing both but preferring neither” (13).
Jesus expects that if we are in him, we will be healthy trees, not because of metrics or our faithfulness, but because of Jesus himself. All faith and faithfulness are a gift. It is Christ who finishes the work he begins in us.
In John 15, Jesus uses other agricultural metaphors of vines and branches: “As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me” (John 15:4). The key to spiritual growth is to abide in Christ himself. As we are connected to Jesus, we cannot help but grow into healthy disciples.
When we talk about fruitfulness, we mean growing into a Christ-shaped life, where we live and love as Jesus did. This Christ-shaped life holds real freedom, meaning, purpose, and peace. But often we are unsure how to get there.
The Sermon on the Mount is one of the longest portions of Scripture where we get Jesus’ direct words to his followers. As he describes his upside-down kingdom where the meek inherit the earth and we pray for our enemies, it can feel overwhelming to think about actually living according to it, or it can feel like some sort of collection of platitudes that elicit a noncommittal shrug.
The good news is that the Sermon on the Mount isn’t a list of arbitrary rules or a yardstick with which Jesus makes sure we measure up. It is good news. As he begins his sermon, Jesus starts with what one writer called the “spiritual zeros,” those who lack, who hunger for justice and righteousness, those who feel their inadequacy. This is great news! Grace always precedes commands. As Jesus lays out his vision of a fruitful life in the sermon, he not only preaches about what the kingdom of God looks like, but also embodies it on our behalf. He confers grace in his preaching and the Spirit confers grace today, even as we read and hear.
How might we live as fruitful disciples in a busy, disconnected, and polarized historical moment? We need a vision, but it doesn’t stop there. As we thought about learning to garden, we could watch all the YouTube videos about gardening in our climate zone, and research different soil methods, but nothing would grow without intention and a plan. As we’ve been studying this portion of Scripture over the last several years to write “A Fruitful Life,” we’re also reminded how many times Jesus asks his followers questions: Do you want to be made well? What do you want? Who touched me? In each of these questions he is asking to hear their intention.
Do you want to be a fruitful disciple? Do you want to be connected to Christ, to live and love as he did? Jesus tells us our highest aim and most secure self come as we align ourselves with the kingdom of God. Here is real fruitfulness. Do you want it?
Bryce Hales pastors Trinity Presbyterian Church in San Luis Obispo, California. Ashley Hales is editorial director for print at Christianity Today. “A Fruitful Life: Discovering Jesus’ Invitation in the Sermon on the Mount” (IVP) is their first published work together: an 8-week Bible study with video content.