Fruit, Fruit and More Fruit

I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing. John 15:5

Melodie eating a mango alongside our neighbor's chimp in Tappita - 1987

When we first moved to Liberia as missionaries in 1986, I was amazed by the amount of fruit on our yard. Besides bananas, pineapples and cashews, we had mango, grapefruit and orange trees. In fact, our trees bore so much fruit that at times the branches were literally sagging under the weight of it. 

I knew the verse in Galatians 5:22 about fruit and even taught its principles to women's groups. "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law." Of course I wanted that kind of fruit in my life. 

I didn't find out how seriously I lacked these fruits until several years later. We were working among the Liberian war refugees who had fled to the Ivory Coast and it was harder than anything I could have imagined. I failed miserably. But then God began a big work in my heart. I had seen what a failure I was at producing the fruits of the Spirit in my own strength. What I needed was a complete transformation. 

And in that spirit I threw myself onto God. To my great joy, I found out that was what He had wanted all along! He didn't need my self-effort—my regular "rededications" to increased striving. No, God wanted me to surrender to Him like I never had surrendered before—in complete humility and in true honesty about my helplessness and hopelessness. 

Hudson Taylor, the great missionary statesman to China, struggled in the same way as me and found the same solution. In They Found the Secret he is quoted as saying the following: 

Hudson Taylor - public domain

"How does the branch bear fruit? Not by incessant effort for sunshine and air; not by vain struggles for those vivifying influences which give beauty to the blossom, and verdure to the leaf: it simply abides in the vine, in silent and undisturbed union, and blossoms and fruit appear as of spontaneous growth. 

"How, then, shall a Christian bear fruit? By efforts and struggles to obtain that which is freely given; by meditations on watchfulness, on prayer, on action, on temptation, and on dangers? No: there must be a full concentration of the thoughts and affections on Christ; a complete surrender of the whole being to Him; a constant looking to Him for grace. Christians in whom these dispositions are once firmly fixed go on calmly as the infant borne in the arms of its mother.

I, like Hudson Taylor long ago, needed to stop looking at myself and my efforts. Only when my eyes are off myself and focused on Christ and Him alone can true freedom come. And it is then, and only then, I can "bear much fruit."

See Message from the "Old Ma."

See "What Not to Wear"—Liberia Edition.