Daily Devotional

All week we have used this passage as a tool for evaluating others. Before we close, turn it on yourself. Read verse 18 again: a healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. A tree does not decide to bear grapes. A tree bears what it is. Which means the deepest question here is not whether you can try harder and produce a better crop this year. The question is whether you have been made a new tree.

You cannot behave your way into a new nature. Paul Tripp calls the counterfeit fruit stapling: people go and get fruit and staple it onto a dead tree, but the tree is still dead. If verse 18 is true, and Jesus says it is, no amount of effort can turn a diseased tree into a healthy one. Something has to happen to the tree itself. This is exactly where the gospel meets us. It is not a program for better fruit. It is the promise that God takes dead things and makes them alive, that he takes diseased things and makes them healthy, giving a new heart and a new spirit as he promised in Ezekiel 36:26.

This is why the Son of God came. He lived the life we have not lived and died the death we could not pay, and he rose so that our barren tree could be made new from the root. If you are not yet in Christ, do not wait for July to come; confess your need of a Savior and receive the new life he freely gives. And if you are in Christ, hear this before you go: the Lord does not demand perfect fruit or a perfectly straight walk. If you belong to him, you will bear some good fruit, and he will forgive the bad. That is what we are doing when we worship. We bring our flawed fruit to the One who forgives it and strengthens us to bear better fruit next week. Apart from him we can do nothing, but abiding in him, as Jesus says in John 15:5, we bear much fruit.