The Fruit that Abides! John 15:9-17; Acts 10:34-48; 1 John 5:1-8

Grace, mercy, and peace …

Last Sunday we talked about abiding in Christ. Today we’re going the fruit that abides.

What are some of your favorite kinds of fruit? FFA Fruit?

Apples, oranges, bananas, pears, tangerines, raspberries (my sister); how about blueberries, strawberries, and my personal favorite, cherry pie.  That’s my idea of a fruit.

Any other favorite fruits?

How Fruit of the Loom?

How about fruit of the Spirit, that’s the best kind of fruit.

Galatians 5:22-23 lists some of the fruit of the Spirit:  love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

The fruit of the Spirit is the fruit that abides.

After a while fruit can spoil, and then the only thing it’s good for is throwing at the speaker… glad that’s no longer done.

In our Gospel Jesus says, I chose you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should abide.

Or in verses 9 and 10 Jesus puts it this way:  ⁹ As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. ¹⁰ If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love.

In our Epistle John says, By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments.

So this is the first thing our Gospel teaches us about the fruit that abides, it must keep the commandments.

Any fruit we bear, any of our deeds, or words, or thoughts, or feelings that are not true to the Word and will of God are just spoiled fruit. They don’t feed the world with godly love, they poison the world with sin.

But God would have us add love and truth to the world.

The second thing we learn from our lessons is that it’s doable.

God does not ask us to do the impossible. Or to put another way, With God, all things are possible, or, nothing is impossible.

Or as Paul says in Philippians 4:13, I can do all things through Him who gives me strength.

In our Epistle, Johns reminds us, And his commandments are not burdensome. ⁴ For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world.

When he wrote this, John must have had the words of Jesus in mind, when he told his disciples, In the world you will have troubles, but take heart; I have overcome the world!  

What helps us to keep us from spreading the poisonous fruit of sin in the world, and helps us to spread the fruit of godliness instead? Being born of God.  

John says, And this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith.

We’re able to bear the fruit of godly love in this world, because we have the gift of faith.

In our reading from Acts, we hear how as Peter was telling people about the gospel, the Holy Spirit fell on them, and they believed, and they were baptized, even though they were Gentiles.

And none of the Jewish believers objected to it, because they could see this was the will of God. In that moment they lost their prejudice.

This doesn’t mean they may not have struggled with it later on, and they actually had to live and serve God side by side with Gentiles, but the fruit of love, which as Peter says, bears no partiality, has no prejudice, has been give to them, and they were growing in it.

This was an amazing fruit of the Spirit in the early church, as people learned to overcome their prejudice toward the Gentiles, or the Jews, and see them the way Jesus did, as people to be loved unconditionally, and saved by the same Gospel.

So when Jesus said, Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. ¹⁴ You are my friends if you do what I command you, He was including people from all nations.  

Believing this, many of the apostles actually gave their lives to spread the Gospel to the Gentiles. That’s the opposite of prejudice; that’s godly love.

They could have that kind of love in their lives because, as we talked about last week, they were connected to the true vine, they believed in Christ.

When Christ is our source of spiritual life, it helps us to have this same kind of nonprejudiced, nonjudgmental love for others, and so to share the Gospel with all, accompanied by deeds of love.

Jesus says that we can show this kind of love even to our enemies. When we share Christ together, in our hearts, it changes us into friends. 

This leads us to a third thing about the fruit that endures, it comes from friendship with God.

Jesus said, No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.  

While we serve the Lord, we do so as His friends. He’s kept no secrets from us; He’s given us the truth of God in His Word, and the Holy Spirit to empower us to believe it, and to enlighten us to understand it.

Now as His friends, a part of the fruit we bear is to share the knowledge Gospel, in the context of loving those we share it with.

Or as our mission reminds us to know Christ and to make Him known.

Finally, the fourth thing about the fruit that endures is that it brings joy into our lives, and into the lives of those we share it with.

Jesus said, These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full, or complete.

Bad fruit, sinful living and false teaching, can’t bring true joy; it’s a false copy of joy.

It’s like intoxication, or like the high a person gets from a drug; it may seem like joy, but in reality it’s the opposite. In the end, it’ll rob you of any joy in your life; it’ll just drag you down into a prison of despair.

The toxic fruit of sin does the same thing; this is most obviously seen in the prison that sin would drag us down into called hell. There’s no joy at all there.

But Jesus wants us to bear fruit with joy. So he gives us the antidote for sin: grace, faith, the gospel, baptism, and the body and blood of Christ for our forgiveness.

Through these Gospel gifts, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we’re helped to have  less sin and selfishness in our lives, less bad fruit, and more godly fruit: more love and more joy.

So go and bear a ton of fruit; because the fruit born of the Gospel brings true joy, and it won’t spoil; it’ll abide in you and last in the world until Christ comes again. And then it will abide in heaven.

The rotten fruit of worldliness is good for nothing; godly fruit is good for everything and everyone. The fruit of the Spirit is the fruit to attain, to share, and to abide in.

May God bless your life with an abundance of good fruit, with godly love and true joy.

And the fruit of God’s peace, which passes understanding, will guard your heart and mind, in Christ Jesus, our Savior and Friend. Amen.