The Fruit We're Growing
What is the Christian life?
We’ve recently gotten into gardening, and something we’ve learned quickly is that what we’re growing determines how we go about growing it. Blueberries require different growing conditions than lettuce, which requires different conditions from roses, and so forth. And if I’m cultivating blueberries but getting poison ivy, I need to change my methods.
In the same way, before we seek spiritual growth, we should ask, what are we growing? That is, what do we hope to see in the Christian life?
This chart has a summary of the essential fruit of the Christian life. In the rest of the piece, we’ll break each down in greater detail.
The Double Love
When Jesus was asked, “What is the greatest commandment?” he replied:
“The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:29-31)
These commands define the “fruit” of a true human life. To be fully human is to grow in what Augustine called “the double love of God and neighbor.” We are to worship and follow Yahweh, the God of Israel and the Father of Jesus, with everything we have; and we are to chase the good of others as passionately as we do our own. This is what you were made for. And when God moves into the fixer-upper of our lives, these are the design principles he uses to draw up the blueprints.
I Want To Know What Love Is
But, as Chesterton said somewhere, simply saying “we need to love” is like saying, “we need to be healthy.” We need definitions of what love for God and love for neighbor look like.
There’s a snapshot from the very beginning of the Church that shows this double love in action in a community:
42 And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. 43 And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. 44 And all who believed were together and had all things in common. 45 And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. 46 And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. – Acts 2:42-47
We see the two loves woven together, as it were, to show how inseparable they are; but if we look closely we can tease out the threads.
Love of God: Hearing and following Jesus
The love of God includes “devot[ing] themselves to the apostles’ teaching.” The apostles – Jesus’ specially commissioned disciples – had the primary job of teaching who Jesus was, what he had done, and what he wanted from his followers. Devoting oneself to that teaching means hearing it and obeying it, so that Jesus’ words become the defining authority of our lives. As Jesus said, “the one who hears my words and does them” (Luke 6:47) builds their house on the rock. Loving God means hearing and following Jesus.
In today’s world, hearing Jesus comes from reading him in the Old and New Testaments, and hearing his Word preached at a solid church. It means learning how Old and New Testament texts lead us to life in him. And it means following those words as our ultimate source of truth and wisdom.
Love of God: Acts of worship
The love of God also includes “the breaking of bread and the prayers … and day by day, attending the temple together.” Some early Christian worship looked like Jewish worship – attending the temple – and some would have happened in the homes of Christians, like the Lord’s Supper and other prayers. Both church-based and home-based acts of worship reorient us to God, and are part of loving him.
Today, that obviously means gathering for formal worship and the Lord’s Supper. But it also means finding ways to worship God in our homes and in our everyday lives with other Christians. We may use set prayers, like the psalms, the Lord’s Prayer, or the Apostles’ Creed, that lead us to worship God; or we may just pray informally, sing, or discuss God’s Word, like Old Testament saints did with the Torah.
Love of God: Intimacy with God
And finally, “they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God.” The love of God recognizes that everything we have is a gift from him. And it seeks to enjoy him in every area of life – not just in formal worship services, but even in drinking your orange juice! Loving God involves a life of growing intimacy with God.
Today, this looks like what we call our “devotional life” – personal time reading the Word and prayer. It also includes the lifelong fight to repent of our sin and to make God the highest love in our lives. We don’t just want external conformity to God’s commands; we want whole-hearted devotion to him, and quick repentance when we (inevitably) fall.
Love of neighbor: Christian community
The love of neighbor includes committing to Christian community. “The fellowship” is a formal term for the early Church living life together, and you can see that throughout the passage: “breaking bread” would have been done with others; and they did both formal worship together and simply “were together” (44). Simply being with others can be an act of love. And the fact that Christians were willing to share even financial needs with one another shows that their relationships were deeper than surface-level chitchat.
The term most commonly used for this today is “community,” which is usually distinguished from simply “going to church.” Christian love seeks relationships of intimacy and depth with a spiritual family.
Love of neighbor: Service
It also involves service: meeting the needs of others. The early Christians “had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.” The early Church was famous for how it cared for those in it, particularly those who had no means to care for themselves, like widows and orphans. Concrete acts of service show the same kind of love Jesus showed us when he washed his disciples’ feet.
Plenty of churches organize formal ways of serving others now; and parables like the Good Samaritan show what the willingness to serve in informal settings looks like. The needs today aren’t identical to those then, but they’re close enough it’s easy to imagine.
Love of neighbor: Discipleship and evangelism
And finally, loving others means directing them toward this double love. All the acts of worship together weren’t just social occasions: they were opportunities for the Christians to push one other to stay faithful to God. And at the very end, we see that “the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.” Their love compelled them to share these things with family and neighbors, so that others came into the saving work of God as well. Caring for others means caring for their eternal good – wanting to see them enter the kingdom of God – as well as their physical good. In my circles today, we call these discipleship and evangelism.
Discipleship means taking an active role in the spiritual growth of fellow Christians. As good as fellowship and service are, we have a responsibility to help one another cultivate this double love for God and others. In our conversations, prayers, and worship, we should be asking our spiritual family about their souls and about their growth in God, and finding ways to encourage them in it (or exhort or rebuke them when they stray).
And evangelism means the same thing, but for friends and family who are not yet Christians. We live as ambassadors representing the kingdom of God, and also as ministers of reconciliation pleading with others to find true life in God’s love. And by God’s grace, we trust that he might cause those efforts to bear fruit in their coming to him as well.
A Deeper Love for the Gospel
The double love for God and neighbor is vital. Some Christian circles have wanted to emphasize this second fruit so much that they’ve downplayed the importance of that, communicating (maybe on accident, maybe on purpose) that Christian growth only consists in celebrating how much God has forgiven us. So that’s why I started where I did.
But there’s another vital fruit of true Christianity that distinguishes it from both other religions and from secular moral renovation projects. You can see it on display in these quotes from the apostle Paul, which come from successively later points in his Christian life:
For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. (1 Corinthians 15:9 - relatively early)
To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ … (Ephesians 3:8 - later)
This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief. (1 Timothy 1:15, near the end of his life, in the KJV because it slaps)
You might think that Paul’s trajectory, which included planting numerous churches and writing letters of increasing influence in the early Church, would include a growing confidence in his character as well (or at least a swelling head). But these quotes show exactly the opposite: he “grows” from calling himself the least of the apostles, to the very least of Christians, to the chief of sinners. What’s happened here? Is this a sign of discouragement? Low self-esteem?
It’s a sign of getting the gospel.
The gospel, as we’ve discussed before, is the good news that God saves sinners entirely through the grace earned by Jesus.
Salvation begins by God’s grace when he makes our dead souls come alive to his reality, forgives us of our sins, unifies us to Christ, and adopts us as his children
It’s maintained by his grace as he continues to forgive us of fresh sins and failures and patiently, persistently grows us.
It’s completed by his grace as he preserves us through a life of struggle, victory, and stumbling and welcomes us into the everlasting rest of heaven and then the new creation.
Or, as the great hymn puts it:
With every breath, I long to follow Jesus
For He has said that He will bring me home
And day by day, I know He will renew me
Until I stand with joy before the throne
To this I hold, my hope is only Jesus
All the glory evermore to Him
When the race is complete, still my lips shall repeat:
”Yet not I, but through Christ in me”
The Christian life includes a double experience of growing in seeing the power and goodness of God, and in “growing” in seeing the pervasiveness and loathsomeness of my sin. There are ways I have genuinely if imperfectly grown in my love for God and my love for others, and I am so grateful for that. But I have seen the cussedness of my own soul much more clearly than I did when I was twenty. This double consciousness means the Christian life includes an ever-deeper gratitude for the gospel, with an according humility. I’ve seen it visualized like this:
This matters, not just because it follows Paul’s trajectory (which is not a bad reason!) or because it’s a true account of how sinful we are (also not a bad reason!), but because the alternative is to say that the Christian life entails growing in self-satisfaction, pride, and denial of our ongoing weaknesses and failures. If “Christian growth” makes us self-righteous, prideful, or bitter, it’s turning us into a Pharisee and moving us in the opposite direction of Jesus’ own humility.
But if we embrace the good news that we’re saved, preserved, and grown sheerly by grace, we’re freed from the need to justify ourselves as being anything more than the chief of sinners. We’re freed to see the gospel, exemplified in the Cross, as increasingly rich and beautiful. And we’re freed to fight for the double love as hard as we can, not in the hope of earning a verdict of righteousness some day, but on the basis of the fact that God has already earned the verdict for us through Jesus. In the soil of that security, true love for God and neighbor will grow more readily and more enduringly.
These are the fruits of the Christian life: the double love of God and neighbor, and an ever-deeper love for the gospel. This is what we want to see growing. In the next piece, we’ll look at a pattern for how that growth happens.
Photo by Ernest Porzi on Unsplash