Paul calls the acts of the flesh “works” (Galatians 5:19), but the good stuff from the Spirit he calls “fruit.” Paul also uses “works” when he speaks of law-based living. But if we find ourselves filled with love, joy and peace, it is not our works—it’s God’s fruit.
The term “fruit” suggests a kind of passivity, a sort of receiving rather than manufacturing. Works are about “doing.” Fruit is about “being.” Jesus said it plainly, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, …” (John 15:5, ESV).
Fruit is free! It is the free byproduct of a healthy plant and a healthy relationship between vine and branch.
So, why is growing tomatoes so hard?
Fruit is free. .. ish.
As of last post, I had about $60 worth of plants and cages and at least 20 hours of time in coddling my tomato vines. After praying and watering and blessing the plants, they grew (especially the two that I bought half-grown for top dollar). And green tomatoes began appearing!
One day, two tomatoes reddened. I was overjoyed as if I’d discovered the pearl of great price. I wanted my wife to dance with me. She was less exuberant than I.
In my joy, I moved in close to discern whether it was time to pick my first home grown tomato when, suddenly, horror struck. The bottom side of the tomato was dark and rotten. I looked at some of the not yet ripened tomatoes. They too had ugly bottoms.
I sent my sister-in-law a photo of the devastated fruit.
“Thankfully,” she replied, “That’s curable. The plants need calcium. You’ll need to get a product and spray them. It will take care of it.”
I looked it up online, “blossom-end rot” they call it. Natural remedies espoused include covering the soil with eggshells or crushing Tums into the soil. I went to the store instead. The first large hardware retailer was out of the calcium concentrate so I made my way to a second store. The solution was about $13 and needed to be mixed per instructions and sprayed on the plant at dusk five days apart.
By my calculations, I was now about $75 and 30 hours into growing and cultivating but hadn’t come close to eating a tomato.
I told myself not to calculate how much each tomato was costing me. Just remember, “there’s nothing like picking your own tomato from your own back yard.”
Praise the Lord, my calcium treatments seemed to work. The new green baby tomatoes were whole – no bottom rot. But, as I inspected the maturing plants, horror struck again.
A ghastly green worm-like alien bearing eerie white sacs on its top side was munching a vine. Then I saw another and another.
“Katherine,” I texted in a hurry. “What’s this?”
“Oh no,” she said, “That’s a tomato caterpillar. You got to get rid of them. They can do real damage.”
I looked it up.
It’s the Green Tomato Hornworm. Evidently, brown moths lay pearl-like eggs on the tomato plant from which the green monster worms hatch and eat voraciously. They can strip a plant overnight. The hideous alien-like white sacs are cocoons of the braconid wasp riding parasitically on the worm.
How do you get rid of a Green Tomato Hornworm? Experts agree: Hand pluck them.
Are you kidding me?
Maybe the Lord put the passion in my heart to grow a tomato to show me a prophetic picture. He told Hosea “Go marry a prostitute.” Maybe He told me “Go grow a tomato.” The lesson has been clear—the fruit is free but the cultivation of the fruit is costly. It all depends on how much you want a home grown tomato. It all depends on how much you want the love and joy of Jesus.
Abiding in Jesus is free and beautiful and fruit-producing. And it is costly like friendship or marriage or even a delightful hobby. Abiding in Jesus means the sacrifice of time spent on other pursuits. Friendship with Jesus often means war with the ways of the world and the wiles of the devil. The Spirit’s fruit of love and joy and peace is utterly free, but marauding worm-like thoughts compete for our attention and often must be hand plucked from our consciousness, one by one, replacing every lie with the truth of God’s Word. In a drought-ridden world, we have to water our souls with the Word and worship.
“We meet and dwell with Jesus and His Father in the disciplines for the spiritual life,” Dallas Willard wrote.
I like to think of the spiritual disciplines as gateways to grace. Grace is a gift, unearned, unmerited. But we make the choice whether to open the gates. We make the choice whether to cultivate conduits for God’s grace to flow in and through us. In his classic, Celebration of Discipline , Richard Foster said simply: “The Disciplines allow us to place ourselves before God so that he can transform us… By themselves the Spiritual Disciplines can do nothing; they can only get us to the place where something can be done. They are God’s means of grace.”
Is it worth it? All the digging, weeding, planting, watering, calcium-treating, and hornworm plucking? Will I ever get a tomato? Maybe. I’ll have a tomato update next week.
Is it worth it? All the praying, worshipping, reading, simplifying, quietening and gratitude journaling? Will we ever have spiritual fruit?
Absolutely. And there’s nothing like the love, joy, peace and patience of Christ flowing in us. Nothing … except maybe a home-grown tomato.
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