Music.
The Rooted Life Change podcast, where we believe that lasting life change can
happen for your good and for God's glory. Today we're gonna kind of continue and
pick up the conversation from where we left off, and we're gonna talk a little
bit about trees today, about fruit, and just exactly this kind of imagery that
is kind of embedded in some of the stuff that I'm talking about, and it's very
embedded throughout the Bible. If you were to open up your Bible and read
through it and highlight every time that there was mention of a tree or mention
of a fruit or some sort of plant, you'd be surprised how much things of how much
of your Bible you end up highlighting by the end of it. Trees and plants happen to
be one of the primary images that are used throughout the Bible. We've talked
about in one of our past episodes about the Garden of Eden and its two trees and what those two trees
represented. When we think about that very familiar story, right, Adam and Eve have these
two trees. One, God encourages them to eat from one tree, the tree of life, which has this fruit
and symbolizes being connected to God in His way of life, of making the right choice and following.
After him of saying, I will submit my understanding of how to live my life to.
God. And then there was the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and that tree
represented the exact opposite. It represented taking knowledge of how to
live our life into our own hands. If maybe that has never really sunk in before exactly that there were two trees and that they represented opposites. It's
And it's not just that that tree of knowledge of good and evil all of a sudden gave the
Adam and Eve knowledge.
That wasn't necessarily it.
It was that they chose to say, we will be the determiners of what is good and what is
evil, of right and wrong.
And that is the knowledge that they were taking on. They decided, we're no longer going to live life according to the way God has called us
to live, but we're choosing to write our own story to say, we know what is best.
And eating from that tree of the knowledge of good and evil was that choice.
And with that came shame, came sin, came all of the problems that we now face as humanity,
because we don't know how best to live.
Left to our own devices, we do not make wise decisions. Today we're going to talk a little bit more about some of this imagery, pick up some of
imagery that Jesus talks about when he mentions trees and plants in New Testament. Jesus has
many parables where he talks about fruit, and he talks about trees, and we'll talk about.
A couple of them but I want to
start off with this one particular Bible verse that I think is very important for us to understand,
and that is this short two verses in Luke chapter 6.
Jesus says these following words here. He says,
No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit.
Each tree is recognized by its own fruit.
Do not pick figs from thorn bushes, or grapes from briars. A good man brings good things
out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the
evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what is the heart full of.".
Okay, let's break that down for a second. At first, Jesus kind of is saying something
that sounds so just no-brainer, right? Of course, if you go up to a thornbush, you wouldn't
expect to find grapes. If there was an apple tree in your backyard and you walked up to
that apple tree, you're expecting to find what? Apples. You wouldn't expect to find
oranges or you wouldn't expect to find bananas, right? Each tree produces fruit depending
on what kind of tree it is.
Tree that's sick, tree that's maybe got some infestation of some kind, is not getting the
right nutrients, is not getting enough water, is going to produce fruit that's less than
desirable, it's not going to be quite right, not as juicy, it's not going to be good fruit,
not healthy fruit.
And then Jesus shifts from talking about agriculture to talking about the internal condition of a person.
He moves and means to take that image of a tree and apply it directly to our lives, to
the way we conceive and think about ourselves.
He says a good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an
evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart.
Now what is this saying? Well, it's saying that there's something that's coming out of us.
What is our life producing?
God, Jesus here is saying, if you look at the fruit, the words that someone speaks,
the actions that they do, it will tell you about what's going on in the inside.
And so this gives us a question of what does our fruit look like?
What is the fruit of our lives producing?
And what does that say about what's going on in the inside of our own hearts?
And I think this is a really important thing. When we're talking about last couple episodes, we've been talking about stepping out of denial,
of admitting that there's a problem, of coming forward and beginning to seek help and stepping
into the light.
Now, in order to do that, we have to start naming and owning the fruit that our life
is producing. And that's a really important thing to do.
What are some of those maybe sour fruits that we're maybe experiencing?
I have a handful of here. Fruits, sour fruits, bad fruit, spoiled fruit that we could be introducing or experiencing in our lives here.
One is addiction. What's going on? There's something wrong if I am consistently drawn
to dependency, whether that be on chemicals, or on behaviors, or on pornography. We are seeking out
something. When we are constantly clinging on to the next thing, to a place where we become,
so needy and so dependent on the thing that we become unhealthy, we're in trouble, right?
Right? Anxiety, right? Are we just constantly anxious? Any little thing is reason for panic
and calamity to come. We're constantly wrecked. It is such a large boulder of anxiety that
we carry on our shoulders. That's a fruit that's bearing out of the position and condition
of our heart? Are we depressed? Are we stuck? Have we lost a sense of ourself and a sense
of ourselves inside of our life and inside of the world? Are we depressed? Elsewhere
is repeating relationship cycles. This is a big one. Are we continually going down this.
Cycle of finding a new connection, a new relationship, and then it crashing and burning at some point?
Are we continually burning bridges with people? Do we just have a long list of people who we don't talk to anymore and not very many
people who we keep in good relationship with?
Is that an ongoing relationship cycle that we're stuck in? Ongoing pain from the past?
Is there something from your past that you cannot name without it being as hurtful and
painful as it was the day it happened?
Not that we should never feel sorrow over things that have happened long ago or a while
ago. That's very normal.
But when things continue to stay sore.
Continue to stay unhealed. It's the difference between having an open wound and having a scar.
When I look at the scar, I can remember the pain, I can see the mark it's left on me.
But an open wound, anytime you move it or touch it, you are in searing pain.
Have we, do we have a wound in our past that we have not dealt with? That is still an open wound
And we haven't gotten any level of healing on yet,
Are we stuck in a cycle of anger? We're constantly in this place of,
Trying to control our anger and then losing control of our anger where we are constantly
Angry at those who are closest to us who want to love us the most.
Are we stuck in a cycle?
Now there's So much wrapped up in each of those things that I mentioned and that's only a small list of things
I'm sure that someone else you who are listening could come up with maybe a couple other,
Sour fruits to add to that list and it's not just a simple fix-it type of mentality
I'm not saying well, these are sour fruits. These are bad things. These are bad fruits
And you just need to get over it or pray over it. That's not what I'm saying
What I'm saying is that these fruits, the things that are coming out of our life, are,
an indication of something much deeper and much more systemic inside of our life.
Out of the root of our heart, out of the root of our history, of our past, of the systems
and cycles out of the environment that we live in, are coming all of these sour fruits.
And so.
We're called here to kind of examine these fruits. And this is kind of a strange shift,
and you might not be there quite yet, but I want to give you a glimpse. If you identified with one
of those sour fruits, one of the things that I said there, and you're like, that's one of the
sour fruits of my life. Definitely. It's a reoccurring, ongoing sour fruit. Now, you might
say, oh, what do I need to do to get rid of that sour fruit? And what you might be tempted and what
a lot of change and a lot of things that we kind of books and other programs that we might look at,
often tackle is ways to kind of just pick off the sour fruit and throw it away, right? Okay,
what do I need to do to just like get all the sour fruit off the tree and throw it away?
Get it out of my view, get it out of my life, be done with it.
But if you do that, and then you don't do anything to take care of the roots,
to take care of the health of the tree or the plant, it's going to keep producing sour fruit.
See, when we took a look at these sour fruits, a lot of times we get fixated and we say,
I have got an addiction problem. I've got an alcohol problem. I've got a pornography problem.
I've got a relationship problem. I've got an anger problem. I've got a hurt or a pain from the past
problem. Right? And we say, that's the problem. And it's not an insignificant piece. It's not
that that isn't a problem.
Chances are is that there's something else going on inside of the roots and in the life of your tree and of your heart in the way in which you've been living that is producing that fruit.
And so rooted is all about trying to get down to that heart level.
We want to talk about the fruit. Yes, we want to work on tools to kind of help manage that.
Figure out how to have that, mitigate that, have that have a less significant impact in our lives.
But really, we wanna get down into the roots.
And the first step of doing that is just looking at the fruit and then asking some questions
and wondering aloud and in conversation saying, what does this fruit say about what's going inside at down in my roots?
I'm starting to rhyme and sound like Dr. Seuss. Anyways, we want to begin to think about what's going on inside of my heart.
And we know that the Bible tells that story, that Adam and Eve chose the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil to live life according to their own definitions of right and wrong.
And each and every single one of us past them has continued to do that very same thing.
The Bible elsewhere says that all of us, like sheep, have gone astray.
Psalmists continually ask in the book of Psalms, like, what's going on inside of my heart,
Lord? Lord, discern my heart, reveal to me what is going on inside of it.
And so this is going to require some deep work, but God is here for it.
Jesus said that he came not to heal the healthy, but to heal the sick.
He came to be a physician for the soul, for those who need it.
And if you find yourself in a place of needing a physician for the soul,
then you're in a really good place.
So I'd encourage you as you kind of listen and think on this topic and this idea over this coming week,
I'd say, sit down, kind of think through what are the fruits, small and big?
What are the big ones that you see? Maybe you have an addiction that is really keenly
on your mind and you're like, this is a big sour fruit in my life,
that keeps coming back and keeps being reproduced.
But what are some of those other smaller ones? Sometimes we get so fixated perhaps on an addiction,
and we maybe miss the fact that, oh, I'm also burning relationships.
Or perhaps I also have an anger problem. Maybe they're somehow connected.
Take an inventory of your fruit.
Don't beat yourself up about it, right? We're coming to get healing.
We're coming to talk about the problem, right? just like we were talking about earlier, right?
A wound, right? We need to diagnose the wound so we can treat it. So don't be angry at the
wound. Don't be angry at the fruit. Just simply notice it. Maybe take a list of it and write
it down. Maybe spend some time in prayer over it. Ask the Lord to begin to do some work
of revealing in your heart of, what does this fruit say perhaps about me and my heart?
What's perhaps going on in there? And I would wager that if you prayed over those sour fruits in your life, and you asked
the Lord to give you wisdom over the internal workings of your heart, I bet you would be
surprised over how much insight the Lord grants you into that.
Next week we're going to talk about some of the consequences of not addressing our fruit.
Music.