It’s in the fruit

If you use social media you have probably seen the recent Druski skit. Druski is a comedian and his recent skit is him as a mega church pastor. Some people were offended and said he was mocking God. Others said he wasn’t mocking God and weren't offended. Personally I wasn’t offended, I saw the skit as mocking false pastors, not mocking God. Sometimes there is truth in comedy and I think this skit does that. It holds a mirror up to some churches and their pastors and highlights where they need to change. 

The skit doesn’t just reflect mega churches. Some of the antics shown in the skit happen in smaller churches too, especially the greed aspect and pastors saying things that just aren’t biblically correct. I know people who have been emotionally hurt by leaders in churches. They have been scammed by large and small churches and swear they will never go back to a church again. It makes me sad that they went through that. For the record, I’m not anti-church, I'm a member of a church, I preach and I serve in my church.

This whole social media conversation about the Druski skit leads back to the importance of people knowing who to trust and making sure we are in the correct healthy spaces that God actually wants us to be in. I’m not just talking about church and pastors, even though it is important that you are in the right Holy Spirit filled, bible teaching church with Godly leaders. I’m also talking about being in the correct healthy secular spaces too, whether that’s your job, your hobby group, your friendship group or people you are friendly with on the school run. I’m talking about knowing when and who to be open with.

How do we do this? Though using our discernment and knowing their fruit. If you think I'm talking about knowing if they prefer bananas or oranges, then keep reading and you’ll discover that starting to learn how to know people’s “fruit” will save you a lot of hurt (emotionally and physically), betrayal, heartbreak and being pulled into gossip circles. 

Discernment

Before we get on to people’s “fruit”, first lets look at how we make sure we are in the correct healthy spaces. We have to use our discernment to make sure we are spotting the red flags quickly and making the right decisions. Discernment is something followers of Christ develop as they read and study the Bible, build their relationship with the Father, through Christ during prayer time, receive the Holy Spirit and develop their spiritual wisdom. Discernment allows us to pick out spiritual truths, rather than lies and follow those truths to lead us to safe spaces in all areas of our lives. 

A preacher from the 1800’s, Charles Spurgeon once said “discernment isn’t knowing the difference between right and wrong. It is knowing the difference between right and almost right”. This is true, what Spurgeon was saying is that it is important that we don’t just spot the bare face lies people say to us but we also spot deceit, the "almost right". Deceit in my option is worse than straight barefaced lies, which are bad enough, because deceit is a bit of truth sprinkled with a lot of lies. 

Deceit in the wilderness

We see deceit being played out when Jesus was in the wilderness and he was being tempted by Satan. Everything that Satan said to Jesus during their conversation was deceitful. First he tells Jesus that Jesus is hungry, without actually telling him outright. He does this by telling Jesus to turn the stones into bread if He is the Son of God. By this point Jesus had been without food and water for 40 days. Yes the truth was that Jesus would’ve been very hungry by this point, as he was in human form.

The lies sprinkled in were firstly the statement “if you are the son of God”, this was deceit because Satan was sprinkling the first lie of the conversation. He knew full well that Jesus is the Son of God but was planting the seed of doubt with the “if”.

The second sprinkled lie was that Jesus needed bread. Yes the truth is Jesus could turn the stones to bread if he wanted to but the lie was that He needed to to do this to stay alive in the wilderness. Jesus didn’t need to eat to stay alive during His time in the wilderness.

The second deceit was Satan telling Jesus to jump from the highest point of the temple. The truth was the reason Satan uses, which was “He [God the Father] will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone’”. (Matthew 4:6) This is true because it is from the bible scripture Psalm 91. Yes, Satan knows Bible scriptures! He knows them more than some Christians unfortunately. 

The deceit in this is again two fold, firstly God the Father, never told Jesus to jump, so Jesus used his discernment to understand that Satan wanted him to kill himself. Jesus understood the deceit. Secondly, Satan deliberately chose to leave out the next part of the scripture, from Psalm 91, that he gave to Jesus when talking about jumping from the temple, which is “You will trample upon lions and cobras; you will crush fierce lions and serpents under your feet!” (Psalm 91:13). Satan leaves this part out because this explains that Satan and his demons will be defeated.

The third and final deceit was when Satan told Jesus that he would give all the kingdoms to Jesus, if Jesus bowed down and worshipped him. This is true because God the Father has made Satan ruler of the earth for a limited time, to influence sinful schemes. This is all part of the spiritual battle that God and Satan are in and that Satan will eventually lose. So Satan can give people anything they want if they worship him. However, the deceit he left out is that this comes at a cost, nothing is free with Satan. Satan will at some point come back to you for what he is owed. This will be taking people closest to you, your family, as a sacrifice and eventually taking your soul to hell when you die. 

Another piece of deceit in this, is that God the Father and the Son (Jesus) rule the whole universe and all kingdoms. They even have authority over Satan and his demons because they were originally angels, created by God, who betrayed God and were kicked out of heaven on to earth. So Jesus didn’t need to worship Satan to have all the kingdoms.

What I love about this conversation between Jesus and Satan is that Jesus discerned every statement from Satan to be “almost right” which was enough to ignore it. He did this by each time saying a simple spiritual truth:

1. “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). 

2. “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test” (Matthew 4:7)

3. “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only” (Matthew 4:10).

   
   

He didn’t get into a long back and forth with Satan. He simply quoted scripture from God the Father. All of the scripture Jesus quoted was from Deuteronomy. That was enough to make Satan give up and flee until his next opportunity. This was when Satan possessed Judas, which led to the crucifixion of Jesus.

Discernment in everyday life

Discernment is what helps us spot the deceit, the “almost rights”, so we can avoid being manipulated. Discernment stops us from entering unsafe spaces, whether they are churches, your job or being around so-called “friends” who don’t actually like us or as I prefer to call them “frenemies”.

Holy Spirit and discernment

I mentioned earlier that one of the ways that we develop discernment is through receiving the Holy Spirit AND listening to the Holy Spirit.

In the Bible, Paul says:

"The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments." (1 Corinthians 2:14-15)

This shows that when believers/ followers of Christ receive the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit gives them the ability to discern/understand and follow the spiritual truths. The Holy Spirit can be like an alarm system in your body to protect you from being manipulated and stop you going to unsafe people and spaces. Non-Christians call it intuition, followers of Christ call it the Holy Spirit. It’s important to remember that we all have free will, so the Holy Spirit will only help you if you let Him by listening to Him. 

“Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” (Matthew 10:16).

Wisdom

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding. His praise endures forever!” (Psalm 111:10)

To have discernment we need to have wisdom. Wisdom is different to intelligence. People can be very intelligent but lack wisdom. We get wisdom from having a healthy fear and trust in the Lord. When the word fear is used with God, it doesn’t mean only doing things because you are scared of God’s punishment. A healthy fear of God is being scared of disappointing him and being scared of losing your connection with Him because you love Him so much.

When you fully trust and have a healthy fear of God, you will want to read the Bible regularly because you will want to know as much as you can about Him as possible. This is what will give you the wisdom to understand and act on your discernment. I always say that the Bible is the best self help book, reading it will give you wisdom which will in the long run protect you.

Here are some Bible scripture about wisdom:

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction” (Proverbs 1:7)

“Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths”. (Proverbs 3:5–6)

“If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him” (James 1:5)

“For the Lord gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding”. (Proverbs 2:6)

“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world” ( 1 John 4:1)

Testing their fruit 

Right, we have discernment, now lets look at how we can learn to trust and allow access to the right people. God, because He loves us so much, has given us a blue print on how to know if people are really good for us and that they won’t bring out the worst in us. The blue print is the “fruit of the spirit”. 

All followers of Christ need to have the fruit of the spirit, so part of our sanctification* process is spending the whole of our lives developing and living out each section of the fruit of the spirit. 

God also wants us to use our discernment to make sure people in our lives have the fruit before we give them increased access to our lives. So we can trust them enough to know they won’t gossip about us and know that they really want the best for us. God wants us to give agape love to everyone but God doesn’t want us to give full access to them. God wants us to test the fruit of everyone before we give them access to our lives. There is a saying; “you will know them by their fruit”. 

*If you want to know about the sanctification process then read my blog post about it here.

The fruit

The Bible says: 

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23)

These nine attributes of the fruit of the spirit are what we need to have as Christians and what we test other people by.

Love: People you let into your life need to genuinely have love for you and want the best for you. In the same way that God loves you. They can’t be jealous if you succeed at something, earn more than them, or if you have the life they thought they would have, or you have a nicer house or car than them. Slight jealousy will turn to envy and we all know it doesn’t end well if you have a “friend” who is envious of you!

Joy: The world is a tough place and we shouldn’t ignore that. However, we need to have fun in life. We need people to have fun with, to laugh with, to go out into the world and make positive memories with. We need people that have joy within them to do this with. We need people that appreciate aspects of their life, even when it’s not going as planned. 

Christians should also have joy in the Lord. So when you go through a hard time, they can help you to find your joy in the Lord, during the bad times to get through it. If we are surrounded by “Debbie downers”, who only see the negative side to everything, they never have anything positive to say, or worse you only see them happy or excited when they are talking or gossiping about something negative. Then your view of life will start to shift and you will start to see the world through their negative lens.

Peace: The one thing that God will give you is peace! So people who are fully surrendered to Christ have acute sensors when someone comes along and disrupts their peace. It reminds them of their life pre-Christ. When they encounter people who thrive on chaos and drama, their radar goes off. Every time they speak to these types of people they are telling them the latest drama they are going through, or what they have heard about someone else's drama. They can also start to bring their chaos into the person’s life because that is what they do. Their discernment tells them they need to back off with these types of people.  

Forbearance: We need people in our lives who have patience during difficult situations. They don’t fly off the handle at the slightest thing. If people in your life don’t have forbearance then you are probably going to be apprehensive or scared around them. You won’t be able to trust them to tell them anything because they are too unpredictable, or are going to overreact or make a scene. If they have created a difficult situation and you try to raise it with them, they will have no patience to listen and take accountability, they will play the victim.

Kindness: Being nice and kind are not the same thing. Nice people tell people what they want to hear because they want to please people. They will not defend you if someone is gossiping about you because they need to please the gossiper too. 

Kind people, on the other hand, tell people who they care about what they need to hear, without being mean to them. They will help people in need, show people respect and they won’t get involved in gossiping about you. This is because kind people have compassion for others and genuinely want the best for the people in their lives,

Goodness: These people have very good morals which are based on the teachings in the Bible. Being around these types of people helps push you to want to be more like Christ everyday. Being around people who are not like this may influence you to make bad, immoral or in some cases illegal decisions. 

Faithfulness: You can tell things to people who are faithful and you can believe that they won’t gossip about you because they are trustworthy. They are faithful to their husbands and wives. They are faithful to God, therefore they do not want to do anything that will not please God and they know that gossiping and breaking someone’s trust will not please God. 

Gentleness: These people are mild and humble. They are not pushovers though because they have discernment, so don’t take their humility for weakness. They are humble because they know no one is more powerful than the Lord. Therefore, they do not need to have a big ego or be prideful to prove themselves to anyone. 

They can admit to people when they have got something wrong because as long as they have repented to God the Father, through Jesus Christ, then it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. The same goes for how they live their lives. They can live a life without showing every detail to everyone and bragging because as long as their life follows biblical instruction then they really don’t care what anyone else thinks.

Self-control: These people can control their desires and wants. They do things in moderation. They are not obsessive over people or things. They don’t have addictions whether it's drugs, alcohol, gambling or food.

If you have given people access to your life who do not have self control, then you know it can be a dangerous game. They can pull you into their addictions through getting into their bad habits by association. Their self control can get you into trouble when you are with them because their impulsive behaviour can lead to arguments and fights with others. People who lack self control concerning obsessing over people, can get you hurt verbally, emotionally or physically, especially if they feel they can’t have all your attention for whatever reason. 

We need self control and we need to be around people who have self-control, so we don’t let our thoughts or their thoughts lead us to do sinful actions. 

Focus on the truth

So, these are the fruit of the spirit and what we need to test people by, especially people who say they are Christians.

We need to focus on the truth, which are the nine parts of the fruit listed above. When we focus solely on the truth, then we can quickly spot the lies and deceit in people’s character. We can spot when people are pretending to have the fruit of the spirit to manipulate you because they will not be able to keep up the deceit for a long period of time. This is why it is important to not make everyone your best friend as soon as you meet them. You can’t be an open book and tell your life story and inner secrets to everyone you meet just because they complement you or say what you want to hear. 

The only time you should be telling people you don’t know or don’t know that well your life story, is when you are telling them your testimony, in order to help bring them to Christ because you are telling what you were like before you let Christ in and how God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) saved you and renewed you for the better and the person you are now.

To further help you in your testing of the fruit, these are are things the Bible says are things of the flesh, so the opposite of the Fruit of the Spirit:

“The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God”. (Galatians 5:19-21)

If you focus on the truth which is the fruit, then when these things of the flesh show up in friends, family, work colleagues or church leaders then you can quickly discern that they don’t have the fruit.

The benefits of discernment and knowing them by their fruit

Here are some benefits of using discernment and knowing them by their fruit:

• Less betrayal.

• Less hurt.

• Less abuse.

• Less trauma in your life.

• You have a stronger community around you.

• You feel more accepted.

• Less drama.

• Less distractions.

• More time to do the positive things God has called you to do. Like raising your family, being a good friend, being a good spouse, completing assignments God has asked you to do and representing God well.

• You feel safe.

They don’t have fruit of the spirit!

So you’ve read through this and realised that you have people in your life that are more *things of the flesh” than “fruit of the spirit”. Well don’t panic, I’m not saying you have to ignore everyone who doesn’t have fruit of the spirit. I can’t say this because the Bible doesn’t say it. 

In the Bible, Jesus says that followers of Jesus have to go out and make disciples. So if you are a Christian reading this, the people we make disciples will not have the fruit of the spirit because they don’t know Christ. Therefore how can we make disciples with people who don’t have fruit of the spirit if we never speak to them?

What I am saying, through the Bible scriptures, that you can be friendly with everyone but in order to feel safe in your life, in your job, in your church, in your extended family and in your friendship group you should only be fully open, vulnerable and only share very personal details with people who have fruit of the spirit. Once they have consistently shown you that they have the fruit, then these are the people that you give access to.

It’s important to remember that if there is someone or people in your life who don’t have fruit of the spirit and they are dangerous, then you don’t have to have contact with them. God is not the author of confusion. God has always loved you, even if you haven’t loved Him and God wants you to be safe and to live a life of safety.

Earlier I said you may have heard the phrase “you’ll know them by their fruit”. Well if you don’t remember everything from this post, then please remember this from the originator of the phrase, my Lord and saviour Jesus Christ:

 “By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them” (Matthew 7:16-20).