Pruned for Purpose: How God Produces Lasting Spiritual Fruit
- Jack Selcher
- Mar 3, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: Jan 25
Summary
God produces lasting spiritual fruit through intentional pruning. Like peach trees, believers grow stronger when God removes distractions and unproductive pursuits. Life is not about happiness or recognition but usefulness to the Master. True joy comes from a God-centered life devoted to doing good, meeting urgent needs, and blessing others. When believers embrace pruning, they experience deeper satisfaction, focused purpose, and fruit that brings glory to God and eternal benefit to others.
Lessons From a Peach Orchard
I swung a rubber hose with a stick inside it to get the job done. I was thinning peaches during hot summer afternoons at the orchard where, as a teenager, I worked for the summer.
Peach trees often set too many peaches for all to grow to marketable size. Enter the teenage peach thinner. I would strike excess peaches to space the remaining ones about eight inches apart. This was part of my employer’s plan to maximize the peach harvest. He did more.
He pruned his trees in early spring. He removed about 40 percent of each tree annually to encourage new growth. He removed broken or diseased branches. He pruned away suckers and water sprouts. He cut off everything that drew from the tree’s strength but wouldn’t produce marketable fruit.
God’s Plan to Maximize Lasting Spiritual Fruit
More importantly, God expects and has a plan to maximize our spiritual fruitfulness. We’re like those peach trees. “He cuts off every branch of mine that doesn’t produce fruit, and he prunes the branches that do bear fruit so they will produce even more” (John 15:2 NLT).
Fruit That Brings Glory to God
Jesus said, “When you produce much fruit, you are my true disciples. This brings great glory to my Father” (John 15:8 NLT). This pruning narrows and focuses our lives on that which has eternal significance and systematically removes what doesn’t. That is part of the denying and dying to ourselves required to follow Jesus (Luke 9:23).
Happiness Versus True Purpose
Life isn’t about the pursuit of happiness. I received a message from a stranger on Facebook who said, “I am not happy.” The woman expected me to fix the problem.
The real problem was that she misunderstood life’s purpose. Her life wasn’t God-centered and useful to the Master. Joy is a by-product of a right relationship with God (John 15:8-11).
A Life Useful to the Master
The satisfaction I’ve experienced from the awards and honors I’ve received doesn’t compare with the ocean-deep contentment of making an eternal difference in someone’s life.
Paul wrote to Timothy, “If you keep yourself pure, you will be a special utensil for honorable use. Your life will be clean, and you will be ready for the Master to use you for every good work” (2 Timothy 2:21 NLT).
A fruitful life is devoted to doing good. Any other defining purpose sucks away life’s vital energy and resources while producing nothing of enduring worth.
Paul wrote, “Our people must learn to do good by meeting the urgent needs of others; then they will not be unproductive” (Titus 3:14 NLT). Urgent needs might be emotional, physical, financial, and/or spiritual.
We can spend our lives like a honeybee flitting from one self-serving flower to the next. We can spend our time entertaining ourselves and others with things we’re good at and enjoy.
We can try to make a name for ourselves in the world. That guarantees we won’t produce much spiritual fruit for God. The spiritually fruitful ignore the world’s marching beat and applause for the applause of One. Are we willing to do that?
Focused Living That Blesses Others
Our fruitfulness enhances others’ spiritual health. God blesses us to bless others. Using our spiritual gifts narrows our focus from the many activities we could do to the few we must do.
A spiritual gifts inventory helps identify our gifts. We know we’re in the right place when people confirm we’re blessing them in a joy-producing ministry to which we’re attracted like iron to a magnet.
Comments