The Fruit of the Harvest

Apple trees produce apples.  Not a particularly profound statement, but let’s keep exploring this idea…  Healthy apple trees eventually reproduce additional apple trees, but only if they first produce seed-bearing apples.  An average apple tree can produce 150-350 apples annually, and each apple contains around 5 seeds.  This means that each apple tree can produce as many as 1750 apple seeds per year and every seed has the potential to result in a new apple tree which will also eventually produce as many as 1750 apples seeds per year.  That’s the exponential potential of the harvest! 

So why are seeds encased in fruit?  Animals eat the fruit and the seeds pass through them, an effective way to spread, plant, and even fertilize the seeds. 

Why is all of this important?  The fruit is the purpose of the harvest and it is essential to reproduce the harvest.  Not only can an unfruitful apple tree not reproduce additional apple trees, what would be the point? Who needs more unfruitful apple trees?

Growing up in the church, I was taught that the fruit of the harvest Jesus speaks so often about is a harvest of souls.  What if we are wrong?  What if the fruit is something else?  How would we know?  Well, one clue would be if all of our results we were after led to less and less natural reproduction of the harvest.  With this evidence we might conclude that our results were not the authentic fruit Jesus had in mind we he spoke so frequently about the explosively reproductive nature of the harvest.  In the United States almost one third of the population (around 100 million) claim to be “converts,” that is souls who believe in Jesus and have their ticket to heaven.  Yet, strangely the Gospel is not spreading as fast as the population is growing.  This means that believers are not, on average, even reaching our own children with the Gospel of Jesus.  If the fruit of the harvest is conversions, then why is so much fruit so unfruitful?  Why is the popular understanding of the Gospel so infertile?

In Matthew chapter 9, Jesus has just demonstrated His love and compassion for the crowds as they were, “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”  He then goes on to say that the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.  By saying this was Jesus encouraging us to harvest souls by asking everyone “who wants to go to heaven?”  If so, this isn’t the example He had just given us.  Just before He said this He was taking care of the needs of the crowd.  He was sharing love with them, and He was planting the seeds of the Kingdom of love in them.  Those with open hearts would become disciples who also produced the fruit of the harvest, which is love.

In Matthew 13, Jesus compares the Kingdom to a wheat field which was planted with good seed.  Then an enemy sabotaged the field by planting weeds.  He warned of a judgment day when the weeds will be burned and the wheat will be gathered together and brought to Him.  So how does he differentiate between the wheat and the weeds?  In Matthew 13:26, He says, “When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.”  So what’s the difference?  The wheat form heads; translation the wheat was fruitful.  The wheat is disciples, and the fruit is love.  The weeds are the ones who grow among the wheat but are not fruitful. 

In Mark chapter 4:26-29, Jesus explains that the Kingdom of God is like “a man who scatters seed on the ground.”   The seed grow to “produce a stalk, then a head, then the full kernel in the head.”  What Jesus is saying here is that maturity means fruitfulness.  There is a cycle to it, first the seed results in a stalk, which results in a head, which results in full kernels (fruit of the harvest), which starts the cycle over again.  The stalks are the disciples, which produce full kernels (fruit) which is love, which result in additional disciples.  Unfruitful disciples do not lead to not reproduce other disciples.  Disciples who never mature to produce fruit are not really disciples.

For Jesus, the central test of orthodoxy was love.  For Jesus, the purpose of the harvest was love.  For Jesus, the way the harvest would be reproduced was through love.  May we praise Him that the fruitless Gospel is so infertile, because loveless Christians are almost as useful to a love-starved world as fruitless apple trees are during a famine.  May we all receive His love and allow His harvest to spread through us as we embody His words, in John 13:35:   “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”