Skip to main content

Patience for fruit-bearing


 I'm working on my sermon for this Sunday (at St. Luke's, Blue Ridge), and it's on the parable of the Sower in Luke 8.  At the end, Jesus says, that the good ground brings for fruit "with patience."  Here's my comment right now:

And lastly, we need the grace of patience.  We need it for lots of reasons, but here it's connected with the bearing of the fruit.  Why?  Well, farmers must be patient, must they not?  It can take months before the work you've put into a crop starts to bear the fruit you desire.  Bearing fruit takes time.  And the changes that God wants to work in our hearts through his word can certainly take time - even a lot of time.  That is why our watching and praying against the devil, the flesh, and the world has to be maintained.  That's why our seeking God's grace for the right heart and the grace of obedience has to be maintained.  It's because the fruit of the Word in our souls takes time.  There are times we wish God would hurry this or that up.  There are times when we are impatient with ourselves.  There are also times when we are impatient with each other.  Friends, this whole fruit-bearing thing takes time and we need to be patient about it - pleading with God and using the means he gives us to keep our hearts plowed up, unobstructed, and moistened with his love and Spirit, so that in God's good time he may be glorified by the fruit we have born in our lives.  


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

George MacDonald on the Source of our Vocabulary

All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words. The better, however, any such  word is fitted for the needs of humanity, the sooner it loses its poetic aspect by commonness of use. It ceases to be heard as a symbol, and appears only as a sign. Thus thousands of words which were originally poetic words owing their existence to the imagination, lose their vitality, and harden into mummies of prose. Not merely in literature does poetry come first, and prose afterwards, but poetry is the source of all the language that belongs to the inner world, whether it be of passion or of metaphysics, of psychology or of aspiration. No poetry comes by the elevation of prose; but the half of prose comes by the "massing into the common clay" of thousands of winged words, whence, like the lovely shells of by-gone ages, one is occasionally disinterred by some lover of speech, and held up to the light to show the play of colour in it
Post a Comment
Read more

Anglicanism: Reformed and Catholic

Today is Oct 31, celebrated by Protestants as Reformation Day.  It is the anniversary of the day that Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of Wittenburg Church.  That event is said to be the start of the Protestant Reformation.  Luther, however, was not trying to start a movement in the Church.  He did not intend for his action to lead to the events that followed.  He was actually following a common practice.  If a professor at the university where he taught had a subject he wanted debated, he would go and post a set of theses on the subject for debate.  It's just that by that time, there was a lot debate throughout Germany going on about the subjects he covered, and there was the printing press.  Someone removed his 95 these, printed them, and one thing lead to another. The Reformation was, of course, a very complicated event that spread over many years.  The result was a split in Western Christendom between the Roman Catholics and those called Protestants, of which ther
Post a Comment
Read more