6-29-2025

“NEW TREE, NEW FRUIT”

Text: Galatians 5:1, 13-25

Sunday June 29, 2025 – Pentecost 3

Trinity – Creston

       Grace, mercy, and peace is yours from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ!

Our text for this Third Sunday after Pentecost is the Epistle lesson form Galatians 5 that was just proclaimed.

Let Us Pray: Dearest Jesus, send your Holy Spirit to remind us that baptized into you, we are new tree who bears new fruit, free to love and serve our neighbor. Amen.

Dear Fellow Redeemed in Christ:

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, you step out of the car and take a deep breath, drawing in the fresh, fragrant air. Rows of apple trees stretch before you, the budding fruit small and green. Beyond them is a field covered with spreading vines that are supplying life to watermelons, little orbs growing slowly but surely larger.

On the near side of the trees are bushes, bursting with color, beckoning you with their fruit. The strawberries are already in season, and it doesn’t take long to fill your container with juicy, red pickings. You lift one to your lips and sink your teeth into its sweetness. It doesn’t get much better than this!

God has filled this world with delightful fruits. He has given us apples and watermelons and strawberries. He has given us pineapples, blueberries, oranges, bananas, mangoes, kiwi, and grapes. As if that’s not enough, there are peaches, pears, plums, tangerines, raspberries, and blackberries.

And then there is the fruit that God seeks in us. Paul mentions nine varieties. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Each one is delicious, and together they provide exactly the feast that we want to come home to at the end of a long day, or to find at the office as we go to work. We want our schools, our communities, and our nation to be marked with exactly these characteristics. God created us not just to enjoy fruit, but to bear fruit, to become an orchard that is continuously producing love and joy and peace and everything else that delights him and makes his world a wonderful place to live.

So there you stand, strawberries in hand, still delighting in the flavor that God provided on your tongue. And then a careless child runs past, knocking into your bucket and spilling the produce to the ground.

You look around for the negligent parents and see that one of them is staring down at a phone while the other picks berries, and neither one recognizes the mess caused by their offspring. Your blood pressure rises, and as you bend down to begin cleaning up the mess, the words that escape from your lips are not exactly patient, kind, gentle, and self-controlled.

There is less fruit in the orchard than it first appeared.

And that is the problem, isn’t it. God created us to bear fruit. But love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control do not exactly come naturally. Apple trees bear apples. Strawberry bushes bear strawberries. But what do we bear? What comes naturally to us?

In our text, Paul lists some crass sins: “Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God” (vv 19–21).

Lots of those were the kinds of things that just about everyone agrees are evil. But did you notice that Paul’s list of grievous sins also includes a few items that sound uncomfortably familiar? Words like jealousy, divisions, envy, and impurity hit close to home.

These come naturally. These grow effortlessly. And for that reason, Paul is quick to warn that those who make a practice of doing such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. If this is what the orchard produces, it has no place in God’s kingdom. If this is what I produce, I have no place in God’s kingdom. That is a scary thought!

And so the solution seems obvious. Try harder not to sin. Try harder to be loving and joyful and to have peace and to be patient and to do everything else that Paul lists among the fruit of the Spirit. Try harder, and hope your effort is good enough.

It makes sense to us. In one form or another, this is what the religions of the world teach. This is what the Galatian Christians were trying to do. Paul wrote this entire letter because he heard that they were working hard to fulfill the Law of Moses, even to the point of embracing circumcision.

But for Paul, that the Christians in Galatia are trying so hard is a huge red flag, and it should be for you and for me too. They are trying hard to get something that God had already given them.

Imagine again stepping out of the car into that orchard. This time you walk past the strawberry bushes, through the rows of apple trees, until you come upon the farmer.

 And when you see him there, wearing a big straw hat and denim overalls, you’re surprised to find him holding a baseball bat and standing in front of a gnarly old oak tree with bare branches and giant hollows visible in its trunk. You watch for a moment, and the farmer pulls back the bat over his shoulder and then lets it rip like he’s swinging for a grand slam, right into the side of that oak tree.

“More apples!” he yells. “What’s wrong with you? I told you last year I wanted more apples.” And then the tree gets another blow.

It’s a ridiculous picture. You don’t have to be a farmer to recognize that the problem is not that the tree is not trying hard enough. The problem is that it’s not an apple tree. If the farmer wants apples to grow in that spot, the oak tree is going to have to go, and a new tree is going to have to be planted in its place.

The problem in Galatia is not that they’re not trying hard enough. The problem is not that they need to add laws like circumcision to their list. The problem is that they’ve taken their eyes off of Jesus Christ and what he did for them at the cross. By running back to their own obedience, they are searching for fruit on a tree that can have nothing to offer.

Paul describes two trees growing in our lives. The first he identifies as the flesh, because you and I are born into slavery to sin. Until Christ comes to redeem our bodies, my flesh will continue to produce desires that are opposed to God and his will.

It is worse than an unfruitful oak tree. The sinful flesh actively opposes fruit. It produces weeds and thorns and poison: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, and the whole rest of the list, including the sins that seem big to us and including the sins that seem small to us.

Make no mistake. Those who make a practice of doing such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

This tree cannot produce good fruit. You can yell at it, beat yourself up, tell yourself to do better, buy a book on self-improvement, hire a life coach, and maybe even make a little progress curtailing some bad behaviors. But the fruit of love? The sweetness of genuine joy? The delicious flavor of real peace? Nothing good grows from the sinful flesh. This tree has to go. A new tree has to grow.

And it is! As Baptism united you with Jesus, that first tree was sentenced to death. As Paul said, “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (v 24). Those passions and desires exist. But they are dead and dying, pinned to the cross of Jesus.

And in Baptism, God planted his Spirit within you. His Spirit is already full of love, already has perfect joy, already lives in perfect peace. Patience is not something God’s Spirit is working on. God does not come to his children with a baseball bat, yelling, “Try harder to be patient!”

Instead, God came to dwell within us, and God is patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled. All of that already exists in you, because God’s Spirit is in you. And so, says Paul, since “we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit” (cf v 25). He will provide the patience. He can provide the gentleness and faithfulness and fruit. He is the one who changes not just your behavior but your desires, your heart.

Are you drawn to the desires of your sinful flesh? God’s Spirit is inviting you to sink your teeth into a fruit that is more delicious, that has no hurt or harm or regret in its aftertaste. So walk by the Spirit and deny the flesh. Are you caught in sin right now? God’s Spirit is confronting you with the fruitlessness of a dead and dying tree, so you can turn away from it and live in the forgiveness Christ won for you at the cross.

Let us keep in step with the Spirit, sinking our teeth into love, joy, and peace. Let us walk by the Spirit, offering those we know and love a taste of patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, inviting them to experience God’s orchard, to taste and see that God is good.

A woman we’ll call Cindy once sat down across from a pastor. Life had not been kind. She had spent the last twenty years in pursuit of the desires of her sinful flesh, and it wasn’t working. Life was painful, and after getting to know some of the Christians in the church, she became curious. She had encountered an orchard there—love, joy, and peace. She dared to ask the pastor if they could talk.

One of the sins Paul listed in our text was sorcery, and Cindy had been involved in sorcery of a kind: tarot. A previous encounter with Christians who had tried the baseball bat approach had left her bruised. They sought to cleanse her life of everything evil and demanded that she throw away the tarot cards. She had refused, angry and indignant.

 So one of the first questions Cindy asked the pastor was, “Do I have to get rid of my tarot cards?” He spent a few minutes listening and discovered that the cards were not feeding the deadly tree (she wasn’t actually using them), and then he responded, “Once you know Jesus better, you won’t want your tarot cards anymore.”

A few months later, they had another sit-down talk. She’d spent the time in between cultivating the new tree God had planted in her life. She worshiped each week, learning the routine of confessing her sins and believing God’s forgiveness. She’d read through the Gospel of John and was getting to know Jesus. She believed that Jesus valued her, loved her enough to die for her, had cleansed her of all her sins.

During those intervening months, the pastor hadn’t said another word about the tarot cards, and so he was surprised to hear her say out of the blue, “You were right. I got rid of the cards. I didn’t want them anymore.”

As she walked in step with the Spirit, her desires had been changed. What was important to her had changed. When she rid herself of those cards, she was doing what she wanted to do, as naturally as an apple tree bearing apples and a strawberry bush bearing strawberries. She believed the love of Jesus, and it changed her.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, Jesus values you, loves you enough to die for you, has cleansed you of all your sins. He has planted his fruitful Spirit in your life and given you his righteousness. God is doing work in you what no law, no command, no effort or obedience on your part can do. God’s Spirit is at work in you so that you delight in his will as you walk in his way.

Imagine yourself back where we started, kneeling on the ground, scooping up spilled strawberries with anger rising in your heart. God’s Spirit of peace already dwells in you. Don’t try harder to be patient. Don’t beat yourself up if you fail. Just look for the step that God’s Spirit has laid in front of you and take it. Let God provide the patience. Let God provide the forgiveness when you fail.

God’s Good Fruit Grows from God’s Good Trees,
and God’s Spirit Has Made You a New, Good Tree.

Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Amen.

Now may the peace of God which passes all human understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior.  Amen.