Where does fruit come from?
Galatians 6:7-10

Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.

The main point of this passage is very simple: We reap what we sow. It is a simple lesson that every gardener knows well. If I plant tomatoes, I reap tomatoes. If I plant weeds, I reap weeds. Whatever I sow, that's what I reap. Paul is not being original here. We find this lesson repeated throughout scripture: "He who sows wickedness reaps trouble" (Pr. 22:8); "Sow for yourselves righteousness, reap the fruit of unfailing love . . . But if you have planted wickedness, you have reaped evil . . ." (Hosea 10:12-13); "Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly (2 Cor. 9:6)

The point is easy enough to get. I reap what I sow. I get what I deserve. In the same way that a gardener who plants tomatoes will be rewarded with a crop of tomatoes, if I do good things, I'll be rewarded with good. And vice versa. It makes alot of sense. It all seems quite fair, and just about every religion out there subscribes to this principle in one form or another.

But there is a problem, and the problem is that we find this statement at the end of the book of Galatians. The whole point of the book of Galatians has been that I can do nothing to earn a reward with God. It is impossible for me to climb my way to righteousness or holiness in his sight. The only way to get to God is to rely utterly on God's Grace -- to throw myself on his mercy, and to trust him in faith. Doing good things can't save me; the law can't save me. In fact, doing good things to try to earn a reward further alienates me from God because it builds up my own sense of pride and self-reliance and self-sufficiency. Only God can save me. And if I DO rely on myself and I DO believe that somehow I can be good on my own, then I am spurning God's grace and rejecting the Gospel.

Galatians gives us this magnificent message of the Grace of God and the futility of my own efforts to reach God, and then we come to Galatians 5, and we read:

The acts of the sinful nature 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 thos who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God (Gal. 5:19-21).

And if we go on to Galatians 6, the text we've been looking at, we read:

A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please the sinful nature from that nature will reap destruction ; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. (Galatians 6:7b-8)

And these verses seem to be saying that if you want to be saved, you had better be good -- you had better be righteous. And if you are not righteous, bad things will happen to you. What became of the message of Grace? Having given us this magnificent picture of God reaching down to us and unilaterally saving us, taking our sins on himself, adopting us as his children -- after all that, have we just come right back to where we started: relying on our own efforts and righteousness to work our way to God?

We already know that's impossible, so what DOES Paul mean here? How does this principle of sowing and reaping fit with God's Grace?
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Well, sowing and reaping is a gardening metaphor, right? So I thought we could get some help from a gardening illustration. I brough with me a prize winning tomato plant. The tomatoes are quite impressive. The plant can hardly bear the weight of them, even though it is only May. They weren't cheap either. I picked them up at Big Y yesterday and they were not on sale. And not only is the fruit impressive, I put alot of work into this plant. It took alot of painstaking effort to carefully fasten each tomato to the plant with wire.

I worked hard. The fruit looks impressive. So what is wrong with this tomato plant. If I took this plant to a gardening contest, I would be thrown out. Why? Surely not because the tomatoes aren't good. They are. And surely not because I didn't work hard. I did. The problem is that THIS plant didn't produce THESE tomatoes. They are a deception, a lie. This is a weed, an ordinary, common weed. Weeds don't produce tomatoes. No matter how many tomatoes I fasten to this weed, I will never make it into a tomato plant. To grow tomatoes I have to sow tomatoes.

The same is true of trying to be good through my own efforts. Now matter how many good deeds I string up, it doesn't change the fact that by nature I am a weed. Weeds will never produce tomatoes; my sinful nature will never produce genuine righteousness. It can produce the show of righteousness, but real righteousness, real goodness that comes from the heart is out of my grasp.

This is easy to illustrate: Let's imagine that my children have not been looking very joyful recently. Now we all know that it is not a good thing for a pastor to have sullen children. God commands us to be joyful. So what do I do? I call a legislative session, and I issue a new decree. From now on we have a new rule in our house: Everyone must be joyful. If you are not joyful, the joy police will arrest you and there will be severe consequences.

What could my joy ordinance possibly accomplish? I might get my children to wander around with smiles pasted on their faces, but there hearts would be just as sullen and rebellious as ever. Probably more so. So all I have accomplished is to move a few steps closer to producing a brood of hypocrites -- white-washed tombs. It is possible to change outward behavior to give the appearance of joy, but the real thing can't be produced by rules.

How many times have you overheard a parent say, "I want you to obey me, and you had better do it willingly and happily!" The obedience is easy enough to get -- the parent is bigger. But willingly? Happily?

Rules can't produce righteousness.

Let's say my kids are recreating the Balkan war in our living room -- lego missiles flying at each other, hair pulled, screams of rage, vows of retaliation. So Dad, the superpower, decides to leave his book and intervene to make peace. And he is irritated at being drawn into the conflict, so he says, "Listen, I don't know what the problem is, but you know that it is the law of this house that you love each other. So you WILL love each other. Why? Because I told you to." If I am heavy handed enough I can force a cease-fire -- or a cold war. But real peace will elude me. I can force a change in outward behavior, but not in attitude or character.

Genuine righteousness doesn't come from rules, and it doesn't come from our own efforts.

I went to get our car inspected yesterday. It provided a marvelous opportunity to demonstrate patience. It was the longest wait I have heaver had for an inspection. The mechanic painstakingly searched until he found some insignificant bult that needed to be replaced in some out of the way place that was almost impossible to get to. I needed patience. And as long as I was being watched I could manage a show of it. I could keep my fingers from drumming, and even keep a pleasant smile on my face. And when everything was done, I acted as gracious and as pleasant as you can imagine. "Of course the wait was no problem -- thanks so much for being so thorough." And all the while I was seething with impatience, muttering inside my head, pacing in my mind, drumming my fingers in my imagination. My efforts could put on a show of patience, but it wasn't real. Intense effort and the pressure of people watching produced a show of goodness, but it wasn't in my power to produce the real thing.

Trying hard can't produce real righteousness; rules can't produce real righteousness. That's why Paul beigins this passage by saying, "Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked." I mock God when I pin fruit to myself as if it was my own. I mock God when I pretend that I can produce furit on my own. I mock God when I think I am doing pretty well to be patient on the outside while I'm seething on the inside. But God will not be deceived. I can fool the rest of you, but God cannot be mocked.

God looks at the heart and he demands genuine holiness and righteousness from me. So what I need is not work on the facade. I don't need plastic surgery to take away the wrinkles on the outside. I need the fountain of youth -- I need radical transformation, a new nature to replace the weeds of the old.

And that is what Paul is talking about when he talks about sowing and reaping. He isn't talking about external shows of goodness, but about something deeper -- the basic drive or motivation behind who we are and what we do. It's not what I DO on the outside so much as what I AM on the inside that is important to God. What is my inner nature? What kind of heart am I cultivating. My outward actions will just be a symptom. What matters is the basic nature at work within me.

In verse 8 he lays out the possibilities: "The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life." Either I am sowing to please the sinful nature, or I am sowing to please the spirit.

How do you tell the difference?

Sowing to please the sinful nature is easy. How hard is it to raise a garden of weeds? I have a large weed patch in our back yard, and I can assure you that it is very low maintenance. I don't have to water it, fertilize it or do anything to it -- and yet it grows. I don't even have to think about it. And there's the key -- not thinking about it. Not struggling. Doing what comes naturally. Just follow your inclinations -- follow your heart. That's what all the Disney films tell us to do. Sowing the please the sinful nature just means allowing what comes up naturally to grow. Taking the lustful thought and toying with it, allowing it to play through my imagination. Enjoying the adrenaline rush of anger and hatred and vengeance. Do what comes naturally.

One of the best signs of sowing to please the sinful nature is self-justification. I'm a good person. I know I'm not perfect, but I'm basically a good person. If I get angry or impatient, the problem is not with me -- its my demanding wife, my irritating kids, my terrible boss. If only they would change.

The sinful nature likes itself just the way it is. So it will try to dress up the weeds to make them look better -- fasten some fruit to them, but it will not face the basic problem. And the basic problem is that a weed is a weed -- and weeds are destined for destruction.

If you find yourself content this morning with things as they are, feeling that you are a pretty good person, I plead with you to beware. The road is easy and the path is wide that leads to destruction.

By contrast, the clearest sign of sowing to please the Spirit will be struggle. Look back at Galatians 5:16-17

So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want.

The Spirit and the flesh are in conflict with one another. A clear sign that the Spirit is at work is that you recognize sin for what it is, that you desire to be free from it, and you feel a struggle. When I plant a vegetable garden, a struggle begins that will last all summer. There are two kinds of plants that are competing with each other. And it takes a constant and vigilant effort to keep the weeds down and allow the fruit-bearing plants to grow and bear fruit.

When God saves us by his grace, he plants his Spirit in us -- he gives us a new, fruit-bearing nature. But he doesn't remove all of the weeds of our sin nature. And the result is a conflict within us that lasts all of our lives. The Spirit and the flesh are at war with one another.

Sowing to please the Spirit simply means taking the side of the Spirit in this struggle -- cultivating the fruit-bearing plant of our new nature, and hacking away at the weeds.

And because it is a struggle, because we have to keep at it constantly, Paul goes on to say, in verse 9: "Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest, IF we do not give up."

This I would guess, is the place where most of us find ourselves. The plant of righteousness is alive, but struggling. The Spirit is at work within us, but we are growing weary. We are in the heat of July, the weeds are tenacious, and the harvest seems distant. We're getting really tired of weeding, and its very tempting to just give up and let the weeds grow.


God's word to us today is clear: Do not grow weary in doing good. Continue to sow to please the Spirit. Don't give up. Don't let the weeds take over. Why? Because it will be worth it! The harvest is coming. Our Lord is returning and I long to be a fruit-bearing plant so that I can greet him with joy and not shame.