The Biblical Secret To Fruitful Spiritual Life

The Lord spoke of having fruit. And so, immediately, we go out, trying to have fruit. That is the dumbest thing on earth. It’s like you took the old water pump. I don’t know if any of you have ever pumped water into a trough, but you keep pumping until water comes out. You prime it, and then you pump the water out. And what this person is doing, he’s trying to pump fruit out of his life. Well, the process of fruit is not from pumping. The process of fruit is literally the disposal of too much life. It is the disposal of too much life. In the springtime, in one season, not all four seasons of that tree’s life, but in one of its seasons each year, life floods its trunk, its branches, its stems, and there is not enough room. So, it sprouts leaves and fills them, and life is still pumping and filling that tree, and the tree doesn’t know what to do with it. It begins building big pods to hold the life, and the life gets so full that it drops off. And that’s called bearing fruit. And that comes in an inner relationship with Jesus Christ, and it comes by season. You are not always fruitful, and when you are, it’s the sharing of an excess of life. Amen. Amen. And anything else is destructive.

Audience: I’m sorry to interrupt, but it’s just something a friend said: “Can you imagine a cherry tree standing in the middle of an orchard, saying, gritting at the bark, ‘I’m going to have cherries.’” It had cherries because it’s a cherry tree.

And it has cherries in the springtime because it has the life of cherries in its bosom. Alright, we’ve chased that enough for today. Ed… oh, we are a talkative bunch today.

Audience: Don’t we see a picture of maturity in the fruit, because no apple tree or other fruit-bearing tree bears until it’s mature?

It takes years. People don’t realize how many years it takes before a tree can bear fruit for a few months. It takes years, and the first time is just a little, not a whole lot, and we kill our trees. We kill our trees by demanding too much fruit too fast. We fertilize them and stick them with hormones and preach at them and put them under the pile. Those trees grunt and groan, and out drops the little fruit, and everybody shouts, “Hallelujah. Finally, brother, praise the Lord. You’ve done it.” And oh man, we are…go back to the way the Lord raised up workers: for three and a half or four years, those men watched the Tree of Life. I like the fact that virtually every man we know of in the New Testament who served the Lord went through many years of watching their lives when they did virtually nothing to serve their Lord. May the day come when preachers can have a skill so they can quit serving the Lord and go out and work for a while. The only reason preachers don’t take off is that they don’t know any other way to make a living. Every one of them needs a few years off. We all need sabbaticals about every two or three years. You can’t keep pumping; you just can’t.

Alright, we’re talking about the new species. This new species has Life within him. He has a spirit within him. This week, and I trust in the future, I’m going to talk a lot about feeding and nourishment and the growth of that spirit. In the mornings, you’ve been meeting and taking a little care of that life from the viewpoint of food, but I also want you to remember that it is a form of life. Therefore, it communicates, and we need to establish communication with our spirit. Again, it has to be done within the body of Christ, or it’s very, very dangerous. It should be a very moderated group gathering that you’re with, a group that is not chasing rainbows, nor does it think that it’s the only group on earth or that it has the final and ultimate truth. It should have a little humility in it. Alright, that’s all the things it should have, but it doesn’t. You need these experiences within a corporate body with certain checks on it, just by its very nature. I would say that’s where young people should spend their lives.

Now, we are a different biological species, but we are nonetheless not identical to our Lord internally. We have a spirit similar to His, but we have a soul that’s very damaged, and we’ve been talking about this. We have a body that’s very damaged, too. Therefore, we have to care for our spirit, we have to care for our soul, and we have to care for our body. At the same time, we have to say not only are we talking about nurture, but we’re talking about communication. We must also learn to live by our human life because there are demands placed upon us as humans. There’s a fascinating verse in one of the epistles that says, “Serve your master.” And in our case, that would be an employer, with all your soul, with your human life. Give Him your human life. He hired your human life. Give it to Him. Therefore, human life needs attention too. And I said something yesterday. I want to make it very clear to you all that walking in your spirit, living in your spirit, your spirit being nourished, your spirit growing, you communicating with the Lord within you, His Life lived out in you, is not enough to transform and meet the needs of the soul. It will help and play its part, but it is not enough. There is the cross from the outside, but I went a little further, and I want to make this really clear to all of you. In the body of Christ, there ought to be…Oh, I can’t use that word…I’m going to have to use the word ‘counselor’ because I’m afraid to use the word ‘pastor’. Anyway, I am afraid to use the word ‘pastor’ because the word ‘pastor’ has been so perverted. I wouldn’t dare use the word shepherd because the word shepherd has been virtually destroyed in our day. So, I’m going to use the word counselor.

Every one of us needs some counseling. Someone who will counsel us. You cannot handle the distorted soul. The soul cannot be brought back to normality only by the spirit, or even, only by the cross. You’re going to need some human help. Every one of us…and my wife is present…I want to ask her a question. May I have your permission to tell the story of your mother and dad? This is for those of you who are married; you should listen to this. When they were quite young, they had a problem, and they built their marriage around that problem. And as the brother said yesterday, marriage is often a demilitarized zone. There are certain areas you don’t enter, and the reason you don’t is that there are minefields in them, and you get blown up. Most marriages are built around certain problems because the problems are never resolved. Today, my wife’s mother is 85, and her father is 92. They recently talked about one of the things they built their marriage around in the first year or two, and it came back to haunt them at 85 and 92. They’re both very, very old, both in very poor health. But they would, if one of them could walk, get up, and walk out. They had a knockdown-and-drag-out at 85 and 92 because they had not resolved the problem in their marriage. And they cannot of themselves resolve it. All they can do is let it wear down, forget it, kind of never really forgive one another, but know you got to talk to one another about where you’re going to have to be in this today, and finally, it kind of fades from the memory until later you walk into the DMZ, and it blows up in your face again.

Now saints, you and I cannot have effective marriages without a third party helping us, and that’s every human being on this planet. Period. It can’t be done unless you were born to Adam and Eve before the fall. I would only stretch that out and say it goes on and on, not just marriage. With every single brother, there should be one full-time counselor. With every marriage, one full-time marriage counselor should be assigned.  For every church, there should be an entire research institution associated with it, or at least a free psychiatrist, psychologist, sociologist, medical doctor, and so on, for every person involved in the church. Because when you have one person, you’ve got problems. When you’ve got two people, you’ve got 100 problems. You have four people; you have a thousand problems. You have eight people; you have 10,000 problems. And when you have 16 people, you’ve got a million problems. Then you have a hundred, and the decimals go off the end of the page. They geometrically increase with the number of people in the interaction.

We have to have spiritual growth within. We’ve got to have the cross working upon our souls, and we’ve got to have the help of the body of Christ. I know that every person who came to this meeting, and all you folks who went out there, and ordered these tapes, and you’re sitting down and you’ve really been enjoying them, you all want the wonderful warm puppy dog feeling of the spirit, and you want to touch the Lord, and you want to grow in the Lord, and really become a spiritual giant like Madame Guyon. And a few of you out there are even willing to bear the cross, but nobody wants anybody messing with their private life and problems. That’s where we draw the line. I watch this every day.

I give this illustration to make a major point. Within a body of people that I belong to…served in…out of many Christians, one particular brother I have to say was the greatest disciple I ever had. He never forgot a message I ever preached. He experienced everything I taught. I have been told that from the day he arrived, he arose early in the morning and spent time with the Lord Jesus. He could remind me of things I had said that I myself had forgotten about the spiritual life, that he was still carrying on. He did everything by the book. His home was open to hospitality. He sold his home and gave the proceeds to the Lord’s house. I didn’t know that till just recently. I did not know…he gave it anonymously. He and his wife live next to the bone…gave up a really good, big, effective job and took a simple one so he could be near the saints. The perfect disciple.

His marriage was an absolute wreck, and the reason was that his wife didn’t know him. He would not communicate. This went on for 10, 12 years in the church. Eventually, everything began to seep out, and I went to him, and I hated to do that. I’d rather be horsewhipped. Some people seem to enjoy it. I’d rather have bamboo shoots stuck under my fingernails, whatever that means. I never knew what that meant. I finally went to them, walked into their home, and said, “I want to talk to you.” I ask the two of you to go to a marriage counselor. Well, now that is my perfect disciple. He went; he had to obey me, otherwise he could not live with himself. One time, and he was healed. He never needed to go back. That did it. A year later, I returned. The marriage was on the verge of splitting. The wife was on the verge of losing her mind, and she was bitter. I went back, and I did it again, and he went…again…but once. Everything was resolved.