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speak to Him about your challenges and allow Him to become the“friend who
sticks closer than a brother” (Proverbs 18 v 24).

SUNDAY
Luke 13 v 1 – 8
I would like to end this week’s devotions on a rather sobering note and allow the
passage above to speak for itself. The passage speaks again of a fig tree. The fig
tree was in the middle of a vineyard and the owner of the vineyard had a gardener
to tend to it. For three years the owner visited the vineyard to find the fig tree,
which looked like it had so much potential, without any fruit. Every year his
disappointment and disillusionment would have grown until at last he said to his
gardener, “Cut the tree down, it has borne us no fruit.” To which the gardener
replied, “Sir, let me nurture and care for this tree one more year and if,when you
return next year, the tree has still borne no fruit than I will do as yousay and cut it
down.”
As much as God is kind and compassionate in all His dealings with all of mankind
there too is a dynamic of who God is that we need, right now, to acknowledge.
That tree is a picture of your life, the gardener is a picture of the Holy Spirit who
nurtures and feeds us. If God looks at your life over an extended period of time
and there be found no fruit in you, how tragic it would be if He were to make the
announcement, “Cut the tree down”, but a very interesting twist to the parable is
that the story doesn’t finish, we never read whether the tree bore any fruit or not.
We don’t find out if they owner came back and found fruit on it. I wonder if Jesus
didn’t deliberately leave out the ending in an endeavour for you to write your own
ending to your personal story of fruitfulness.
Prayer Thought: As you come to church today we will be dealing with one of the
aspects of the fruit, namely love, based upon the high standard of the requirement
of love for one another. Jesus demands we will need to do everything we can to
find and practice all that we have been speaking about this week in order to love
as He loves. Remember that although the fruit bearing power comes from God, it
requires from us a passionate desire to love Him and to walk in friendship with
Himas Enoch did all the days of his life (Genesis 5 v 24).