Understanding the Root Issues Behind our Behaviors

Have you ever wondered why we keep producing 'bad fruit' in our lives? 

What if the key to addressing these issues is not just to pluck them away, but to trace them back to their roots? Let's journey together through an exploration of life's root issues, inspired by Jesus' saying that a healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit. 

We'll discuss how to acknowledge our condition without shame or isolation, and how to seek guidance from Jesus. 

In our deep dive, we'll also reflect on how Jesus promises liberation from the corruption that taints our world. Together, we'll learn how to identify the bad fruit in our lives and lean on Jesus for healing and transformation. 

Echoing Brother Lawrence's wisdom in 'Practicing the Presence of God', we'll learn to trust Jesus, embrace our shortcomings, and seek His help to change. This is a powerful reminder that we're not alone in this journey. 

So, tune in, and let's navigate through our life issues by tracing them back to the roots.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:18

Hey everybody, I want you to imagine with me a tree, a fruit tree. Pick your favorite fruit tree. For me, my favorite kind of fruit tree would be an orange tree. It's not my favorite kind of fruit, but I love oranges. They are so, they're miraculous. I mean, can you think of another kind of fruit that is? I mean, first of all, I think fruit in general is like it's snack size. Right, like any piece of fruit, it's snack size, it's amazing.

Speaker 1: 0:45

And then, but an orange comes in its own like pre-made case God made a little case for it. That can be, you know, punctured. You just peel it away. And then, once you peel it away, inside that, by the way, when you first start peeling it like these little, this little aroma kicks in the air and kind of makes you feel more awake. Just in that moment, when you smell the orange, you start peeling it away. And then, inside, the orange is held together by these little I don't know what they're called, but these little like, almost like edible threads. But you pull the little pieces of orange away and they're now bite-sized pieces of the orange. It's like already pre-sliced.

Speaker 1: 1:21

For you, oranges are amazing. Talk about God's beautiful inventions, man. All right. So, matt, whatever the fruit tree is for you maybe it's a pear tree, maybe it's a banana tree, something else, um, peach tree. Anyway, for me I'm thinking of an orange tree.

Speaker 1: 1:36

Now, now, imagine one day and I want you to imagine that this tree, this fruit tree, represents your life, and one day you go by the fruit tree and you notice on the tree that there's a piece of fruit growing and it is a distorted color. Maybe it's usually, for me it would be orange, or for you it's yellow or green or whatever, but today it's purple. It's like a bruised, purpley, blackish color. Or maybe it's the right color, but it's very misshapen. It's a elongated shape, or it's dripping when it shouldn't be dripping. Something's wrong with it.

Speaker 1: 2:09

Well, a lot of us, when we encounter that kind of fruit in our lives, it feels embarrassing to us. Maybe it stinks and we want to cover it up, we want to hide it, so we might pluck that piece of fruit and we chuck it, we throw it away like, get rid of that, we don't want it in our lives anymore, because nobody wants a fruit tree that bears really cruddy fruit. Jesus even said in uh, in the book of Luke. He said uh, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can it bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. He says that in Matthew seven we don't want to be a bad tree, and so when we find bad fruit on our tree, we tend to chuck it. We want to get rid of it, but inevitably another piece of bad fruit grows, and then we get rid of that one and another one grows.

Speaker 1: 2:56

And we can't deny, when we experience bad fruit growing from our lives, that something's wrong with the tree. Good tree does not bear bad fruit, and so when we have bad fruit that's born in our lives, that that comes around in our lives on a recurring basis, we have to acknowledge the reality that something's wrong. On top of that, we can recognize that just picking the bad fruit off the tree and chucking it does not fix the problem, because it doesn't go deep enough. Pulling the bad fruit off of our tree doesn't go deep enough to heal the part of the tree that really needs healing. So one of the illustrations we've used here before is the idea and this isn't a perfect illustration, but it works for our purposes that if the fruit on the tree is your behavior, or maybe it's your thought life and you encounter this bad fruit, you have to track back from the fruit, through the branches, through the trunk of the tree, down into the roots to find out what's wrong with this tree. How did this tree become a bad tree?

Speaker 1: 4:04

Now, there's a problem here for us, because what we tend to do when we kind of recognize I've got bad fruit, it's recurring in my life, that means I'm a bad tree is we tend to move towards shame, we look inward and we get ashamed. But Jesus did not intend for us to become ashamed in an unhealthy way. By shame here I specifically mean, you know, if guilt is, I'm guilty, I did something wrong. This kind of shame, this toxic shame, suggests there's something uniquely wrong about me. Every other tree is good, but I'm bad, something uniquely deficient, defective or dirty about me.

Speaker 1: 4:43

When Jesus spoke about a tree that bears bad fruit being a bad tree, his intent was not to isolate us, not to cast us away, not to shame us into trying to hide our sin and pluck it and throw it, or to keep people out of the vineyard of our lives or orchard of our lives. His intent was to help us to take seriously our condition, and we see this over and over again in the Gospels, where the Pharisees or the religious elite, whoever they were, repeatedly did not believe they needed a Savior. And those are the ones that Jesus was hardest on. But he wasn't hard on them to isolate them or cast them away either. He was hard on them because he wanted them to acknowledge the very real condition that they're in, the situation they're in and how grave it is. So wherever we see Jesus speaking a hard word about sin like, for example, good trees don't bear bad fruit it's because he's inviting us to be saved. He's inviting us to invite him in. So rather than turning inward and focusing on a bad tree I got to hide this I guess I should go sulk alone what he wants us to do is to pluck the fruit, to turn toward him and to acknowledge the reality of our situation.

Speaker 1: 6:04

And here I think about Brother Lawrence and his wonderful book. If you've not read it, read it. It's called Practicing the Presence of God. It's worthwhile for so many reasons, but one of my favorite reasons is that Brother Lawrence was very aware of his shortcomings, sins, weaknesses and failures. He took them so seriously that when he would see them, he would acknowledge them quickly. But he also knew not to turn those into moments of shaming himself, because that would do no good. Instead, he would turn quickly to the Lord and say, lord, I did it again and thus I will always do until you change me. Not an entitled shaking his fist, like you should have already changed me, but just that humble acknowledgement Lord, this is really bad fruit and I keep bearing it. There's something wrong in me. It's stinky and I will always be this way, except you change me.

Speaker 1: 7:01

This is an invitation to engage with Jesus in those very areas that he came to save in us. Jesus is always aware, he's always able to see through the gunk, the stink, the bad fruit, the bad roots, to the very person that God created in the first place. He sees through our corruption, through our sin, through our evil, to see the very good man or woman, boy or girl that God created in the first place, and that is the person he came to redeem, came to set free from sin, from the slavery of sin, from evil, from darkness, from corruption. This is the good news of the gospel we don't need to hide our bad fruit and we don't need to pretend like it's just a surface-level problem when it's not. And, by the way, the reason I get into all this here is because so many people who come to regeneration and this was the situation for me to have spent so much of their lives wondering why do I keep doing these things, why does this bad fruit continue to appear in my life without ever considering that there are root issues connected to it? Or if they have considered that they're root issues, it's kind of a generic well, a fallen creature where I live in a fallen world, and so that's why.

Speaker 1: 8:26

But we've done this ministry long enough to know that, while that is absolutely true, we do all live in a corrupted self that has been impacted by the fall. There also, we live in an environment that's been fallen, and we can start looking at things like our family of origin, things that we experienced from mom and from dad that shaped and shaded our perspective of ourselves, our perspective of God, our perspective of men or women. We can look at the messages that we receive from our culture and we can start to parse those out. We don't need to hold on to stinking thinking. This is one of my favorite passages Romans 12, 1 and 2, that says Paul writes to present your bodies as a living sacrifice unto the Lord. And then he goes on to say and be renewed, be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Speaker 1: 9:20

So this work that Christ has done to save us from the corruption of the fallen world, to save us from sin, to save us from evil, to save us from death, there's also work that we can do in the process where we track down from the bad fruit in our lives and begin to recognize some of the soil around the roots of our lives that have made things worse than they need to be, and we can receive healing in those places, so that the fruit begins to get cleaner and brighter and better. Brothers and sisters, that's what we have in store. God has done this work. It's going to be completed on the day of Christ Jesus. We can be confident of that. But in the meantime, we can turn towards Jesus with the bad fruit. We can partner with him in excavating around the bad roots and cleaning up the soil, pulling out the artifacts that are there, that teach us something about where we've come from and the messages that we've received, so that we can become fuller, more alive, more vibrant, more life-giving as the trees, as the humans, as the men and women God created us to be and Jesus came to redeem us to be.

Speaker 1: 10:33

Lord, I've spent so much time just trying to hide bad fruit in my life or to pluck a piece of fruit and think that's going to be good enough. Lord, I've also spent so much time just kind of shrugging my shoulder and say, well, you know I'm falling. What do we expect, lord? Help us, instead of doing this, to trust that you invite us into this beautiful, splendid, sacred journey of becoming more whole and, just as you have saved us on Calvary and through your resurrection, lord, we can partner with you in our journey towards sanctification, becoming more and more like you, jesus, during the image of God in our bodies, in our behavior, in our minds, our thoughts, our hearts. Lord, make it so for our good, for the good of those around us and for your glory, lord Jesus Christ. Amen.