The Tree

So my awesome roommate Josh Poole and I are trying to get saved again. He came up with a brilliant idea to get us back on the path of righteousness. His idea was that every Sunday, instead of just walking away from church and saying, “That was really good”, we should come up with two things that we could take away from the service and apply to our lives the following week. Today marks the first Sunday of our attempt to be more like Jesus.

This morning the most incredible pastor on the face of the planet, Pastor Lloyd Zeigler, spoke on prayer. In his sermon he told the story of Jesus cursing the fig tree. I never really put this story in the context of the events surrounding it. For those of you like me, allow me to go all historical on you…

It is the week of the Passover feast in Israel and every year at this time hundreds of thousands of Jews travel to the city of Jerusalem to worship and sacrifice at the Temple of God. Jesus and his band of merry disciples are also heading to Jerusalem. When they arrive Jesus heads to the temple and he sees what is supposed to be a house of prayer for all nations has been turned into a money making business by the religious leaders who run the place. He gets really mad and turns over their tables and kicks them all out. They do not like this…at all. That afternoon Jesus heads out of town to find some lodging because A) There are a lot of really angry Pharisees looking for him and B) There are a whole lot of people in the city and not many open rooms. So Jesus and his boys head to the nearby city of Bethany. The next morning as they are heading back to Jerusalem, Jesus sees a fig tree in the distance. Being hungry Jesus goes to the fig tree to find some figs. (In the book of Mark it even goes so far as to say that it is not the season for figs to bloom.) When He could not find any figs on the tree He cursed it saying, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” The next day when Jesus and the disciples are again heading back to Jerusalem they walk by the same fig tree and it has withered all the way down to the roots.

Now even though this has nothing to do with what my incredible pastor spoke on, I began to think about this and here is what I am going to try to apply to my life this week.

Jesus knew that the fig tree should not have fruit on it at the time of the year when he walked up to it but He didn’t care. He was hungry. Also, even if the tree had produced fruit early it had probably all been taken by the thousands and thousands of people who passed by that tree before Him on their way to Jerusalem. Jesus still expected the tree to bear fruit.

I am a tree. I am, as a child of God, supposed to bear fruit to those who are hungry. To those who need joy, I should share my joy. To those who need hope, I am supposed to feed their hope. To those who are watching to see if I live what I say I believe, I have to give nourishment to their faith. The problem with this is that sometimes I feel like I have been picked dry. Most days I don’t even feel like I am in the season where I should have fruit at all. But God is looking for me to bear fruit whenever there is someone who is hungry. If I cannot bring the fruit of the Spirit when a soul is hungry then they may starve.

This week I will attempt to be a perpetual fruit bearing machine. When I have been plucked dry, I will dig my roots deep and find a way to pop out another fig. That is my challenge to myself. Pray for me. God loves to test our words. So here goes. Anybody hungry?