Ripe Fruit 2
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II. Briefly, brethren, let us notice THE CAUSES OF THIS RIPENESS. So gracious a result must have a gracious cause.
1. The first cause of ripeness in grace is the inward working of the sap. The fruit could never be ripe in its raw state were it taken away from the bough. Outward agencies alone may produce rottenness, but not ripeness; sun, shower, and what not, all would fail — it is the vital sap within the tree that perfects the fruit.
It is especially so in grace. Dear brother, are you one with Christ, are you sure you are? Are you sure your profession is connected with vital godliness? Is Jesus Christ formed within you? Do you abide in him? If not, you need not think about maturity in grace, you had need to do your first works and repent, and turn unto him. Everything between hell and heaven, in connection with salvation, is the work of the Spirit of God, and the work of the grace of Jesus. You not only cannot begin to live the Christian life, but you cannot continue in it except as the Holy Spirit enables you. That blessed Spirit, flowing to us from Christ, as he is the originator of the first blossom, so he is the producer of the fruit, and is the ripener of it until it is gathered into the heavenly garner. Vitally endowed within, you must be. Your sacraments, your attendance at a place of worship, your outward bowings of the knee in prayer, these are all vanity and less than nothing, unless there be this vital sap of the inward, spiritual grace.
2. Only when truth is present in the hidden part, can outer influences help. Fruit is ripened by the sun. His beams impart or produce in the fruit its perfectness of flavor. Sunless skies cause tasteless fruit. How sweetly Christians grow when they walk in the light of God’s countenance! What a ripening influence the love of Jesus Christ has on the soul! When the love of God is shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Spirit, how rapidly the Christian advances! I believe we ripen in grace more in ten minutes when we live near to God than we might do in ten years of absence from his presence.
Some fruit on a tree will not ripen fast, it is shielded from the sun. We have soon the cottagers pluck off the leaves from their vines in our chilly climate, in order to let the sun get at the vine, and bring out the color and ripeness of the clusters; even thus the great Husbandman takes away many of the leaves of worldly comfort from us, that the comfort of his own dear presence may come at us, and ripen us for himself. We cannot have too much joy in the Lord, we cannot get too near to him. We may well sing—
“When will you come unto me, Lord?
O come, my Lord, most dear!
Come near, come nearer, nearer still,
I’m blest when you are near.”
The joy of the Lord is your strength, and the joy of the Lord is your perfectness. Still, brethren, the fruit is no doubt equally ripened, though not as evidently so, by the shower and by the dew. All heat and no moisture, and there must be scarcely any fruit. So the dew of God’s Spirit falling upon us, the constant shower of grace visiting us, and what if I add, even the trials and troubles of life, which are like showers to us — all these teach us by experience, and by experience we ripen for the skies.
Some fruit I have heard of, especially the sycamore fig, never will ripen except it be bruised. It was the trade of Amos to be a bruiser of sycamore figs; they were struck with a long staff, and then after being wounded, they sweetened. How like to many of us! How many, many of us seem as if we never would be sweet until first we have been dipped in bitterness; never would be perfected until we have been smitten! We may trace many of our sharp trials, our bereavements, and our bodily pains, to the fact that we are such sour fruit, nothing will ripen us but heavy blows.
Blessed be the Lord that he does not spare us. We would be ripe even if we be struck again and again. We cannot be content to continue in our sourness and immaturity; therefore, we meekly bless him that he will strike us, and make us ripe.
One idea I would correct before I pass from this — it is the notion that ripeness in grace is the necessary result of age. It is not so at all. Little children have been ripe for glory; ay, there have been authentic cases of their ripeness for heaven even at three years of age– strange things dying babes have said of Christ, and deeply experimental things too. “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings” the Lord not only brings childlike praise, but he has “perfected praise,” or, as David has it, “You have ordained strength because of your enemies.”
Many an aged Christian is not an experienced Christian, for all his experience, though it may be the experience of a Christian, may not have been Christian experience of an advanced kind. An old sailor who has never left the river is not an experienced mariner. An old soldier who never saw a battle is no veteran. Remember it is in the kingdom of God very much as it is with God himself, one day may be as a thousand years. God can, as Solomon tells us, give wisdom to the simple, and teach the young man knowledge and discretion. Years with grace will produce greater maturity, but what I want to say is, that years without grace will produce no such maturity. The mere lapse of time will not advance us in the divine life. We do not ripen necessarily because our years fulfill their tale. Grey hairs and great grace are not inseparable companions. Time may be wasted as well as improved, we may be petrified rather than perfected by the flow of years.
Here it may be well to note that there is no reason why a young Christian should not make great advance towards this maturity, even while young. The Lord’s grace is independent of time and age; the Holy Spirit is not limited by youth, nor restrained by fewness of days. Young Samuel may excel aged Eli; a holy babe is riper than a backsliding man. Timothy was more mature than Diotrephes. Jesus can lead you, my youthful brother, to high degrees of fellowship with himself; he can make you to be a blessing even while yet you are young; I pray you aspire to the nearest place to Jesus, and like young John, lie in the Master’s bosom.
Truly, the aged have the help of experience, and in any case they deserve our reverent esteem, but let neither old nor young imagine that the merely natural fact of age has any influence in the spiritual life. God’s work is the same in old and young, and owes nothing to the merely natural vigor of youth, or equally natural prudence of age.
III. Thus we have given you the causes of ripeness; briefly let us show you THE DESIRABILITY OF RIPENESS IN GRACE. It is needful to dwell on this head, because many Christians appear to think that if they are just believers, it is enough. We do not in business think it enough if we barely escape bankruptcy. A man does not say, if his dear child has been ill in bed for years, that it is quite enough so long as the child is alive. We do not think that of our own bodies, that so long as we can breathe it is enough.
If any one were dragged out of the river and life was just in him, we should not feel it sufficient to discover the vital spark and there leave it. No, we pursue the processes of resuscitation until the person is perfectly restored. To be just alive as a Christian is horrid work. It is a poor state to be in; to be always trying to see whether we are alive, by putting the looking glass of evidences to the lips to see if there is just a trace of gracious vapor on the surface. It is a dolorous thing to be always groaning —
“It is a point I long to know,
Often it causes anxious thought,
Do I love the Lord or no?
Am I his, or am I not?”
Yet too many are content to continue in this ignominious condition.
1. Brethren, it is desirable that you should get out of it, and come to ripeness in grace by God’s Spirit, for, first, ripeness is an index of the health of your soul. The fruit which under proper circumstances does not ripen is not a good fruit, it must be an unwholesome production. Your soul can surely not be as it should be, if it does not ripen under the influence of God’s love and the work of his grace.
2. The gardener’s reward is the ripe fruit. You desire that Christ should see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied, do you think will he find that satisfaction in sour grapes? Is he to find his recompense in griping crab-apples? No, sir! the gardener needs the mature productions of the soil, and he does not count that he has a return for his labor until he gathers ripe fruit. Let the Redeemer find ripe fruit in you. Say you with the spouse, “Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.” Endeavor to imitate her when she said, “At our gates are all manner of pleasant fruits, new and old, which I have laid up for you, O beloved.” Present yourself to him, and may he present you to the Father, made fit to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light!
3. It is the ripe fruit which proves the excellence of the tree. The tree may bear a name in very good repute, but if the fruit never ripens, very soon the gardener will remove it from the orchard. The church’s reputation among wise men, is gained not from her raw and green members, but from her ripe believers — these are they by whose steadfast holiness, those whose verdict is worth the having will be ruled. I would have men compelled to own that the church is a goodly vine, and her fruit most pleasant to the taste.
4. To break the metaphor, the church needs mature Christians very greatly, and especially when there are many fresh converts added to it. New converts furnish impetus to the church, but her backbone and substance must, under God, lie with the mature members. We need mature Christians in the army of Christ, to play the part of veterans, to inspire the rest with composure, courage, and steadfastness; for if the whole army is made up of raw recruits the tendency will be for them to waver when the onslaught is fiercer than usual. The old guard, the men who have breathed smoke and eaten fire before, do not waver when the battle rages like a tempest, they can die but they cannot surrender. When they hear the cry of “Forward,” they may not rush to the front so nimbly as the younger soldiers, but they drag up the heavy artillery, and their advance once made is secure. They do not reel when the shots fly thick, but still hold their own, for they remember former fights when Jehovah protected their heads.
The church needs in these days of flimsiness and timeserving, more decided, thoroughgoing, well-instructed, and confirmed believers. We are assailed by all sorts of new doctrines. The old faith is attacked by so-called reformers, who would reform it all away to ruin. I expect to hear tidings of some new doctrine once a week. So often as the moon changes, some 'prophet' or other is moved to propound a new theory, and believe me, he will contend more valiantly for his novelty than ever he did for the gospel. The discoverer thinks himself a modern Luther, and of his doctrine he thinks as much as David of Goliath’s sword, “There is none like it.” As Martin Luther said of certain in his day, these inventors of new doctrines stare at their discoveries like a cow at a new gate, as if there were nothing else in all the world but the one thing for them to stare at. We are all expected to go mad for their fashions, and march to their piping. To whom we give place; no, not for an hour. They may muster a troop of raw recruits, and lead them where they would, but for confirmed believers they sound their bugles in vain.
Children run after every new toy; any little performance in the street, and the boys are all anxious, gaping at it. But their fathers have work to do abroad, and their mothers have other matters at home; your drum and whistle will not draw them out.
For the solidity of the church, for her steadfastness in the faith, for her defense against the constantly recurring attacks of heretics and infidels, and for her permanent advance and the seizing of fresh provinces for Christ, we need not only your young, hot blood, which may God always send to us, for it is of immense service, and we cannot do without it, but we need also the cool, steady, well-disciplined, deeply experienced hearts of men who know by experience the truth of God, and hold fast what they have learned in the school of Christ. May the Lord our God therefore send us many such; they are needed.
IV. And now I shall close by calling your attention to THE GREAT SOLEMNITY OF THE SUBJECT. We have tried to treat it pleasantly, and to instruct after the Master’s example by parables, but there is much of weight here, much of deep and solemn weight.
1. The first is to me, to you, professor of the faith of Christ, a solemn question, am I ripening? I recollect when as a child, I saw on the mantel a stone apple, looking remarkably like an apple, and very well colored. I saw that apple years after, but it was no riper. It had been in unfavorable circumstances for softening and sweetening, if it ever would have become mellow; but I do not think if the sun of the Equator had shone on it, or if the dews of Hermon had fallen on it, it would ever have been fit to be brought to table. Its hard marble substance would have broken a giant’s teeth. It was a hypocritical professor, a hard-hearted mocker of little children, a mere mimic of God’s fruits.
There are church members who used to be unkind, covetous, censorious, bad tempered, egotistical, everything that was hard and stony; are they so now? Have they not mellowed with the lapse of years? No, they are worse if anything; very dogs in the house for snapping and snarling, rending and devouring; great men at hewing down the carved work of the sanctuary with their axes, or at filling up wells and marring good pieces of land with stones. When the devil needs a stone to fling at a minister he is sure to use one of them. Well, now, are these people Christians at all? Are they? Let your senses exercise themselves. I leave you each one to judge.
If these be extreme cases, let me ask, are there not many in whom ripeness is certainly not very apparent? No growing downwards in humility, no growing upwards in fellowship with God, no doing more, no giving more, no loving more, no praying more, no praising more, no sympathizing more. Are you, then, a fruit unto God at all? Solemn question! I put it to myself as in the sight of God, and I ask you to do the same to yourselves.
2. Another question also rises up. There is constantly going on in every man, specially in every professed Christian, some process or other, and I believe that one of two processes will go on in us — the one is ripening, the other is rotting. Now rotting and ripening are exceedingly like each other in appearance up to a certain stage. You will sometimes find upon your tree a fruit which seems perfectly ripe, and has all the signs of ripeness a month before the proper time, outstripping thus all the other fruit. You must not think it is ripe. Cut it open, there is a worm inside! That noxious worm is to all appearance producing the same effect as the blessed sun and dew. So the worm of secret sin will eat out the heart of a professor, and yet it will outwardly produce in him the same savoriness of speech, the same apparent sanctity of life, which the Holy Spirit truly produces in a real Christian, but still the fair outside conceals a foul interior.
The whitewashed sepulcher is full of decay. That fruit which mimics ripeness is rotten, leave it alone, and it will soon be a thing fit only for the ash-heap. My dear friends, I have lived long enough, young as I am, to have seen some turn out to be very rotten hypocrites, though once they were in general esteem as more than ordinarily good men. I am sure we have all admired and loved people who after awhile have turned out to be utterly unworthy. They looked the more ripe because they were rotten! They were obliged to try and look like holy men because they feared that their real unholiness would be found out; just as some failing merchants make all the greater show to conceal their insolvency.
You will rot if you do not ripen, depend on it. He that in the church of God does not grow more heavenly will become more devilish. It is a hard thing to be in the hot house of an earnest church without growing more moldy, if you do not grow more fruitful. Mind this, and God give you to grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
One other reflection, and a very solemn one it is, while good fruits ripen, evil plants ripen too. While the wheat ripens for the harvest, the tares ripen also. They may grow together, and ripen together, but they will not be housed together forever. Dear hearers, some of you have been in this place now for years, and you are not converted. Well, you are ripening, you cannot help that; even weeds and tares come to maturity. “Let both grow together until the harvest.”
Look at these galleries and this vast area. I see before me a great field of corn and tares. You are mingled while you grow. “Let both grow together until the harvest,” that is the ripening and the dividing time. You are all growing, all ripening. Then, when all are ripe in the time of harvest, he will say to the reapers, “Gather together first the tares, bind them in bundles to burn them. Gather the wheat into my barn.”
O sinner! your unbelief is ripening, it will ripen into despair. Your enmity to God is ripening, it will ripen into everlasting rebellion against him. Even now your heart grows harder and more stubborn, and your death in sin becomes more hopeless every hour you live. Remember there shall be no hope that your character will undergo improvement in the eternal world. Then shall be fulfilled the saying which is written, “He that is filthy, let him be filthy still.” Forever and forever the processes which ripen sin, will continue to operate on condemned spirits, “where their worm dies not, and their fire is not quenched.”
God grant you grace to believe in Jesus Christ now, that you may receive the new nature, and having received it may grow up into ripeness, that so God may be glorified. May we all be housed in the garner of ripe fruit in the King’s own palace above! Amen and Amen.
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