The Fruit of Abiding in Christ by Rocky Fleming

I had an interesting conversation with my dear friend and our director of international expansion of Journey Groups around the world.  Having been a success in his business days, and with Walmart in particular, he is familiar with rapid expansion.  He brings a lot of wisdom and zest to our ministry and has done so for fifteen years.  He is committed to expanding Journey Groups worldwide, for he knows firsthand how his life has been changed by being in close proximity to Christ, which is the mission of The Journey.  He is also a bit product-driven like most of us who grew up as businessmen before joining this ministry.  What do I mean?  We, as former “get it done” guys, must consistently keep those instincts in check because we can start working for God rather than with Him if we are not careful.  We must also be careful with defining the product, regarding the fruit that Jesus spoke of.  If we are not careful, we will try to focus our efforts toward producing a specific fruit that we have in mind instead of a broader fruit Jesus is speaking of.  The fruit Jesus speaks of that comes from our abiding relationship with Him is broader and much more expansive and much more mysterious than what we can understand.  If we don’t have a broader view of this fruit He speaks of, we could in essence minimalize something that doesn’t fit with our point of view.  Let me develop this thought with you so you can get my take on this abiding fruit.

If we are product-driven as a ministry, it would be easy to see that our emphasis on using The Journey to make disciples who bear fruit would be easy to do.  No doubt we’ve seen tremendous fruit from people who have gone through The Journey.  When someone goes through The Journey and embraces their sacred responsibility to make disciples and use the process they’ve experienced, we feel that we see fruit that was used to bless them and then being passed forward to others.  That’s an easy one.  It’s easy to measure and quantify when Journey Groups reproduce.  But that is only a small measure of the fruit that comes when people start to abide in Christ.  It is important to this ministry and our mission that Journey Groups expand and reproduce.  But God has a bigger appreciation of the fruit produced than our limited view.  He is expanding His Kingdom, and we are only a small part of it. 

I think there are other measurements as well to describe the fruit Jesus speaks of.  How is the person’s marriage now that he or she is abiding in Christ?  How has forgiveness made its way to their hearts?  Is the fruit of God’s Spirit surfacing in their lives?  Think of how these attributes of Holy Spirit impact all the relationships in a man or woman’s life, not just the immediate ones.  Think about how those attributes contribute to a church family, a pastor who is loved and appreciated, a neighbor who benefits, and yes, even our enemies who see something new and disarming in us.  We can’t measure and quantify these things, but they are real.  Every now and then we hear about it.  But most of the time we don’t.  So how can we know as a ministry if we are faithfully making fruit bearing disciples if we don’t know who they are or what they are doing?  We can know by faith that they are bearing fruit, for Jesus said they would. 

Every now and then, we are given a private view into lives that show us the fruit.  But there is much more than we see, for we’ve heard about it.  This takes us back to asking the question about our mission as a discipleship ministry.  Does the Lord want us to invest time and resources to produce fruit producers, or abiders?  I think we all know the answer if we believe Jesus, for He said that we cannot bear fruit if we do not abide.  But if we abide, we will bear fruit.  Abiding in Him is both the target and the results.  Rule number one.

The truth is we see only about twenty percent or less of people who go through The Journey that reach back and take new groups through a Journey Group.  We would love to see more for the benefit of the people who need it, and for a guide who deepens his or her walk with Christ when they do so.  The expansion of our message about the intimate, abiding relationship that awaits them would reach more people, and give to them that which they long for with knowing Jesus better and to experience His love in a deeper way.  But we cannot, nor will we, discount other ways the Holy Spirit is doing His work in the other lives who do not take a Journey Group forward but are impacting their world around them in different ways, for its bigger than our limited view … bigger than us.

As an older man I sometimes ask myself if I can keep up and continue to bear fruit for my King as I grow older.  I can easily fall into the “I can’t” category, “because I’m old and hurt all the time.”   But I then remember rule number one in my life and with Influencers.  Rule number one is the answer to my question and all questions about bearing fruit.  Rule number one tells me that if I abide in Christ, then I will bear fruit for His glory.  It doesn’t require strength in our body or being pain free or limited by growing older.  In fact, some of those limitations are invitations to the necessary dependency in our relationship with Christ to bear even more fruit.

Here's the gist of it as I see it.  We can see some of the fruit that comes from The Journey and the abiding relationship with Christ that many people discover in it.  But I think that we don’t see most of the fruit that flows from their abiding relationship with Him.  Most of it is hidden or not known by us.  Some of the fruit of these disciples may germinate for a long period of time in a life before it comes to the surface.  We may have planted a fruit seed even years before it breaks out into the open.  They might not know it came from us.  We might not know it as well.  But that’s the beauty of it.  We don’t have to see it to know it, if we abide in Christ.  We just rely on His promise that if we abide in Him, fruit happens.  That’s rule number one.  Fruit happens when we abide.