Year 6, Day 61: Jeremiah 8

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Discipleship Focus: Bear Fruit

• Bear Fruit: We bear fruit after we grow.  Bearing fruit is ultimately the goal of abiding and the goal of being called into the Kingdom of God.  However, while bearing fruit is our calling, it is not the end.  We bear fruit so that we can then prune, abide, grow, and bear more fruit in another season.  Bearing fruit is not the end, but rather only a portion of the whole rhythm of life into which God has called us.

I think the lens of fruit is an interesting one through which we can view this chapter.  Once more we hear God complaining about the Hebrew people.  But you’ll notice that in today’s verses we don’t focus as much on what they’ve done wrong.  What we can hear as a theme through the text is more along what the people haven’t done right.

They have healed the people lightly.  In other words, they are busy telling the people around them, “Oh, there’s nothing wrong with you.  You’re fine just the way that you are.”  They say, “Peace, peace” when there is no peace.  In other words, the Hebrew people aren’t bearing fruit of repentance and relationship with God.  They are encouraging one another to continue to exist as they want, not as they should.

In another verse, God tells them that they didn’t even know when to be ashamed of themselves.  “They don’t know how to blush,” God says.  Now we find the reason that the Hebrew people can’t correct the lives of the people in their community.  They don’t even know what is right and wrong in themselves!  It’s hard to bear fruit when you don’t even know how.

This brings us to one of my favorite phrases in Jeremiah when it comes to God’s expectation to see fruit in us.  “When I would gather, there are no grapes on the vine or figs in the trees.”  In other words, there is no fruit.  There is nothing in their lives in which God can partake.  What a sad expression of God’s own people.

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