My grandparents ran a wholesale grocery in Venezuela that my dad worked at during his college years. So it’s part of his heritage to go and visit a grocery store in whatever new country or city he visits.
With us living in Thailand, he’s almost as excited about the bounty of fruit as he is to visit us! He wakes up early with his jetlag in full force, and is back before we’re up with bags and bags of fruit. Durian is particularly popular in Southeast Asia and a delicacy for my dad. But it’s terribly stinky and is banned in most hotels.
One time we stepped off the elevator into the hotel floor where my parents were staying and immediately smelled the durian down the hall. Of course, my dad was the culprit, willing to even break the rules and invoke societal / hotel staff shame onto us for the sake of his precious fruit!
When he looks for fruit, he’s focused on two things. Quality and quantity. That the fruit tastes fresh, sweet, and delicious, and that there’s a lot of it!
The word fruit or fruitful shows up in Scripture 200+ times. But it’s a word in ministry that can sometimes bring up tension, especially when we value one type of fruitfulness over another. It happens when we as leaders are trusting in our own effort to produce fruit instead of bearing fruit through God’s methods.
The Warning of Not Bearing Fruit
There is a troubling passage in Matthew 21 where Jesus encounters a fig tree that does not bear fruit.
In the morning, as he was returning to the city, he became hungry. And seeing a fig tree by the wayside, he went to it and found nothing on it but only leaves. And he said to it, “May no fruit ever come from you again!” And the fig tree withered at once.
Matthew 21:18-19
The tree has leaves on it! It looks like it is supposed to be healthy and bearing fruit. But it has no fruit, and Jesus curses it and it withers.
Right before this happens, Jesus drives out all the merchants from the temple, because they’ve made God’s house of prayer into a den of robbers. And he also condemns the chief priests and Pharisees for looking like spiritual people but not bearing any spiritual fruit.
John 15 has a similar warning, that a branch that does not bear fruit will be cut off and thrown into the fire and burned.
Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away… If anyone does not abide in me he is thrown away like a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.
John 15:2, 6
This idea of fruitfulness, or the lack of it, used to keep me up at night. What does it mean to bear fruit? If I don’t bear fruit, will I be cut off and burned? Or cursed like the fig tree?
What is Fruitfulness?
So what is fruitfulness?
Like my dad, when we think of fruit and how to evaluate it, we think of two things: quality and quantity. For quality, we look at the fruit’s health, flavor, and condition. For quantity, we look at its ability to reproduce more of itself.
Scripture also defines Kingdom Fruitfulness in these two ways – quality and quantity. For the disciple of Jesus, the quality of their fruit is the fruit of the Spirit, or their Christ-like character. And the quantity of their fruit is the multiplication of disciples. Let’s look at these two aspects.
The Fruit of the Spirit
So the first one is the fruit of the Spirit. Let’s read Galatians 5:22:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.
Galatians 5:22-23
Paul gives us a pretty clear definition of what fruit of the Spirit is in Galatians. All of these are attributes of godly character. The New Testament mentions fruit in this manner many other times. In Ephesians 5:9, that the “fruit of light is found in all that is good and true and right” or in Hebrews, where discipline “yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness” (Hebrews 12:11).
When you have a relationship with Jesus, he changes you. He changes your character, your desires, the way you think and act. When we are saved by Jesus and put our faith in him, he gives us new hearts to obey and desire him. And he continually sanctifies us, prunes us so that we can look more like him in character.
When I started dating Jenn, I was only 19 years old. I had never had a girlfriend before! I was selfish with my time, mean, rough with my words, and I became angry easily (why did she start dating me?). Over the last 15 years together and 10 years of being married, being with Jenn has changed my character! Through a lot of time spent together and many tears, mistakes, and conflicts, I learned how to be nice in my words and affirm her, I learned how to give up my personal time to spend quality time with her, I learned how to calm down and be gentle instead of angry. I learned that when we choose restaurants, we are choosing the restaurant that she wants! Basically I just learned the very important point: Happy wife, happy life! I have changed a lot since being with Jenn. But being with Jesus has changed me incomparably more.
Being with Jesus changes who we are!
He can turn an angry person into a kind person because he is kindness.
He can turn an anxious person into a peaceful person because he is peace.
He can turn a selfish person into a loving person because he is love.
And the more we abide in Jesus, learn from him in his Word, and start living our lives according to the way he has taught us, we will change more and more. He changes our character, and the result is that we bear the fruits of the Spirit.
If you are unsure whether you are fruitful or if Christ is sanctifying you, look at what Paul lists out as the fruits of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. If your desires, thoughts, and actions are orienting more in line with these things, the Spirit is working in your life! Thank God and ask him for more.
The Fruit of Multiplying Disciples
The second type of fruitfulness that the Bible talks about is the fruit of multiplication. It starts with the very first command that God gives to man when He created the world in Genesis 1: “Be fruitful and multiply.” Later in Genesis 12, God gives this promise to Abraham that multiplication will happen through his descendants, to bear his image and His glory across the whole world.
But Jesus gave us a new command in Matthew 28, a Great Commission –
Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and teach them to obey all that I have commanded you.
Matthew 28:19
So now, we are not only meant to multiply through having physical descendants, but through multiplying spiritual descendants, or by making disciples of Jesus.
This spiritual multiplication is seen throughout the Old and New Testament. In Mark 4 Jesus tells a parable about the Kingdom of God.
The sower sows the word. But those that were sown on the good soil are the ones who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.”
Mark 4:14, 20
He explains that in this parable, the sower sows the Word or the gospel, and different people respond to the Word differently. Some do not receive the Word, some receive but are not fruitful, but the 4th soil, the good soil, receives the Word and bears fruit. And they don’t only bear fruit, but they multiply, 30-60-100 times!
How does the multiplication of disciples happen? Paul shows us in 2 Timothy 2:2:
And what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.
2 Timothy 2:2
Paul tells Timothy that whatever we receive, whatever we learn, we need to pass on and share with others. If you are a believer today, you have received the good news of Jesus. The Bible says that we need to share that gospel with others! And we need to teach those other people to share with others!
When we obey this command to make disciples and teach others to obey, and they teach others, and they teach others, we can multiply disciples. 30, 60, and 100 times! Through multiplication, we can see many thousands or millions of people come to know Jesus!
I first learned about multiplying movements when I was in college. Jenn and I were part of a campus ministry leadership team overseeing 300 students. None of us really knew how to share the gospel or how to disciple others. Maybe 5-10 people a year would come to faith, mainly by inviting friends to large events.
We went to a conference and heard Ying Kai’s story. He was a church planter in China in the early 2000s, in an area with 20 million people. At the rate that he was seeing people come to faith, about 200 people every 3 years, he would still not be able to reach even .1% of the population. He was challenged by the question, “How many people will hear the gospel today?”
From Matthew 28 and 2 Timothy 2, he created a simple method called training for trainers, or T4T. He would train people in how to share the gospel, and challenge them to share it 5 times each week. Every new believer was trained and challenged to share 5 times each week as well.
His first training group was with one group of uneducated farmers, just 30 people. He taught them how to share their testimony of how Jesus changed their life, and share a short gospel message. And they set a goal to share 5 times a week and train others. Within 3 months, this group of 30 farmers had led 200 people to faith and formed 27 small groups. And they were training all the new believers to also share and teach others. And then they started multiplying! By the end of the first year, 10,000 people had believed in Jesus and 906 small groups had started. At the end of 10 years, this one group of 30 farmers had multiplied into 1.7 million new believers, and 150,000 churches started! This is a true story of multiplication today!
The organization that Ying Kai was a part of didn’t believe the numbers he was reporting. So they sent in a research team to confirm the statistics. They found out that he was under-reporting by almost 60%! God was multiplying so fast that they couldn’t even track all that was happening.
Many of us among the unreached are in places where this type of multiplying, exponential growth seems impossible. Just seeing one friend come to know Jesus would be amazing. And that is where it starts – by reaching out to even one friend. But from there, do we believe that God’s method is multiplication? That the things happening in the book of Acts, and in movements throughout the world, can happen through and around us?
Do we believe that Jesus wants us to bear the fruit of multiplication?
Which Type of Fruitfulness?
In Japan, there is a culture of giving super-expensive fruit as gifts. In 2023, two mangoes sold for 600,000 Japanese yen or close to $5000! We were curious at what all the hype was about, so we tried one much cheaper, but still very expensive, $10 mango. For context, a kilogram of mangoes is between $1-3 in Thailand.
Was it delicious? Very. But 10x the price delicious? Not even close. (Thai mangoes are also awesome.) It left us somewhat dissatisfied after basically only getting a couple bites each. On the other hand, I’m sure many of us have gotten a large but cheap batch of fruit that is bland, or mushy, or just not tasty. Lots of low quality fruit isn’t exactly enjoyable either.
In ministry or missions leadership, it can sometimes feel like we are stuck between the choice of focusing on quality or quantity of fruit. Some might be gifted shepherds and teachers who help people grow deeper in Christ, but can’t remember the last time they met a non-believing friend much less shared the gospel. Others may be seeing crazy huge multiplication numbers of new believers, but the discipleship level is shallow. All the training and coaching is focused on evangelism, and not much energy is spent towards pursuing holiness.
For me, pursuing multiplying movements means that I can often get stuck in the latter pitfall. So much of our focus is around how to get the gospel to 70 million unreached in Thailand that we can forget to ask if we are producing healthy and good quality fruit that is pleasing to God.
We’ve told our partner Mint’s story before, and it has been our joy to see her multiply in her region of Thailand. But a couple years ago during a coaching meeting, when we asked her about how her disciples are doing, she told us, “Many of them are sharing the gospel and discipling others, but they are struggling in their marriages. There’s a lot of conflict and they have never had examples of godly marriages.”
So her idea was to gather her disciples together, not for an evangelism or multiplication focused training, but a marriage / family camp! We invited Talia and her husband, who have a great marriage, to come and train on different aspects of a godly marriage, including centering their relationship around Jesus and learning to serve each other through their love languages like gifts and words of affirmation.
Through the family camp and some other coaching, one of Mint’s main disciples Bee felt convicted that she needed to share some personal sin with her husband, Not. They had been struggling in their marriage, even considering separation since it was so difficult. After she confessed, Bee and Not experienced newfound trust and restoration in their marriage. Later that week, one of the people Bee had shared with called her back and invited her to start a Discovery Bible Study in her shop! Bee attributes it to God’s kindness in giving her new disciples after she had the courage to obey the Spirit’s conviction in confessing sin. The fruit of heart change in Bee’s life led to the fruit of new disciples in her ministry!
Reflection
We know that Jesus gives a warning against not bearing fruit. And we know that abiding is how we get more of Jesus, which results in heart transformation and disciple multiplication. If you are bearing fruit in some way or another, praise the Lord for the work of the Holy Spirit in and through you!
But sometimes we have to self-assess whether we are producing fruitfulness in one category and not the other. Do we believe that abiding in Christ can help us to bear the fruit of character and multiplication, in our own lives and in those we lead?
Below are some questions for reflection, for your own life, in your ministry, or with your team.
- Are you / your ministry / your team bearing the fruit of Christ-like character or of new disciples? If yes, then thank God for how He is working in your life!
- Do you / your ministry / your team have a tendency to fall into the pitfall of quality over quantity of fruit, or of quantity over quality? Why?
- What would it look like if you could see both types of fruit consistently produced in your life?
- If you identify with one of these pitfalls, how can you reorient your heart and make tangible changes to address these issues?
- As a leader, how can you lead your team and / or ministry towards greater multiplication AND more Christ-like character? (e.g. if you have a ministry focused on care or teaching, how can you multiply those efforts? Or, if you lead a multiplication ministry, how can you emphasize greater health and deepen character?)