God Declared You Fruitful Before You Produced Anything

Sermon outline

God declared you fruitful before you produced anything, He preserves that fruit through every drought, and He cultivates it as you abide in the Vine, so that your fruit becomes the evidence that you are a true disciple.

1. Real fruit and fake fruit

   She sets the theme with three words the church repeats after her: declaration, preservation and cultivation. Genesis is God's declaration over us, Jeremiah His preservation and John His cultivation. God has never called us to look fruitful but to be fruitful, and you can be busy, gifted, titled and fluent in church language without being connected to the source.

   Illustration: A display of real and fake fruit. The fake looks better, with the right colour and sheen and no bruises, but it has no nutrition and no seed. The real fruit carries marks because it came through heat, drought and storms from a deep root, and it can reproduce.

   “God has never called us to look fruitful. He has called us to be fruitful.”

   • Genesis 1:28
   • John 15:8

2. Declaration: the blessing comes before the fruit

   God blessed Adam and Eve before they had achieved, performed or proven anything, and then said, be fruitful. His declaration comes before manifestation, so fruitfulness begins with what God has spoken, not with what you can currently see. It is identity before assignment, it is not busyness, and it is destined to multiply, because every real fruit carries tomorrow's harvest in its seed.

   Illustration: God called Abraham the father of nations before Isaac was born, called Gideon a mighty man of valour while he was hiding, and called Simon Peter a rock before he was stable. She also tells how teachers at her children's school wrote to thank her for ministry books her son had quietly handed out across the week, and how the Holy Spirit said one word to her: fruit.

   “God's declaration came before manifestation. God spoke fruitfulness before it was even visible.”

   • Genesis 1:28
   • Genesis 17:5
   • Judges 6:12

3. Preservation: a true disciple remains fruitful in difficult seasons

   Life is not always Genesis 1:28. Jeremiah describes heat, wind and a whole year of drought, and yet the tree that trusts in the Lord does not stop yielding fruit. Circumstances do not cancel God's design. The supply is underground, where the roots reach the water, and pressure reveals what has been feeding us. God does not always preserve us from something; sometimes He preserves us to something.

   Illustration: Daniel in the lions' den and Joseph in prison as people preserved through, not removed from, the hard season.

   “The miracle is not the absence of drought. The miracle is the fruit in the drought.”

   • Jeremiah 17:7-8

4. Cultivation: disciples are developed through connection to the Vine

   The Father is the gardener, Jesus is the vine and we are the branches. Some are exhausted because they are trying to be the source, driven by a checklist instead of by the life of God in them, and so they manufacture fruit. The branch's primary responsibility is to abide. Every fruitful branch is also pruned, which is cultivation and not punishment, and the progression is fruit, more fruit and much fruit.

   Illustration: Fruit taped onto a branch may look like fruit from a distance, but no life flows into it. Church attendance, Bible knowledge or a title can be attached to a life the same way. She says the Holy Spirit told her that morning that we are KPI-driven when we should be DNA-driven.

   “The first discipline to fruitfulness is not productivity, it is intimacy.”

   • John 15:1-5
   • John 15:2

5. Proven: fruit is the evidence of a true disciple

   When you bear much fruit you are His true disciples, and it brings glory to the Father. Fruit must never be decoration; it is evidence. If you have followed Jesus for years, something should be changing: your forgiveness, patience, love and generosity should be growing, and you should be passing on to others what God has placed in you. She names three expressions of fruit, character, obedience and reproduction, without developing them.

   “Our fruit should never be a decoration. It must always be the evidence.”

   • John 15:8

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