GAL 5:22 "But the fruit of the Spirit is...goodness"*

I spent summers on my grandparents’ farm. In front of their house, there were two old apple trees. They’re not there anymore, but when we were younger, they produced a good crop of yellow transparent apples every second year. "August apples," we always called them, because they always ripened in August.

When they came on, my grandmother would send us out each day to pick up the apples that dropped off, and she would make them into apple sauce or tasty pies.

They also made good eating apples. When we had time, my brother, cousins and I would take our pocket knives and go out to get the really good apples for ourselves. For this we couldn’t look on the ground because those apples were bruised and tended to pick up worms quickly in the grass. The best ones were still on the trees. We would search for what we thought were the best ones and try them out. After a while we became pretty good at predicting which ones were ripest.

The knives had two purposes. First of all, we cut each apple in half. It seemed the juiciest and nicest apples had a wet core which was easily seen when the apple was cut open. It was a little bit of a contest to find the wettest and, therefore, the sweetest fruit.

The second reason to take a knife was to cut slices. It wasn’t wise simply to bite pieces off since the apples sometimes had worms. It was usually easy to spot the hole on the outside of the apple. In this case we knew to look for the worm track and we could cut out the bad spots.

Sometimes, however, the worm would have started at the bottom and it wouldn’t be detected until we cut the apple to reveal the dirty brown track cutting its way through the white flesh. Once in a while, we were surprised to find several worms in an apple. In these instances there wasn’t much under the skin that wasn’t rotten.

I was reminded of these apples as I was thinking about goodness this week. Goodness is about character. Its about integrity, morality, trustworthiness, excellence in virtue. Who we are on the inside.

Just like in those yellow transparent apples, our inside reveals what we are really like. Jesus talked a lot about this. In Matthew 12:33-35, he said, "Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit....Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him."

We can look pretty good on the outside, but where the worms of sin have been eating their way through our hearts, there is rot and disease which will eventually be revealed. That’s why the people who most demonstrate goodness are the ones without blemish all the way through - the ones who, like Gram’s August apples, have a sweet heart with clean white flesh.

Hope this helps. Be On Fire,

Troy

ON FIRE is a weekly letter of encouragement by Troy Dennis. This letter published June 12, 2005. www.onfireletter.com