Free to Be Fruitful

Chapter Seven

Fruitfulness

After God removed darkness and flood, the dry land appeared. The land had been formed. Now it needed to be filled. God made the land fruitful so it could sustain life, so it could feed animals and people. As good as removing our death, blindness and bondage is, the process is still incomplete if we don’t become fruitful people. Take a look at Jesus’ teaching.

Matt 12:43 Now when the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and does not find it. 44 “Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came’; and when it comes, it finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order. 45 “Then it goes and takes along with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first. That is the way it will also be with this evil generation.

The house “unoccupied, swept, and put in order” still had something wrong: it was empty. The empty house was like the land after it was formed, with no obstacles to fruitfulness, yet still uninhabited, empty. What the house needed was to be occupied, filled.

Obviously, Jesus isn’t just talking about real estate property; He’s talking about people. He said “…the last state of that man…” The house represents the man. The man “unoccupied, swept, and put in order” means he was healed and set free from spiritual bondage. His obstacles to fruitfulness were removed. The “evil generation” that Jesus compared to the man and to the house is the same “brood of vipers” He talked about a few verses earlier. He said of them “make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad.” “The good man brings out of his good treasure what is good; and the evil man brings out of his evil treasure what is evil.” Clearly, Jesus was talking about fruitfulness when referring to the house in need of being filled, occupied. In other words, He was saying, “After being healed and freed, people need to be filled with fruitfulness.”

As we have shown before, the activity of seeing means that God decides what is good and provides it. Jeremiah 5:25 says that “your sins have withheld good from you.” The verse before that says about God, “Who gives rain in its season, both the autumn rain and the spring rain, who keeps for us the appointed weeks of the harvest.” In context, the “good” withheld was the rain and the harvest, the water that made the land fruitful. This has the same meaning in Genesis 1 where the land was very good because it was very fruitful, well watered.

That’s what God wants to do in you and me. A blessed land is one that’s fruitful, because God’s blessing brings about fruitfulness. A blessed person is one who receives the “good” from God, water, rain, making him or her fruitful. A fruitful person is one who has been healed of his or her love deficiency and made free from bondage to iniquities, and is now receiving rain and producing a harvest of grain (the word, teachings from God), grapes (the joy of the Lord) and olives (oil, anointing, sanctification). Such land, such life, is very fruitful, very blessed, very good indeed!