Day 1: Love

What thermometer do you use to measure your spiritual temperature? How do you know when you’re maturing, and how do you know when you’re regressing? I ask because you definitely have one. And if it's the wrong instrument, it can’t give you the right information.

Jesus, in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, explains how to recognize spiritual health, a thermometer for taking spiritual temperature.

“By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.” (Matthew 7v16-20, NIV)

A few pages later in Matthew’s Gospel, we read: “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.” (Matthew 12v33, NIV)

Jesus is making the same point here, but the context is different. Jesus is strolling through a grain field on the Sabbath day — a sacred day set aside for rest and celebration — and his disciples are helping themselves to some of the fruit, snacking on heads of grain. As the story progresses, the Pharisees (a strict sect of priests) take issue because, “not to be a stickler here, rabbi, but that’s technically harvesting. It’s work, and the Law forbids work on the Sabbath.” And Jesus schools them by comparing himself to David, even insinuating he’s the fulfillment of King David.

That’s Jesus for: “You guys are missing the forest for the trees.”

When the how of spiritual formation outruns the why of spiritual formation, your spiritual practice is drained of power to form you, or worse, it deforms you. You’re taking your spiritual temperature by the wrong instrument: so it’s reading healthy because you’re keeping the rules, but the way you’re keeping the rules is making you rotten, fruitless, not fruitful.

See what Jesus is getting at?

Jesus, when asked what the most important command in Scripture was, said, ‘“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: “Love your neighbour as yourself.”' (Matthew 22v37-38, NIV)

Jesus inseparably joined together love for God and for people.

If practicing the Way of Jesus isn’t filling me to overflowing with the love of Jesus, I’m nothing more than noisy — religiously busy but out of tune with God’s redemption in me and the world around me.

The aim and destination of the spiritual journey is to become love. Love, in the Christian imagination, is incarnate, embodied, practical actions of self-sacrificial service, as we see in Jesus. The thermometer that takes our spiritual temperature is: Love, expressed practically as service.

And that’s what it means to become firstfruits.

The Apostle Paul says this: “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” (1 Corinthians 15v20, NIV) When Jesus burst forth from that tomb on Sunday, the first seed of eternal life to take root and break corrupted soil, he was “firstfruits.”

What does that mean?

In the American Pacific Northwest, where I live, if you visited an apple orchard in late August, there’d be a couple of apples on the trees. You’d be waaaaaaay too early for baking pumpkin-flavored anything, but you would see a few apples. Those August apples, they’re called “first fruits.” They’re out of season: it still feels like summer in every way.

But they’re promisingly out of season, meaning those first-fruit apples are early signs of a full-blown atmospheric change.

That’s what the resurrection of Jesus Christ is: first fruits. An early promise of a sweeping atmospheric change for all of creation — the re-unification of heaven and earth.

You and I are first fruits in a corrupted creation: An early promise of a sweeping atmospheric change. Our lives of service are like August apples. We are “promisingly out of season.”

So how do we become first fruits?

At the risk of underwhelming you with simplicity, you start where you are and start today.

Don’t start by volunteering at a new agency in your city or joining a team at your church you aren’t already invested in. That will certainly be a part of your practice as we mature in service, but it’s not the start.

How might you, simply and humbly, get your shoulder under someone else’s burden and share the weight?

And start today, not tomorrow: this week’s exercise is one act of service. The smaller and simpler, the better.

How do I become the first fruits of the greatest promise?

Not by inspiration. Not by grand action.

But by starting where we are and starting today.