Heart Fruit Garden

Think of your heart like a fruit garden.  In a literal garden, one cultivates and nurtures their garden by planting seeds in good soil where the sun can infiltrate.  The gardener tends to their garden by giving it water and the right nutrients – giving it to much or not enough can destroy the garden.  Hence, good gardeners pull weeds and keep pests away.

Struggles come from within our heart.  Our behaviors change by changes in our heart. What we plant in our heart will sprout – good or bad fruit.  It is our role to guard our heart and not allow certain things to come into our fruit garden (Proverbs 4:23).  We want to cultivate, nurture, and weed our garden by putting the right things in it and keeping the wrong things out of it.  We do this by forming new godly habits to replace old ungodly habits. We only have two options on the shelf: pleasing God or pleasing self.  Since God is our Great Gardner, He shows us The Way through His Son, Jesus Christ.  Jesus defines what normal humanity should look like.  Jesus lived his life displaying a perfect fruit garden.  We have the power of the Holy Spirit giving us the right nutrients to grow beautiful good fruit.  God is bringing us back to the Garden – the Garden of Eden before sin entered.  As we follow Jesus more and more, good fruit will grow in our heart reflecting in our thoughts and actions.  Only when we meet Jesus face-to-face will our fruit garden be perfect.  Questions to ponder:

• What do you need to plant more of in your fruit garden? What action steps will you take to do that?
• What do you need to weed out of your fruit garden? Perhaps it is choices of entertainment, friendships, media, thought-life, etc.?  What action steps will you take?
• What do you need to practice telling your heart instead of listening to your heart?
• What have you learned about your heart being like a fruit garden?