By Their Fruits

Today's Scripture

Jesus closes the Sermon on the Mount with a warning we keep forgetting.

Matthew 7:15-16 — "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?"

Matthew 7:22-23 — "On that day many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?' And then will I declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.'"

Matthew 24:24 — "For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect."

The Big Idea

Jesus warned us that some spiritual leaders would be fakes — and that the fakes would be impressive. So he gave us a test. Not crowd size. Not talent. Not even miracles. Fruit: the slow, hard-to-fake character that the Holy Spirit grows in a person over time. Discernment — an old word for telling the real thing from the almost-real thing — starts with actually using the test Jesus gave us.

Reflection

The wolves dress well

Begin with what Jesus does not say. He does not say false prophets are easy to spot.

The phrase "sheep's clothing" is doing real work. The wolves do not look like wolves. They look like sheep. They preach in pulpits, write bestselling books, lead worship, fill conference stages. Some of them do not yet know they are wolves. If spotting them were easy, Jesus would not have needed to warn us.

Paul says the same thing, and then makes it worse. 2 Corinthians 11:13-15 — "For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light." The disguise is not a clumsy costume. It is light. It looks like the real thing on purpose.

Irenaeus was a pastor in the second century who spent his life answering false teachers. Here is what he learned about how error works:

"Error, indeed, is never set forth in its naked deformity, lest, being thus exposed, it should at once be detected. But it is craftily decked out in an attractive dress, so as, by its outward form, to make it appear to the inexperienced more true than truth itself." — Irenaeus, Against Heresies

More true than truth itself. That sentence is eighteen hundred years old, and it could have been written about your feed this morning. The teacher with the perfect lighting, the clip that gives you chills, the voice that sounds more confident than your own pastor — none of that tells you anything yet. Error dresses well. It always has.

Miracles are not the test

Here is the second thing Jesus does not say: he does not say false prophets can't do amazing things.

Read Matthew 7:22-23 again slowly. The people Jesus turns away are not slackers. They prophesied. They cast out demons. They did "many mighty works" — and they did them in his name. Their résumé is spiritual fireworks from top to bottom. And Jesus says, "I never knew you." In Matthew 24:24 he goes further: false christs will perform "great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect."

Sit with what that means. We cannot evaluate a ministry by its visible results. Crowd size is not fruit. Healings are not fruit, by themselves. Goosebumps are not fruit. Even accuracy is not fruit, by itself. Jesus said we would see real-looking power in fake shepherds, and he said it in advance so we would not be fooled by it.

Jonathan Edwards learned this in the middle of a real revival. During the Great Awakening of the 1740s, he watched genuine conversions and dramatic counterfeits happen in the same room, sometimes in the same pew. He refused to measure either one by how intense it looked. His conclusion became the opening claim of his most famous book:

"True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections." — Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections

"Affections" is Edwards's word for the deep loves of the heart — not surface excitement, but what a person actually treasures. Tears can be faked. Crowds can be rented. What cannot be faked, over years, is a heart that loves God more than it loves the stage.

Tim Keller gives us the modern vocabulary for what goes wrong when a ministry starts loving the stage:

"What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give." — Tim Keller, Counterfeit Gods

An idol is an old word for a god-substitute. A platform can become one. A following can become one. Even "results for God" can become one. When they do, the ministry keeps all the Christian words and quietly changes owners.

What fruit actually means

So what is the test? Jesus tells us: "You will recognize them by their fruits." And he explains the image in Luke 6:43-45 — "for each tree is known by its own fruit... out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks." Fruit is what the tree produces because of what the tree is. It cannot be stapled on.

The Bible even gives us the fruit list. Galatians 5:22-23 — "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law." Read that list once more and notice something strange. Every item is a character trait. Not one is a talent. Not one is a result. The fruit Jesus tells us to look for is not what a leader produces on stage but what the Holy Spirit has produced in the leader.

That is why Paul's qualification list for elders is so unimpressive-sounding. 1 Timothy 3:2-3 — an overseer "must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money." Almost everything is character. Almost nothing is gifting. Paul knew what Jesus knew: gifting without character is the most dangerous combination in the church.

Charles Spurgeon trained hundreds of young pastors, and the very first lecture he gave them was not about preaching. It was about the preacher:

"We are, in a certain sense, our own tools, and therefore must keep ourselves in order." — Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students

A surgeon with a dirty scalpel harms people no matter how skilled his hands are. A leader is the instrument. If the instrument is corrupt, the skill only spreads the infection further.

And character takes time to read. 1 Samuel 16:7 — "For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart." We cannot see hearts directly. But we can watch what a heart produces over years: How does this person treat the staff who can do nothing for them? Is their home a place of grace or fear? Do the people closest to them trust them most — or least? Thomas à Kempis, a quiet monk whose little book has trained Christians for six centuries, kept the standard simple:

"At the Day of Judgement, we shall not be asked what we have read, but what we have done." — Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

Not what we platformed. Not what we claimed. What we did. Edwards, after two hundred pages of careful testing, landed on the same place — his famous twelfth and final sign of real grace:

"Gracious and holy affections have their exercise and fruit in Christian practice." — Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections

In plain English: the realest sign of a real heart is a changed life that keeps showing up, week after ordinary week. Fruit trees are boring. They just stand there in the backyard through every season. And then, slowly, reliably, they feed people.

Known, not just impressive

Now look at the most haunting words in today's passage. Jesus does not say to the false prophets, "You failed." He says, "I never knew you."

That is the wound underneath all counterfeit ministry. It is possible to do a great deal for Jesus without ever being with Jesus. It is possible to run a whole religious career on talent, adrenaline, and applause — and never once sit quietly with the Lord whose name is on the sign out front. J.I. Packer puts the difference in one sentence:

"A little knowledge of God is worth more than a great deal of knowledge about him." — J.I. Packer, Knowing God

Knowing about God can be performed. Knowing God cannot. And here is where today's warning turns into good news, because Jesus does not leave us with a test to pass. He tells us where fruit actually comes from.

John 15:4-5 — "Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing."

Branches do not strain to produce grapes. They stay connected, and the life of the vine does the rest. The gospel — the announcement of what God has done in Christ — is not "be impressive for God." It is that Jesus was the one fully fruitful human, the true vine, and that he was cut down at the cross so that people like us could be grafted in. Our safety against counterfeits is not, finally, our cleverness. It is being truly known by the Shepherd who laid down his life for the sheep — and staying close enough to him that we learn the sound of his voice, and notice when another voice is wearing his clothes.

Jesus has given us the test. He told us in advance. Most failures of discernment are not failures of information. They are failures of nerve to apply the test we already have.

Going Deeper

Take one Christian leader whose voice currently shapes your thinking — author, pastor, podcaster, teacher. Walk slowly through the Galatians 5:22-23 list and ask it of them, as best you can know: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Where you cannot answer, notice that — it is data. Then turn the list around and ask it of yourself, gently. The point is not a witch hunt. The point is to start running, on the voices that shape you most, the one test Jesus actually told us to run.