Do You Need a New Clutch?

We are encouraged to review ourselves and our lives from time to time, and make special efforts to re-tune our lifestyle to God’s instructions; two such times are Lent and Advent, but these don’t have to be exclusive.  Nor does such a discipline have to be corporate.  We can as individuals undertake such a review at any time.

There are two kinds of review.  We can compare our life now to what it was like a month, a year or a generation ago.  We can read meaningless statistics like the number of loaves of bread we could buy for the price of a new car or a television, for example, or note that certain aspects of present-day life didn’t even exist in the age we’re comparing to.   From that we can draw our conclusions about the way life has progressed or – depending on our point of view - regressed.

A more searching review comes if we measure what we have, the way of life in our nation now, against some absolute scale of values.  And what better absolute scale than God’s text-book for life itself, the Bible?  As we do so, we may realise that many of the problems in our lives are not the result of cataclysmic events or upheavals, but are the consequence of gradual change, a steady slip from the ideal.

In the same way, the servicing of a motor vehicle is a kind of review, and in this respect I’m undergoing a process of transition.  The van I use for my work, travelling up to 70,000 miles a year, is serviced every couple of months or so, while the motorhome I’ve recently acquired for the retirement I’m gradually phasing into only needs to be serviced once a year.  These are two different attitudes to what is essentially the same task.  In one case, I have a pretty shrewd idea of what will need doing, because I remember fairly clearly what was done at the last service.  In the other, I’m expecting a lot of things will be checked over according to the programme, but I don’t know precisely what will be involved.

If your motor mechanic tells you that your car needs a new clutch, you might well be surprised.  When driving along, you hadn’t noticed anything at all amiss.  The fault – natural wear - had developed gradually and as a result you were accommodating the problem without realising it.  It’s not until he’s fitted the new one and driving the car is so much easier, that you realise just how bad it had been.  Life itself works just the same way.  It’s all too easy to slip into comfortable ways, habits that fit in conveniently with those around us, but which aren’t the way life was intended to be.

There’s a very appropriate phrase in the book of Revelation, “I know … that you are neither cold nor hot. … So, because you are lukewarm … I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”  (Rev. 3:15-16).  It is a reminder of our responsibility to be positive for God, to dispense with lukewarm political correctness, call a spade a spade and denounce sin for what it is.

We need to consider: are we enjoying a lukewarm comfortable-ness, or are we fired up with enthusiasm for God and His love?

Stewed Fruit

I’m amazed how things happen together to provide an additional meaning to something.  The other day I was listening to a piece on the radio about a shepherd.  As he told how he had learned from his grandfather, and how his son was now learning from his father, he used the phrase, ‘the seasons have come full circle’, and my eye fell on some plums in my kitchen.

Most fruit – I apologise to banana-lovers – are generally spherical in shape: plums, oranges, apples ... lemons, too, at a stretch of the imagination; and even the banana gets included if you think in just two dimensions and consider the cross-section of them all, which is roughly circular.  So the term ‘coming full circle’ is a fruitful one <groan>.

Just as amazing is the discovery of over 150 references in the Bible to fruit, and it’s worth thinking about the meanings that some of them present to us.

I have already spoken about things being fruitful; in the first chapter of Genesis we read of “trees bearing fruit with seed in it” (vv. 11,12 &29), indicating that the purpose of fruit is to continue the species.  In the next chapters later we find that fruit was good for food (2:16, 3:6).  Further in the Books of the Law, Leviticus chapter 19 explains the concept of ‘first fruits’, by which the first of the crop should be offered to God rather than eaten.  So fruit can be a gift … do you remember the expression, ‘an apple for the teacher’?

Psalms, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes move us into metaphor.  Man is described as “like a tree, yielding its fruit at the proper time” (Ps.1:3); there are references to “the fruit of their labour” (Ps. 78:46 and Eccl. ch.2), and Psalm 127 speaks of sons being “the fruit of the womb” (v.3).  Proverbs give us fruits of the righteous, his words, his speech, and a person’s mouth and tongue (11:30, 12:14, 13:2, 18:20&21).

In the New Testament, Jesus used many of these expressions in His teaching.  He often spoke of fruit in the sense of our behaviour, thus “you will recognise them by their fruit” (Mt. 7:16), and “fruit that proves your repentance” (Lk. 3:8).  Sometimes He referred to the disciples’ evangelistic obligations as in John ch. 15: “every branch that bears fruit”, “the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it remains in the vine” and “bear much fruit and show that you are my disciples” (vv. 2,4 & 8).

Paul also used fruit as a metaphor in many of his letters.  We all know about the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22), and similarly the fruit of the light (Eph.5:9), to which we can add the reference to “the gospel bearing fruit and growing among you” (Col. 1:10).  James, too, referred to fruit, writing about “the fruit that consists of righteousness, planted in peace among those who make peace.”

I wouldn’t expect any of my readers to learn all these references … indeed, to see that as an objective, though laudable, would be to miss my point.  But there are countless things around us that are circular - quite apart from looking at the fruit stall on the market - so when you see circles try to remember just some of these meanings, and think how they might link something divine to your own lifestyle.