In the Bible Christian Ministry
Sunday 5-31-26 (Fruit Takes Time, Part 2)
  • Awesome God - Tammi & Gerald Haddon
  • Let It Rise
  • You're the One
  • In Spite of Me
  • I'll Just Say Yes
  • Worthy of My Praise
  • Victory Chant
  • This is How We Overcome
  • Fill Me Up / Overflow
  • What a Mighty God We Serve
  • Happy
  • Father, Jesus, Spirit
  • I Give Myself Away
  • Shabach
  • We've Come to Worship
  • One Thing Remains
  • I'm Yours
  • You Are Good
  • I Am a Friend of God
  • In the Room
  • I Am Not Alone
  • He Is
  • Freedom
  • I Know Who I Am
  • Trust In God
  • Welcome Holy Spirit
  • Worthy of My Praise
  • Lord I Love You - Todd Galberth
  • My Worship - Phil Thompson
  • Lord I Lift Your Name on High
  • Joy To The World
  • O Come All Ye Faithful
  • Excellent
  • Father, Jesus, Spirit
  • Closer / Wrap Me In Your Arms
  • Lord, I Love You (TGalberth)
  • Lord You're Mighty
  • He is Exalted / Give Him Praise
  • Sing a New Song
  • My Worship
  • Just a Closer Walk with Thee
  • Fire
  • We Believe
  • Holy Forever
  • 1. The Full Sermon Manuscript
    I. The Natural Reflex to Run from the Mess
    Our natural human reflex when something gets messy, smelly, or offensive is to throw it away.
    Think about your kitchen trash can on a hot summer afternoon. If you slice up some fruit and leave the scraps sitting out, it begins to rot.
    It turns slimy.
    It starts to smell.
    Nobody in their right mind leaves a pile of decaying fruit scraps sitting on their beautiful dining room table.
    Your immediate instinct is to sweep it up, bag it up, and get it as far away from your living space as physically possible.
    You throw it out because it smells like failure. It smells like death.
    We do the exact same thing with our relationships and our seasons of life.
    The moment a situation gets complicated—
    the moment a relationship encounters friction,
    the moment an old stuff starts creeping back up,
    or the moment we experience a painful, messy, public failure
    —our immediate structural response is to discard it.
    We want to distance ourselves from the stench of the mess. We look at the broken pieces of our expectations and say, "This is toxic. Throw it away."

    II. The Sickness of the Transactional Pattern

    The reason we handle our brokenness this way is because we have been trained by the world around us.
    We are swimming in a culture that operates strictly on a TRANSACTIONAL grid.
    The world tells you that if something is functional, clean, and immediately profitable, you keep it.
    If it is broken, slow, breaking or demanding, you cut it loose.
    We apply this transactional template to how we love people.
    We follow a calculated script: “I will invest my time, my affection, and my kindness into you, but only as long as you have the emotional capital to pay me back. Only as long as you make me look good or advance my social status.”
    But what happens when life hands you a season full of rot?
    What happens when a family member defaults on their relational debt?
    What happens when you look at the soil of your own heart and all you see is dirty, messy, unappealing dust?
    Because we don't know how to handle the mess, we end up spiritually exhausted.
    Our goal is not to just grow but to grow fruit
    Then our goal is not to just grow fruit but the best fruit

    III. GOD: The Transforming Power of the Root

    We act this way because this is what we have been taught.
    This is what we have seen
    This is exactly the defensive posture the Apostle Paul confronts in Romans 12:2.
    Paul declares:
    Romans 12:2 NIV
    2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
    When Paul says "Do not be conformed,"he uses the word his word choice means to force yourself into an external, superficial, and temporary outward mold.
    You are in the world but you must me stronger than the mold. The mold is weak plastic and you are hard concrete when the world puts you in that mold you have to break the the shape on the outside—break the mold
    The world wants to force you to conform to its transactional pressures.
    But Paul shouts: “Be ye transformed!” NOT CONFORMED.
    He uses the word Metamorphoo —the very root of our word metamorphosis. This is not behavioral modification. This is an organic, structural rewrite of your internal nature.
    It is the shifting of your entire internal processing environment.
    So here is the thing to conform doesn’t change you.
    It bends you and molds you but it doesn’t change you.
    We spend a lot of time conforming in depending on the situation.
    But to be TRANSFORMED — Permanent
    But here is the catch: In order not to conform to the pattern of the world, we have to be radically grafted into God. Outward compliance cannot break the world's mold; only an inward, vital connection to the Root can alter your spiritual DNA.

    The Agriculture of Abiding: The Unseen Partnership

    Jesus shows us exactly how this internal re-engineering works in John 15:4:
    John 15:4 NIV
    4 Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.
    Or ABIDE
    Wither
    The Foundation of a House: He famously closed the Sermon on the Mount by describing a wise builder who digs deep down to anchor a house on bedrock versus a foolish builder who builds on shifting sand (Matthew 7:24–27).
    Counting the Cost: When explaining the cost of discipleship, He asked who would start building a tower without first sitting down to estimate the cost to ensure they have enough to finish it (Luke 14:28–30).
    The Rejected Cornerstone: He quoted the Old Testament imagery of builders casting aside a stone that ultimately becomes the crucial cornerstone of the entire structure (Matthew 21:42)
    Think about the precise mechanics of this unseen partnership. The branch does not have to stay awake at night pacing the floor, trying to figure out how to manufacture fruit. The branch doesn’t sweat to produce grapes. The branch has one primary assignment: Abide. Remain connected. Don’t LET GO.
    In this divine ecosystem, there are three active movements working simultaneously:
    Branch: Abiding; Remains in total, receptive surrender—.
    Vinedresser: protecting walks the rows, clearing away parasitic wood and guarding the borders—.
    Holy Spirit: supplying; pumps the life-giving sap directly through the center of the wood—.
    When you are vitally engrafted into Christ, you stop trying to generate love through the power of your own flesh. You step into a rest where His life flows through your ordinary Tuesday afternoon choices.

    The Chemistry of the Compost Tumbler

    Now, let's step into the dirty grit of my backyard garden to see how this vital connection handles the mess.
    If you look at an experienced gardener, you will find they look at waste completely differently than the rest of the world.
    In my garden, I have a compost tumbler. It is essentially a large, dark drum that sits in the corner of the yard. When I am working the soil, I take the rotten fruit that fell off the vine, the kitchen scraps from the house, the old dead vines, and the tattered leaves that look absolutely ruined.
    To the casual observer, it is a pile of disgusting, slimy, offensive garbage. The world says, "Throw it out."
    But a gardener looks at that rot and says, "That isn't trash; that is raw material in transition."
    [Proclaim Slide: The Confinement, The Turning, The Payoff]
    We are highly skilled at discarding what we should be composting.
    We treat covenant like convenience, and the moment the aroma shifts from sweet to sour, we change our address.
    But God never wastes a waste product. If you keep throwing away everything that gets complicated, you will spend your entire life standing on barren ground, wondering why nothing beautiful is growing around you.
    Think about that compost tumbler.
    It passes through an intermediate stage called the active phase.
    If you open that hatch at day four or day five, it doesn't look like rich soil yet, and it doesn't look like fresh fruit anymore. It is a gray, piping-hot, unrecognizable mush that smells worse than the day you threw it in!
    And that is exactly where we quit on relationships.
    We stay through the initial friction, we attempt to address the mess, but when we look inside halfway through the process, the situation looks and smells worse than when we started.
    We freak out, assume the process has failed, bag it up, and chuck it.
    But the Vinedresser knows that the peak of the heat is actually the peak of the transformation. If you throw the material out during the heat, you aren't protecting yourself from a mess—you are robbing yourself of the soil.

    From Dump to Plant: Active Processing

    Think about the flashpoint when your spouse or a good friend says something you don’t like. If you respond right then out of your own raw emotion, you smash that relationship. Bible says be slow to anger.
    Let it rest.
    We like to think of God as a receiver of only good things and finished product.
    To bring Him mess is to treat Him like a dump… just to bring our trash.
    What does it mean to give it to God?
    Doesn’t make sense:
    Proverbs 3:5–6 NIV
    5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; 6 in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.
    You cast that burning anxiety directly onto Him because He is the only One who knows what to do with it
    You don't speak until the Spirit has stripped the toxic sting out of the raw material.
    1 Peter 5:7 NIV
    7 Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.
    If you don’t give it you can wait it out.  Let it pile up. Think about the difference between a waste dump and a recycling plant. A waste dump just lets trash pile up until the whole county reeks—that's what happens when you just "wait it out" without God. That’s a waste dump
    Dump: A dump just lets trash pile up until the whole neighborhood reeks.
    You wait it out and issues pile up until you explode over the smallest thing
    Processing plant: takes the raw material, runs it through intense heat, and changes its form. TRANSFORMS
    When you hold your tongue, you are giving the Holy Spirit the room He needs to process the blow. You lean away from your own immediate, defensive understanding and trust His layout
    A recycling plant takes the trash, runs it through intense heat, shreds it, and changes its form.
    When you are transformed your situations and relationships become transformed.
    When you are slow to anger, you are giving the Holy Spirit the time He needs to run that offense through His internal processing plant. You are staying still so that the sap of Christ can rewrite your reaction. You don't speak until the Spirit has stripped the toxic sting out of the raw material.

    Boundaries and the Master Recycler

    But sometimes you can’t heal that relationship. You can’t tumble the relationship back to where it is fertilizer But that doesn’t mean that it leaves you with TOXICITY.
    Hear me clearly: Confinement does not mean you stay in an abusive or toxic environment.
    Removing yourself from a toxic, destructive situation is an act of wisdom and obedience.
    God does not demand that you remain a doormat for someone else’s sin.
    You can walk away from the person, establish a boundary of iron, and still bring the raw, broken pieces of that trauma to the Vinedresser.
    Invasive Weeds: Plants with aggressive root systems or those that spread rapidly (like alligator weed or certain invasive varieties) should be kept far away from your bin. Standard backyard composting rarely reaches the sustained high temperatures needed to kill their roots or runners, meaning you’ll accidentally spread them right back into your garden beds.
    Diseased or Insect-Infested Plants: If your tomatoes, peppers, or other crops suffered from blight, severe fungal infections, or heavy pest infestations, do not compost them. The pathogens can easily survive the winter in the compost and reinfect your next crop.
    You don't compost the abuse inside the relationship; you carry the wreckage into the secret place with God and let Him process it there.
    Look at the scriptural blueprint of David and King Saul in 1 Samuel 24.
    David completely removed himself from Saul’s toxic, murderous environment. He fled to the caves of En-Gedi—that is an iron boundary.

    1. The Honeymoon Phase: Mutual Dependency

    The Healing Musician: David enters Saul’s court as a humble harpist. Saul, plagued by an "evil spirit" (severe depression or paranoia), relies completely on David’s music for peace. Saul loves David deeply at first and makes him his armor-bearer.
    The National Hero: After David defeats Goliath, Saul takes him in permanently. David becomes a brilliant military commander, a close friend to Saul's son Jonathan, and eventually Saul’s son-in-law by marrying his daughter Michal.

    2. The Shift: Envy and Paranoia

    The Trigger Song: The turning point happens when Israelite women sing, "Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands." This unlocks an intense, toxic jealousy in Saul. He realizes the people—and God's favor—are shifting toward David.
    Assassination Attempts at Home: Saul’s jealousy quickly turns violent. While David is playing music to soothe him, Saul hurls a spear at David's head on two separate occasions. David ducks, continuing to serve a king who wants him dead.
    The Dangerous Dowry: Unable to kill David openly due to his popularity, Saul tries to use the Philistines as a proxy. He demands 100 Philistine foreskins as a dowry for his daughter, fully expecting David to die in the attempt. David brings back 200.

    3. The Break: Active Hunting and Outlaw Life

    Fleeing for His Life: With Jonathan’s help, David realizes Saul will never stop trying to kill him. David flees the court, becoming a fugitive leading a band of outlaws and misfits in the wilderness.
    Collateral Damage: Saul’s obsession deepens to madness. When he discovers that the priests of Nob unknowingly gave David food and a sword, Saul orders the execution of 85 priests and their entire city. David carries the heavy psychological guilt of this massacre.

    4. The Climax: David’s Ultimate Restraint

    This background sets up the two moments where David has a clean shot to end his nightmare, but chooses radical restraint:
    The Cave of En-Gedi (1 Samuel 24): Saul enters a cave to relieve himself, completely unaware that David and his men are hiding in the dark recesses of that exact cave. David’s men whisper that this is God delivering his enemy. Instead of killing Saul, David creeps up and secretly cuts off a corner of Saul’s robe.
    The Point of Restraint: Even cutting the robe causes David's conscience to strike him. He tells his men, "The Lord forbid that I should do such a thing to my master, the Lord’s anointed." He uses the piece of cloth afterward to prove to Saul that he had the power to kill him but chose mercy.
    Now this is a moment where you would think things would right themselves. But some people are too Toxic— a weed or a poisonous plant to your garden
    The Wilderness of Ziph (1 Samuel 26): Saul hunts David again. David and a comrade slip into Saul’s army camp while everyone is asleep. David's companion begs to pin Saul to the ground with a spear, promising it will only take one blow.
    The Point of Restraint: David stops him, reiterating that no one can strike the king guiltlessly. He takes Saul's spear and water jug instead, once again proving his loyalty from a safe distance.
    David was promised Kingship… why not take it. It wasn’t His to take it was his to receive.
    Saul's end is dark and tragic. It stems directly from his fractured mental state and the fact that his obsession with hunting David left Israel vulnerable to their ultimate enemy: the Philistines.
    The Desperate King: The Philistines gather a massive army against Israel. Terrified and realizing God has completely abandoned him, Saul secretly visits the Witch of Endor to summon the spirit of the deceased prophet Samuel for advice. The spirit gives Saul a grim prophecy: because of his repeated disobedience to God, Israel will lose the battle, and Saul and his sons will die the next day.
    The Battle of Mount Gilboa: The next day, the Philistines crush the Israelite army on the slopes of Mount Gilboa. Saul's brave sons—including David’s best friend, Jonathan—are killed in battle.
    Saul's Death: Saul is severely wounded by Philistine archers. To avoid being captured, tortured, and humiliated by his enemies, he begs his armor-bearer to kill him. When the armor-bearer refuses out of fear, Saul falls on his own sword, ending his tragic reign.

    The Big Takeaway for Your Point

    David’s restraint wasn't born out of cowardice; it was born out of theology and honor. By refusing to kill Saul, David refused to take the throne by force or political assassination. He chose to let God decide when Saul's reign would end, preserving the integrity of his own future kingdom.
    He refused to pretend Saul's actions were okay, and he refused to stay in the palace to let Saul keep throwing javelins at his head.
    Yet, when David had the chance to kill Saul in the cave, he refused to take vengeance into his own hands. David let God hold the wreckage of Saul's betrayal, while David protected his physical safety.
    God took that cave-years trauma and recycled it into the very material that wrote the Psalms and shaped David into a compassionate, dependent king!
    When someone hurts you, betrays you, or abuses you, the enemy intends for that toxic waste to poison your soil forever.
    He wants you to carry that heavy bag of stinking resentment around until it rots your future relationships. But our God is a Master Recycler.
    Joseph looked at the brothers who threw him in a pit, sold him into slavery, and left him to rot in a dungeon, and he didn't say, "What you did was fine." He didn't minimize the pain. He said,
    Genesis 50:20 NIV
    20 You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.
    God takes the very weapon that was formed against you—the trauma, the betrayal, the smear campaigns, the deep wounds—and He locks it in the tumbler of His grace.
    He validates it, He heals it, and then He breaks it down until the enemy's ammunition becomes the very nitrogen that causes your empathy, your discernment, and your capacity to love others to grow deeper than it ever could have before.
    The enemy thought he was burying you; he didn't realize God was just fertilizing the soil for a greater ministry.

    The Restored Vessel: Peter’s Charcoal Fire

    This is exactly how Jesus processes the messy failures of our lives when we are engrafted in Him. Look at the Apostle Peter.
    On the night of Jesus' arrest, standing in the high priest's courtyard over a transactional charcoal fire, Peter experienced a catastrophic collapse. Three separate times, the pressure of the world hit him, and three separate times, he denied even knowing the Lord. In the honor-shame grid of the ancient world, Peter was finished. He was an absolute traitor, a coward, a piece of discarded human scrap material. He went out into the pitch-black night and wept bitterly, completely drowning in the stench of his own failure.
    John 18 : 15-27
    Peter denies Jesus
    John 21:15-19
    Peter is reinstated
    [Proclaim Slide: Reconfigured by Grace – John 21]
    A Vinedresser:
    That time transformed Peter.
    When the Risen Christ meets Peter on the shore of Galilee, He doesn't cast him into the fire of permanent abandonment. He doesn't throw Peter away.
    Instead, Jesus builds another charcoal fire. He encloses Peter in a restoration conversation, and He matches those three denials with three deliberate questions: "Peter, do you love me? Peter, do you love me? Peter, do you love me?"
    Jesus took the ugliest, nastiest, most offensive raw material of Peter's greatest sin, locked it inside the enclosure of covenant grace, and turned it over through the fire of forgiveness until it decomposed into fine soil!
    He reconfigured the rot of the denial into a three-fold pastoral commission: "Feed my lambs... shepherd my sheep."
    The deep trauma of Peter's worst night became the exact fertilizer that fueled his status-shattering sermon at Pentecost! God took the stench of his collapse and processed it until it became a sweet-smelling aroma of life-giving leadership for the early church.
    The same man who was scared to admit went to those same persecutors some time later and boldly spoke about Jesus

    IV. YOU: Committing to the Tumbler

    So don’t think you need to wait out toxicity.
    You must listen to God and go when he says go.
    But that pain that goes with you, that feeling of not enough that goes with you, that hurt of why me that goes with you—that is what the world and that relationship intended for you to keep. The enemy intended it for evil, but God will reconfigure that for good.
    He will take that wreckage and add it to the tumbler of love and turn it over, and you will come out stronger. You will be better, you will be more, and what they intended for hurt is now power.
    Not because of your own human effort, but because you gave it completely to Him.
    Stop trying to force instant results, and stop broadcasting the raw stench of the mess. We want to talk about it. Be the victim, Get all this insight from everyone but God which may be poison.
    Give the Vinedresser the room to work. Let the Holy Spirit turn the wheel of your internal processing system today, and watch Him turn your greatest trials into the very soil of a historic breakthrough.
    George Washington Carver’s Scrap Pile
    George Washington Carver was born into the horrific, abusive institution of American chattel slavery. He suffered deep childhood trauma, was orphaned, and lived through the systemic rot of racial terror. Yet, when he became a scientist, he dedicated his life to helping poor farmers whose soil had been completely ruined and exhausted by the cotton industry. He famously said, "Look at the scrap pile. There is no such thing as waste in God's universe."
    Carver took the lowly, ignored peanut and sweet potato—things the elite systems dismissed—and discovered over 300 uses for them, single-handedly regenerating the exhausted fields of the South. He walked away from the abusive environment into freedom, but he took the wreckage of his background and let God turn it into the very nitrogen that healed the fields of his people.
    The Pungent Blessing of Barracks 28 Corrie ten Boom
    There is arguably no greater historical example of deep, traumatic, systemic abuse being turned into the supernatural fertilizer of Agapē love than the life of Corrie ten Boom in the Nazi concentration camp of Ravensbrück.
    Corrie and her sister Betsie were crammed into Barracks 28—a place of absolute horror, cruelty, and degradation. To make matters worse, the barracks were utterly infested with fleas. The environment literally reeked of death, sweat, and failure. It was human scrap material at its worst.
    The unseen processing began when Betsie told Corrie they must "give thanks in all circumstances," even for the fleas. Corrie thought her sister had lost her mind. She complained that the fleas were a useless, disgusting plague. But weeks later, they discovered the internal reconfiguration: the brutal Nazi guards never stepped foot inside Barracks 28 to stop their secret Bible studies or beat the women because the guards were terrified of catching the fleas. The very thing that was biting them, the very thing that was offensive and foul, was the exact barrier God used to confine the guards and protect the ministry of His Word!
    After the war, Corrie stood face-to-face in 1947 with one of the most cruel, abusive guards from that camp. He held out his hand and asked for her forgiveness. Corrie wrote that she froze—the old trauma, the stench of the camp, and the memory of her sister’s death rushed back. It was pure rot. But she breathed a silent prayer: "Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness." When she took his hand, an overwhelming warmth flooded her arm. God took the raw, agonizing waste of Ravensbrück and turned it into the precise fuel she needed to travel the world preaching radical, boundary-shattering reconciliation.

      • Romans 12:2NIV2011

      • John 15:4NIV2011

      • Proverbs 3:5–6NIV2011

      • 1 Peter 5:7NIV2011

      • Genesis 50:20NIV2011

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