You Can’t Staple Good Fruit on a Bad Tree

I gave up golf for years, and it had nothing to do with time.

I gave it up because I didn’t like who I was when I played. Golf is a pressure cooker, and as a younger man I’d come home from eighteen holes grumpy and worn out — not good for me, and definitely not good for my young family. So when my oldest got into tee ball, I quit.

Golf did me a favor, though. It told the truth.

You have your own version of it. The tone in your voice when she asks a fourth time about the trash. How you responded when the gate broke for the third time. What you thought about the guy who pulled out in front of you. The instinct is to try harder to hide those moments. I want to suggest the opposite.

Your fruit is telling on you

In Matthew 12, the Pharisees have just accused Jesus of casting out demons by Satan’s power. That accusation sets up the tree-and-fruit line — it isn’t a free-standing parable, it’s part of a conversation about how our words publish what’s in our hearts.

Jesus says a tree is known by its fruit. And in this picture, you’re the tree. So let me ask you something: can an apple tree produce peaches? No — only a peach tree can. Jesus isn’t assigning you fruit you’re not capable of producing. He’s telling you that your fruit reveals what kind of tree you are.

The Pharisees were world-class at the alternative: cleaning the outside of the cup while the inside stayed filthy, stapling good fruit onto bad trees. Jesus tells them plainly — you don’t have a fruit problem, you have a root problem. Any farmer knows a tree is only as healthy as its roots. My neighbor had a young maple that died in a couple of weeks when the rain quit. Nothing was wrong with the leaves — the dry spell just revealed the roots.

The word Jesus uses is “surplus”

Then Jesus says the mouth speaks from the overflow of the heart (Matthew 12:34). The NLT puts it, “For whatever is in your heart determines what you say.”

The Greek word for overflow is perisseuma. It does mean overflow — but it also means surplus. What’s left over. What spills.

Picture filling a coffee cup to the brim and walking it across the kitchen. You’re going to slop some on the floor — and what lands there isn’t random. It’s coffee, because that’s what was in the cup. So when somebody pushes on you at the end of a long shift and something comes out of your mouth that surprises you, that wasn’t a misfire. That was your surplus.

Parents, this is why aiming at behavior never quite works. If your kids aren’t speaking to you with respect, they don’t have a speaking problem — they have a heart problem. And hear me: behavioral change is real. Maybe you quit drinking on will power, or rebuilt your life on discipline. God uses that. But it has a ceiling, and Jesus already told us where it is.

You were never the one who had to fix the tree

Matthew leaves you as a tree that can’t fix itself. Jesus doesn’t leave us there.

By John 15 the picture changes. You’re not a tree — you’re a branch, and a branch was never intended to produce its own life. Jesus is the vine, the Father is the gardener, and here’s the line that should stop you: “You have already been pruned and purified by the message I have given you” (John 15:3).

Already. Not after you get it together. You don’t clean your life up so God can use you. That’s the whole difference between grace and grit.

The word for remain is meno — abide, dwell, stay. It isn’t a feeling; it’s more like a location. Years ago I looked hard at putting in grape vines, and I learned that an unpruned vine doesn’t produce nothing. It produces a great deal of growth and almost no fruit. It looks alive. It’s busy. And it’s feeding nobody. Look at where the grapes hang and you’d swear the branch made them. It didn’t.

So put down the staple gun

Your next step is smaller than you think. The next time bad fruit leaks out, don’t reach to hide it and don’t try to manage it. Examine it. Ask one question: what does this say about what’s in my heart?

Because your fruit is not a verdict. Your fruit is a diagnosis — and a diagnosis is the thing that finally lets you get treated.

If you’ve been sitting in shame over the divorce, or the thing you can’t stop doing, or what someone else did to you, Jesus went to the cross for all of it long before you ever got there. And if your heart has gone hard: when Jesus told the parable of the soils, he never said the ground was bad. He said it was hard — and he told us why. It got walked on.

Your hard ground is not a character flaw. It’s a history. God knows exactly why your soil got compacted, and he isn’t angry about it. He’s ready to break it up and give you a heart soft enough for seed.

You don’t have to hide the fruit. Just bring him the soil.