The Fruit of Discipleship

When I was growing up, my mom kept a large bowl of fruit on the kitchen counter. Every week when she did her grocery shopping, she bought apples, oranges, and bananas to refill the bowl. I remember her polishing each apple individually to make them look appealing. There were no rules around snacking when it came to the fruit bowl. My brother, sister, and I emptied it faster than she could refill it, it seemed. Somehow, she kept some fruit hidden from us, and every Sunday after church, she instructed me to make a fruit salad. She taught me how to do it when I was pretty young, and by the time I was ten or eleven, I had complete confidence in my ability to turn a few apples, oranges, and bananas into a special Sunday treat. While she prepared the main after-church meal, I chopped apples, peeled bananas, and dissected oranges before mixing in an entire carton of whipped cream. (Maybe this was a southern thing, but you just can’t go wrong with fruit and cream.) I loved that fruit salad and looked forward to it every week. There were never any leftovers.

But, I also loved the daily access to the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter. I grabbed an apple or an orange whenever I walked through the kitchen nosing around for a snack. We had other snacks in the house, of course, but the fruit bowl was always my mom’s first choice for us because the fruit was more nourishing than cookie or chips. The accessible nature of the bowl meant that we often reached for fruit first. It’s hard to say which we kids enjoyed more: the fruit bowl or the fruit salad.

That overflowing fruit bowl has followed me into my own motherhood. Each week, my family goes through two bags of apples, two bags of oranges, a bag of grapes, and a few pints of berries. I keep the bowl placed on the middle of the table in the dining room, a high traffic area in our house. And a couple of years ago, I bought a set of kid-friendly knives and taught one of my sons how to make fruit salad, which everyone looks forward to for the happy collision of sweet and tangy flavors.

I was washing fruit and refilling our fruit bowl yesterday and thinking about the way we nourish our souls. Weekly church attendance is a lot like the fruit salad with whipped cream that my mom taught me to make every week. We need the sweet gathering of God’s people, the preaching of His Word, the time to worship and fellowship together as a spiritual family. The author of Hebrews tells us not to forsake meeting together as some do but to encourage one another more and more as we near the coming of Christ.[1] We’re also exhorted to take advantage of the body of Christ as a means of both encouragement and protection from drifting away from the faith. “But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”[2] All of the one-another commands of the New Testament show us how the body of Christ is to serve and love one another, aiding each other as we walk the path of faithfulness to Christ. The gathering of the church is both nourishing and profoundly sweet. I look forward to it all week, and I pray that my kids do as well. Church is an integral part of our family culture because we follow Jesus, and the more we grow with our local church body, the more we long for the fellowship and camaraderie. That weekly fellowship gives us a taste of what’s coming when Christ returns to set up his forever kingdom. We need those regular gatherings as God’s people.

Yet, we also need daily connection with Christ—regular faith conversations and encouragements. We need the daily apple, the afterschool pile of clementines, the evening bowl of strawberries throughout the week. We need Scriptures read around the table, conversations about faith and the gospel in the carpool line, prayers for others before bed, requests for forgiveness over coffee, verses memorized and remembered in the middle of the night, discipleship over morning cereal, loving correction in our living rooms. My husband and I are still learning what it means to parent our children in a way that encourages love for Jesus, but we’ve learned that it’s the cumulative effect of reaching for discipleship opportunities that produces the most fruit. We may not see spiritual growth or interest in the things of God after one week of family devotions, but we will after ten years of reading, praying, and singing together. We may not feel the nourishment of a conversation about biblical truth and cultural lies with our teenager after one conversation—one grab from the fruit bowl—but we will after months of deliberately talking and asking questions.

All of life as a believer is lived coram Deo, before the face of God. And I think that the key to discipling our children or the loved ones in our home is to blur every delineation between sacred and secular. Our faith conversations aren’t limited to devotions around the dinner table. They often start there, but they can’t end there. All of our conversations and attempts at resolving conflict are opportunities to make much of Christ, to remember God’s Word, to pray persistently. When God commanded his people to keep his Word ever before them, he told them to teach his Word diligently to their children, “to talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.”[3] I love that picture—it’s a never-ending discipleship conversation. In our homes. In our churches. In the car. At work. At school. In the morning. In the evening.

I often tell people that discipleship begins at home but is also shared by the church. Many times, it’s the topic of Sunday’s sermon or the correction we had to offer in the church foyer with one of our kids that spurs our daily discipleship discussions. It’s a both/and situation when it comes to living a life of faith. We need the daily fruit bowl and the weekly fruit salad because we are uniquely nourished by both. How sweet to be reminded that God knew exactly what we needed for growth. I remember His faithfulness every time I refill the fruit bowl, and I hope you will, too.

All of life as a believer is lived coram Deo, before the face of God. And I think that the key to discipling our children or the loved ones in our home is to blur every delineation between sacred and secular. Share on X

[1] Heb. 10:25
[2] Heb. 3:13
[3] Deut. 6:7

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash