Buying Rotten Apples?

When you pick out fruit, do you look for the nice ripe pieces, unmarred and beautiful? I do! When I was living as a missionary in Russia, shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain, I went to a roadside fruit stall to do just that.

As I stood outside in the frigid air, I looked over a display of apples, some nice and others not so nice. When I started to select the ones I liked, the vendor indicated that he had already bagged up apples, and those were the ones he wanted to sell. Okay, I thought. Let me see what he is offering.

I took the wrinkled, brown paper bag from his gloved hands. The apples on the top were lovely! Nice and red, with a bit of green and yellow striping. Firm skin. Looked good! But then, I took a closer look. As I began to remove the top apples, the less than perfect apples underneath were exposed. They were bruised and marred, and had areas that had become rotten. The vendor was watching me, and as I indicated that I wanted to replace the rotten apples with good ones, he became angry, grabbed back his bag, and refused to sell me anything!I walked away feeling a bit angry myself. This man was trying to deceive me and rip me off! But then I felt compassion, as he probably needed to sell the bad with the good in order to make enough money to live on.

Hummm. The bad with the good. That made me think of our lives. By God’s grace, He gives us some “good” qualities and enables us to do some “good” things, (although our “good works” are as filthy rags compared to His perfection. See Isaiah 64:6). But even with our “good”, we are clearly “less than perfect”, and actually have some truly rotten spots in our lives. The Bible calls these “less than perfect” parts “sin”, and, sad to say, we all have them. (See Romans 3:23.) As we live our lives before others, we always try to put our “good apples” on display, and tuck the unattractive fruit out of sight. And, like the apple vendor, we get mad when someone exposes the uglier parts. We are embarrassed, and our pride becomes hurt. 

Sometimes we try to do the same thing with God. We go through life, trying to produce some “good fruit”, while seeking to hide, and even sometimes denying, the ugly fruit. The good news is that, although God sees the whole bag, He loves us anyway! That’s why He sent Jesus to pay the penalty for our sins by dying on the cross in our place!

What about you? Have you noticed some unsavory fruit in your life? When He shows us something rotten in our lives, it’s because He wants us to confess it to Him, turn from it, and be forgiven. (See 1 John 1:9.) Is that something you need to do? Remember, little by little, He wants to make us more like Christ every day! What a wonderful prospect! Now, true enough, this can be a painful process at times. So when it hurts, we need to remind ourselves that He loves His children too much to leave us the way we are. And someday, when He appears, He will make each of His children to be without spot or blemish, all to His glory!!!