“A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them. Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” (Jesus, Matthew 7.18-21)
I want to address a serious misunderstanding held by many American Christians: the idea that fruit is optional, as long as you can claim a “salvation moment” in your life.
Let me explain further. More than a few Christians carry the assumption that their claim to salvation by faith alone through grace alone stands isolated as a foolproof guarantee of future and forever inclusion in the Kingdom of God.
Indeed, salvation is engaged entirely through the grace of God accessed through repentance and recognition of Jesus’ completed work on my behalf through the cross and empty grave. We don’t do anything to earn salvation—we simply respond in faith to a free offer founded upon what Jesus has already done for us. Romans 10.9-10 reflects this reality: “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.”
The problem is the idea that a person can stop there, claiming salvation “from” without engaging the work of the Holy Spirit to accomplish what they have been saved “to”—namely, the fruit of life transformation. Jesus put it this way in John 15.16: “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last….”
In Ephesians, the first three chapters celebrate all that is ours by no personal merit or action, but by God’s grace; we are marked with the Holy Spirit, adopted, included in God’s family, forgiven, seated with Christ in the heavenlies, and so much more. But Ephesians doesn’t end with chapter 3. In Ephesians 4.1, Paul tells us, “As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.” In short, in light of all God has granted in grace, we are to choose to “live into it.”
There is no Biblical distinction between a first category of saved Christians who show no fruit and a second category of saved Christians who demonstrate the fruit of a transformed life. Instead, the full counsel of Scripture is that while salvation is accessed entirely by grace, that grace empowers a life that shows evidence of the Galatians 5.22-23 fruit of the Holy Spirit as He transforms us into the likeness of Jesus. A “fruitless Christian” is a Biblical oxymoron—“a combination of two contradictory terms.”
All who claim salvation through Christ claim that on the basis of grace and faith alone, but they also then demonstrate evidence of God at work in their life making them more like Christ and less like themselves. James 2.14,17 heartily agrees: “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? …In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”
It’s enlightening that persons as well-noted as Martin Luther struggled with that James passage, given the absolute certainty that the work of salvation is not rooted in any human effort. However, a balance of the full counsel of Scripture would suggest that the James passage reflects the second of two fully Biblical assertions: 1)salvation is by faith alone through grace alone, but also 2)any truly saved person will demonstrate the spiritual fruit of life transformation as they surrender themselves to the work of the indwelling Holy Spirit. We should “see the evidence,” not in perfection or sinlessness, but in a life marked by choices to embrace the Spirit’s shaping, empowering and sanctifying work within us.