Hi, friends, and thank you for joining me for today's reading from the Our Daily Bread

Devotional.

I'm Elisa Morgan, and today's devotional is entitled The Fruit Sells the Tree.

A nursery owner set out to sell peach trees. She considered various approaches.

Should she line up leafy saplings and burlap sacks in a beautiful display? Should she create a

colorful catalog picturing peach trees in various seasons of growth? At last, she realized what really sells a peach tree.

It's the peach it produces, sweet-smelling, deep orange, and fuzzy-skinned. The best way to sell a peach

tree is to pluck a ripe peach, cut it open until the juice dribbles down your arm and hand a slice to a customer.

When they taste the fruit, they want the tree.

God reveals himself and a wrapper of spiritual fruit in his followers.

Love, joy, peace, forbearance, which is patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness,

and self-control.

When believers in Jesus exhibit such fruit, others will want that fruit as well, and therefore

will seek the source of the fruit that is so attractive.

Fruit is the external result of an internal relationship, the influence of the Holy Spirit in

our lives. Fruit is the dressing that beckons others to know the God we represent. Like the bright

peaches standing out against the green leaves of a tree,

the fruit of the spirit announces to a starving world,

Here is food, here is life.

Come and find a way out of exhaustion and discouragement.

Come and meet God.

Today's our daily bread Devotional Scripture reading is from Galatians chapter 5 verses 22 to 26.

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