I was just praying last night that God would reveal the quality of fruit from a certain situation…and soon.  I have trepidation about something, and I know that in the end, the thing will be revealed by the fruit it produces.  So, I prayed.  And then I read….in my daily devotional of collective writings by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Here’s what I got:

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“There is an old argument about whether only the will, the act of the mind, the person, can be good, or whether achievement, work, consequence, or condition can be called good as well – and if so, which comes first and which is more important.  This argument, which has also seeped into theology, leading there as elsewhere to serious aberrations, proceeds from a basically perverse way of putting the question.  It tears apart what is originally and essentially one, namely, the good and the real, the person and the work.  Ther objection that Jesus, too, had this distinction between person and work in mind, when he spoke about the good tree that brings forth good fruits, distorts this saying of Jesus into its exact opposite.  Its meaning is not that first the person is good and then the work, but that only the two together, only both as united in one, are to be understood as good or bad.”

                                          – from “Ethics”, pg 51