Part 3: "Fruit," Not Fame: Judging the Tree - What Fruit Actually Means

This is Part 3 and the final one in our series on ‘Judging in the New Testament.” For Part 1, click here, and for Part 2, click here.

Part 3: What the New Testament Says About Judging

Judging the Tree: What Fruit Actually Means

Impressive Is Not the Same as Faithful

There is another passage that gets pulled into these conversations, usually intended to shut them down. When concerns are raised about a ministry leader — their conduct, their character, their treatment of people under their care — someone will point to the size of their ministry, the number of people they’ve led to faith, the miracles attributed to their meetings, the books sold, the conferences filled. And then comes the argument: look at the fruit. Who are you to question someone God is so obviously blessing?

It sounds spiritual. It is not biblical.

When Jesus said, “You will recognize them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16), he was not talking about ministry metrics. He was not talking about crowd size, YouTube subscribers, healing testimonies, or the number of nations visited. To read it that way is to import a thoroughly modern, market-driven definition of success onto a passage that is about something else entirely.

Anointing on your ministry is not the same as God’s blessing on your life. Think about that for a bit. I know many anointed people whose children don’t speak to them because of their hypocrisy—famous people. That’s not a blessing.

The context makes this unmistakable. Jesus has just warned his disciples to beware of false prophets who come in sheep’s clothing — outwardly impressive, seemingly legitimate, carrying all the right credentials. The whole point of the warning is that external appearance can be deceiving. A wolf dressed as a sheep looks like a sheep. A ministry that produces impressive external results can still be led by someone whose inner life is corrupt. The fruit Jesus points to as the diagnostic is not the fruit of the ministry — it is the fruit of the person.

What Happens Behind Closed Doors

This is precisely what Paul describes in Galatians 5. The fruit of the Spirit is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). Not miracles. Not influence. Not a global platform. The fruit that matters — the fruit that reveals whether someone is genuinely rooted in Messiah — is character. It is how they treat people who can do nothing for them. It is how they respond to correction. It is what happens behind closed doors, in private conversations, in the way they handle money, in the way they treat their staff, in the way they respond when a vulnerable person comes to them for help.

We need the Spirit, though. It is not merely good behavior, but spirit-empowered behavior. “The fruit of the Spirit is the moral character developed by the power of the Spirit,” writes G. Walter Hansen, noted Galatians scholar. Let me mention it again: in Paul’s list of nine attributes, there is nothing about anointing or power — only moral character.

New Testament scholar Gordon Fee, in his commentary on Galatians, notes that the fruit of the Spirit is fundamentally relational and ethical — it describes the texture of a person’s life as it is experienced by those around them. It is not a performance. It cannot be manufactured for a stage. Over time, and especially under pressure, what is actually inside a person comes out — and that is the fruit Jesus is telling us to look for.

This matters enormously in the context of accountability. When survivors come forward with credible, consistent, documented accounts of abuse, manipulation, financial exploitation, or spiritual coercion, and the response from a leader’s defenders is to point to their ministry’s reach and influence — that is a category error. It is answering the wrong question. The question is not how many people did this person minister to? The question is how did they treat the people entrusted to their care?

The Most Sobering Passage in the Sermon on the Mount

Jesus himself addressed this directly, and the passage is one of the most sobering in the entire New Testament:

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven... On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’” (Matthew 7:21-23)

Ministry output — even supernatural ministry output — is not proof of a life rooted in Messiah. Jesus says that plainly. People can prophesy, cast out demons, and perform miracles and still hear “I never knew you.” What disqualifies them, in Jesus’s own words, is that they are workers of lawlessness — people whose lives, beneath the impressive exterior, are characterized by moral disorder.

And friends, this is not a theoretical problem. Some of the most famous leaders are living morally corrupt lives, or covering for those who do. It’s far worse than I ever imagined. Many of them use their mystical experiences as proof that God really is OK with their immorality.

This is not a peripheral teaching. It sits at the conclusion of the very same passage that opened with “judge not.” Matthew 7 is a unified argument. Jesus moves from warning against hypocritical judgment, to teaching right judgment, to warning about false prophets recognizable by their fruit, to making clear that even spectacular ministry does not validate a corrupt character. The chapter is, from beginning to end, a call to rigorous, humble, clear-eyed discernment.

The Right Question

So when someone asks, “Who are you to question this leader — look at everything God has done through them?” — the honest answer is that Jesus himself told us not to use that as the standard. We look at the fruit of their life. We listen to the people they have harmed. We ask whether the character of Yeshua — love, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control — is present in the way they have exercised power. And we do not let impressive ministry numbers silence that question.

A tree is not known by how tall it grows.

It is known by what it produces.