Encore - 1002- What Will We Be Known For? Matthew 12:33

Hey, it's Mike Henry with Follower of One. Today I want to talk about a passage in Matthew. Jesus is speaking. This is Matthew 12:33 and I'm reading from the new living translation. A tree is identified by us fruit. If a tree is good, its fruit will be good. If a tree is bad, it's fruit will be bad. What are you known for?   What am I known for? What we find out is, is that the tree is identified by the type of fruit that it produces. And you and I are known for the type of results that we create. Do people feel better or worse when we're around? Do we bring an attitude of a group up or do we bring the attitude of work down?   Are we someone who always sees the opportunities and the encouraging things that we can say to others? Are we someone who chooses to find out what's wrong and to point out what's wrong and other things that are going on, or the attitudes that our friends have, we will be known by the results that we create?   And I want to challenge myself to think a little bit more about the legacy that I leave. What kind of an imprint does my life make on the lives of my family members on the lives of the people that are working. What type of a difference do this? Some of my actions end up making and did I do anything that made a difference in the lives of the people who will live beyond me?   I was challenged to consider this verse and to add it to our podcast simply because I was challenged to consider a 150-year vision for the legacy of my own life. Instead of thinking about. How my job produces good results for this quarter or this month, whether or not I made my sales objectives or whether or not we got our freight delivered on time, which for, from my old life, what kind of a difference is my life make a hundred years from now or 50 years from now?   What can I do to make sure that I was a positive influence on the world after? That I think is a challenge that we're being called to as believers who follow Jesus, we don't have to set a long-term horizon. I think it's a daily decision, but the sum of our daily decisions over time, I would believe, turn out to be the fruit that we are known by.   So, I want to challenge us today. Let's examine how we go to work and how we interact with people today. Did we pray for the people that we met with? Were we making time to serve them, or are we constantly living with this expectation that others should serve us? Let's be the kind of people that produce good fruit that make the lives of the people around us better.   Let's do that in such a way, even that they might add. If you pray and you ask God to put you to work in the lives of the people around you, I believe he will. If he doesn't reach out to us, you can connect with me at https://followerofone.org and you can respond or comment to this wherever you're listening to it on any platform or reply to me at mike@followerofone.org   And I'd love to talk with you about how to make a positive difference for the rest of your life.   Let's produce the kind of fruit that we want to be known by for 150 years.