In a recent Daily Bread post (Leaves but No Fruit), we walked through the fig tree Jesus cursed on the road to Bethany — the tree full of promise from a distance, barren up close. Within that post, I touched briefly on what I called the theological core: the difference between appearances and real spiritual formation. I promised to go deeper, and today, that’s exactly what we’re doing.
This isn’t about pointing fingers outward. For me, the exploration of this topic began within myself, and has been ongoing for years. If anything, this post and all the ones like it are an invitation to sit with those uncomfortable questions, especially about our own lives — because the gap between spiritual appearance and real formation is one most of us have lived in at some point, whether we recognized it or not.
Part One: The Diagnostic — How We Mistake Appearance for Formation
The most unsettling thing about spiritual appearance is that it rarely feels fake from the inside. That’s what makes it so difficult to diagnose. We aren’t usually conscious hypocrites. We genuinely believe our leaves are fruit. We feel the warmth of community, the comfort of familiar rhythms, the satisfaction of saying the right things at the right times. It feels like faith. It looks like faith. But feeling and looking aren’t the same as being.
One of my favorite philosophers had a really graceful way of putting this into perspective. Alan Watts, drawing on a concept originated by philosopher Alfred Korzybski, once observed:
We are so absorbed in our symbols — our thoughts, ideas, words — that we take them for reality.
Watts was not a Christian, and had little patience for organized religion, but his insights into human nature and self-deception have deeply shaped my own thinking. Religious life is not immune to what he was describing. The activities of faith can become a map we mistake for the destination itself.
Jesus saw this same dynamic at work in the religious world around Him, and He did not mince words about it. In fact, He reserved His sharpest words not for the openly wicked, but for those who had mastered the appearance of righteousness. In Matthew 23:27, He calls the Pharisees whitewashed tombs — beautiful on the outside, full of dead bones within. That image is jarring precisely because it isn’t describing obviously bad people. It’s describing people who had built an entire architecture of religious life and lost the living thing at the center of it.
How does that happen? Gradually, and often innocently.
It starts with good things — the kind of things nobody would question. Attending church. Reading Scripture. Learning the language of faith, showing up to serve. None of those things are wrong; they’re genuinely good and Scripture encourages all of them. But somewhere along the way, the doing of them can quietly become the point. We start measuring our spiritual health by our activity level rather than asking whether we’re actually being transformed. Paul saw this coming and noted it in 2 Timothy 3:5. He warns about people who hold “a form of godliness but deny its power.” The form is intact. The engine is dead.
The full passage reads:
But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasures rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people. They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires. (2 Timothy 3:1-7)
What strikes me about that warning is how old the pattern is. Isaiah heard God saying essentially the same thing centuries before the Pharisees ever showed up:
These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught. (Isaiah 29:13)
That’s not a modern critique of social media Christianity. That’s God, thousands of years ago, naming the same ache — the gap between what we perform and what we actually are. External compliance without internal surrender. It’s been the default setting of human religious life for a very long time.
The tricky part — and I say this from personal experience — is that appearance-based faith often feels completely real. I’ve sat in worship and been genuinely moved. I’ve said the right things and meant them in the moment. Belonging, purpose, even real emotion are all available inside a faith that hasn’t gone very deep yet. Those feelings aren’t worthless or fake. But they can become a substitute for the slower, quieter, far less emotionally satisfying work of actual formation. Being moved and being changed are two very different things, and for a long time I confused them.
There’s also a social layer to this worth being honest about. Communities of faith, like churches, small groups, online spaces, tend to reward the leaves without meaning to. Eloquent prayers get noticed. Polished testimonies get shared. Visible service gets acknowledged. But the quiet interior work? The dying to self. Repenting without an audience. Forgiving someone who will never know you did it. These things produce zero social currency. Nobody claps for them. So without anyone intending harm, we can end up cultivating whatever gets rewarded, and what gets rewarded is almost always appearance over substance.
The diagnostic question, then, isn’t “Am I doing enough?” That’s the performance question. The harder one that actually matters is, “Am I being changed?”
Part Two: The Process — What Real Formation Actually Looks Like
If the diagnostic side is uncomfortable, the process side is humbling. Real spiritual formation is slow, unglamorous, and largely invisible to everyone including ourselves for long stretches of time. But, it is what we are taught, and expected, to do. Romans 12:2 guides us:
“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
The word transformed here is the Greek metamorphoo — the same root as metamorphosis. It’s not a surface change. It’s a structural one, worked from the inside out, over time, by the Spirit. This is where the appearance model collapses. You cannot perform a metamorphosis. You can only submit to one.
Formation begins in surrender, not effort. Jesus makes this clear in John 15 — abide in the vine, and fruit follows. Not “try harder to produce fruit.” Abide. The branch doesn’t strain to grow grapes; it stays connected to the source and growth happens as a consequence. Disconnected from the vine, our best efforts produce nothing that lasts. Connected, we don’t have to manufacture transformation. We receive it.
But abiding isn’t passive. Fruit and vegetable trees and plants require maintenance. Watering. Feeding and fertilizing. For us, it’s an active, daily orientation, maintenance and feeding of the heart. It’s beginnings look like Psalm 139:23–24 becoming a genuine prayer rather than a reflex:
Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
That kind of prayer requires real courage, because it’s an open invitation for God to show you what you’d rather not see.
Formation also moves through suffering and resistance, not around them. James 1:2–4 puts it plainly:
Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
Maturity isn’t built in the comfortable seasons. It’s built in the seasons that are difficult, painful — the ones that test you with the most doubt, fear, anxiety, and grief you’ve ever faced. There’s an almost cruel paradox at the center of spiritual formation: the very seasons we most desperately want to escape are the ones doing the deepest work in us. The ones where God feels furthest away are often the ones where He is working most profoundly underground.
The body doesn’t make it easy. Fear has a voice. Grief has very real weight. Anxiety has a way of narrowing your entire world down to the thing you cannot fix. Every instinct you have — fight, flee, control, numb — rises up against surrender. I know this from the inside. I have sat in multiple seasons of caregiving while trying to manage my own health that were so heavy with stress, loss and uncertainty that choosing trust felt less like faith and more like defiance.
I am led to be transparent here: I often failed, even reaching for alcohol instead of the Word or God many times. But it was only in awareness and then surrender, in handing those moments to God, that I didn’t fall into a pattern that destroyed not only my life but my soul. He was there, and He was willing. He was waiting on me to get real, and the instant I did, even the hardest moments were not enough to deter or defeat me. Looking back, those are the seasons that built what shallow waters never could. Paul names this paradox directly in Romans 5:3-5:
We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.
Suffering producing hope isn’t a comfortable theology. But it’s an honest one. It’s built in the crucible, not the classroom. It’s forged in fire, not in the easy and comfortable places we’d choose for ourselves.
Real formation shows up in the texture of ordinary life. Not in the moments when you’re being watched, but in the moments when you aren’t. How you respond to being misunderstood, dismissed, or even overlooked. Whether you extend grace to someone who isn’t offering any. Whether you can sit with your own failure without collapsing into shame or leaping to self-defense. These are the quiet indicators of whether the Spirit is genuinely at work, producing what Galatians 5 calls the harvest: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Not as achievements, but as evidence.
One of the most important things to hold onto in this process is that formation isn’t linear. It ebbs and flows. It rises and falls. There are absolute droughts. There are seasons where you feel spiritually dry, distant, disconnected — and they don’t always mean something is wrong. Sometimes the roots are going deeper underground before the next season of fruit. God is faithful even in the fog, and Philippians 1:6 anchors this:
He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
He doesn’t abandon the process when it stalls. Neither should we.
Closing Thoughts
The fig tree wasn’t cursed because it was a bad tree. It was cursed because it promised what it wasn’t delivering, and because that promise, that deceptive show of readiness, was the very thing Jesus came to call out in the religious world around him.
We are not that tree. Or, more precisely, we don’t have to stay that tree.
The invitation in all of this is not to perform better, or to scrutinize ourselves into paralysis, but to return again and again, as many times as it takes, to the Vine. To let the Spirit do what only the Spirit can do: reshape us from the inside, slowly, faithfully, in ways that eventually show up as fruit that actually feeds people.
Leaves catch the eye. Fruit sustains life. The difference is always in the root.
Closing Prayer
Lord, You see what we show the world and what we hide from ourselves. You aren’t fooled by leaves, but You aren’t harsh with the branch either. You are patient, persistent, and deeply committed to our becoming. Search us. Tend us. Grow in us what we cannot manufacture on our own. Grow in us the kind of fruit that comes only from abiding in You. Amen.
Twin Tree Project 