"You Will Know Them By Their Fruits." Here's What That Actually Means.

"You will know them by their fruits." The line itself comes from Christ in the Gospel of Matthew, where He warns about false prophets who come to you looking like sheep while being wolves underneath.

And He tells you plainly that you will recognize them by their fruits, the same way that you would never expect to gather grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles.

A good tree produces good fruit, and a bad tree produces bad fruit.

And He is telling you this not as a mystery that you need special discernment or a theology degree to figure out, because the fruit itself will eventually show you exactly what kind of tree you're dealing with.

That is the whole test, and it's meant to be something that ordinary people like you and I can actually apply in our own feed and in our own life without needing anyone else's permission to trust what they are seeing.

So if you notice what Christ does not tell you to check first, He does not tell you to check credentials.

He does not tell you to check how many years someone has been Catholic, or whether they went to seminary, or whether they can quote the catechism from memory in an argument.

False prophets in His own day had all of that.

They wore the clothing, they knew the law better than the crowd did, and they were still the ones that He was warning us about.

Fruit was always going to be the harder thing to fake, because credentials can be a costume you put on once, and knowledge is a script that you can memorize, but the fruit is what happens over time in the people standing near you, and that takes a lot longer to counterfeit than a bio or a caption or a credential.

So what actually counts as fruit according to the Church? St.

Paul gives us the list in his letter to the Galatians, and the Church has held onto 12 of them specifically.

Charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, and chastity.