ReflectionsTuesday airs each week on GospelBellsRadio.com, where Pastor Ayo Agunloye reflects on current themes from Your Potter’s House, the daily devotional he writes and publishes. This report is an edited summary of the broadcast, faithful to the teaching as delivered and prepared so that listeners and readers may revisit it, study it, and pass it on. Added Scripture references are provided to aid personal study.
Opening a new month on ReflectionsTuesday, Pastor Ayo Agunloye begins a fresh line of reflection within the year’s Your Potter’s House journey of cultivating a heart after God’s own heart. October, he explains, will build toward a single question—why do the showers of revival so often fail to fall on our lives, families, ministries, and nation? The coming weeks will take up that “rain” directly. This opening message lays the diagnosis beneath it, and gives it a title that stops you short:
The world is full of works—yet starved of fruit. There is endless religious activity, and little that God can actually eat.
Fittingly for Nigeria’s Independence month, the pastor frames the irony: nations celebrate independence from colonial masters, but the believer’s call is the opposite—independence from self, and complete dependence on the Holy Spirit.
🎧 Listen to the Full Episode Below
A searching, courageous message that holds up a mirror to modern Christianity, closing with a rich exchange on what “believing” actually looks like in practice. Worth an unhurried, honest listen.
🌿 Works of the Flesh vs. Fruit of the Spirit
The teaching opens with a distinction hidden in plain sight. In Galatians 5:19–22, Paul does not write “works of the flesh” and “works of the Spirit,” nor “fruit” and “fruit.” He writes the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit—a deliberate contrast.
Works emphasise what a person produces by an active source within. Fruit emphasises what is produced through a living relationship with another source.
The flesh produces works naturally—we struggle, we generate, we strain. Fruit is simply borne, as we yield. The model is the vine: “I am the vine, ye are the branches… he that abideth in me… bringeth forth much fruit; for without me ye can do nothing” (John 15:5). The branch does nothing but stay attached; the life of the vine does the rest.
🙋 The One Work God Requires
Crucially, the pastor warns, the “works” in view today run far deeper than the obvious sins listed in Galatians 5. Those are easy to name as sinful. The subtler danger is work that looks religious.
In John 6:28–29 the crowd asks, “What shall we do, that we might work the works of God?” Jesus redirects them entirely: “This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.”
There is not a list of “works of God” for you to perform. There is one work: to believe on the One He sent—so that Christ in you becomes the One who works.
This is why Hebrews 3 warns that Israel failed to enter God’s rest through unbelief. The point is not passivity but trust: we believe, and then “it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13). He produces the desire, enables the doing, and does it through us. All He asks is our cooperation.
The pastor skewers our instinct to take the credit with a vivid local proverb: the lizard that falls from a tall ìrókò tree looks left and right, and when no one praises the feat, lifts its head and praises itself. “We all love to work”—and that is precisely where mere religion creeps in.
⚠️ Much Work, No Fruit
Here the message turns prophetic and unsparing. Churches multiply; ministers multiply; titles multiply—brother to pastor, pastor to apostle, apostle to prophet. There is crusade work, radio and television and social-media evangelism, bus-and-street preaching on every corner. And yet:
The more the churches and the ministers seem to increase, the more the decadence increases alongside them. There is a multiplication of works, and a multiplication of evil.
He presses the uncomfortable question: if churches are the “fastest-growing in town,” from where are the new members coming—while the brothels and nightclubs in the same vicinity are no emptier? Are people truly escaping into the gospel’s light, or living as dual citizens—receiving miracles on one day and returning to the broad road on the next?
The sobering anchor is Matthew 7:22–23: “Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name?… And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.” Mighty works, the pastor notes, can still be works of iniquity if they are barren—done in Jesus’ name, yet not born of abiding in Him, and changing no one into His likeness.
It is not that such ministers fetch their power from darkness. It is that they have quietly taken the work out of the only hands that can do it—and are doing it by their own methods, for their own glory.
The true miracle, he adds, may carry no drama at all—no vomiting, no rolling on the floor, no testimony that traces the glory back to a celebrated “man of fire.” God may simply make you present, and get His work done through you unnoticed, because He is the one working.
🌱 Genesis 2:5 — A Chain of Cause and Effect
For the heart of the message the pastor turns to Genesis 2:5 in the Good News Bible: “there were no plants… and no seeds had sprouted, because he had not sent any rain, and there was no one to cultivate the land.” He reads it as a chain running backward from the problem to its root.
No fruit—because there are no plants. We are meant to be “trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord” (Isaiah 61:3). Where there are no such plants—lives helplessly attached to and dependent on God—there can be no fruit. Our tragedy is that we are too strong: “when I am weak, then am I strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10), yet we are too strong to let God work in us, asking Jesus to rest while we labour—when He said, “Come unto me, all ye that labour… and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).
No plants—because the seeds have not sprouted. Note the wording, he urges: not that no seed was sown. The seed of God’s word is being carried and preached everywhere—it is ever potent, ever living. But it is scattered out of mere works, independent of the Sower, and so it refuses to sprout.
The seeds don’t sprout—because God has sent no rain. And God withholds the rain on purpose. The ground is choked with thorns—“break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns” (Jeremiah 4:3; Hosea 10:12). Were the rain to fall now, it would not only water the tender seed but swell the thorns, which would choke the word while it is still young. So the rain waits.
And there was no one to cultivate the land. “And that is where the problem really lies.”
💓 The Ground God Is Looking For
What, then, is the land that must be cultivated before the rain can fall? Not the ministry, not the programs, not the polished message—but the heart.
The pastor pictures God searching, as in Ezekiel’s lament that He “sought for a man… but found none” (Ezekiel 22:30), and as He searched Jesse’s household—rejecting seven sons one by one—until He found David, “a man after his own heart” (1 Samuel 16:7; Acts 13:22). God was not inspecting outward deeds; He was testing hearts.
A prepared, cultivated heart is worth more than a prepared message or a prepared ministry. Where the heart is not truly after God, no revival rain will fall.
And this cultivation is not a single day’s work, he stresses, but a daily discipline—otherwise the heart hardens and the thorns grow back, and we are left with men of God performing miracles with thorns still in their hearts, wondering why no revival comes.
🔁 Believing Is Active, Not Passive
In the closing conversation, the presenter raises the obvious question: if the only “work” is to believe, how is that different from passive inaction?
The pastor is emphatic: yielding to the Lord can never be passive. To yield is to obey—to rise when He says pray, to go when He says go, to be silent when He says be silent, to speak His words when He says speak. You become an available instrument in His hands.
If He sends me to pray for the cancer patient, I am not afraid they will die—I am simply doing what He asked. If He sends me to preach to an empty bush, I preach as though a crowd were there—and discover afterward there was one soul about to take their life.
The branch, after all, does nothing to manufacture fruit; it only abides—and the fruit comes.
🌟 Final Reflection
“Why There Are More Works Than Fruit” sets October’s course by refusing the easy explanations. The problem is not a shortage of preaching, programs, or power; it is a shortage of cultivated hearts yielded enough for God Himself to do His work through them. Works we can produce by the barrelful; fruit only grows on a branch that abides.
So the call lands personally. If the ground around me is still dry, if I see little of the life of Jesus taking root nearby, it is a pointer—not to everyone else’s failure, but to a heart not yet fully His.
Whatever revival we long to see in the church and the world, the prayer must be: “Lord, send a revival—and let it begin in me.”
The episode closes in prayer:
“Father, show us mercy—help us to cultivate our hearts, to focus on our hearts, to seek You until our hearts are after Your own heart, so that You can send rain, and there will be revival. Give this radio station a voice of revival, and let Your rain fall from here to the ends of the earth. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”
This is a message to act on, not merely admire.
Listen again. Search the soil of your own heart. And ask God for the grace to abide—so that what He grows in you, He can grow through you.
