Recently, I was curious about the question of what fruits are native to the United States. Answer: not as many as you would think. Not one of the more common choices I researched (apples, oranges, tomatoes) was indigenous.

Still, apple orchards dot the geography where I live. Tomato plants are truly ubiquitous, found even in the unlikeliest of places (like in a planter on my back deck). Fruits once strangers to US soil are now embedded in its landscape.

Paul invoked this metaphor—of alien fruit flourishing in a new habitat—to picture how God’s kingdom inhabits our world. Writing to the young Colossian church, Paul described heaven as the realm where God’s perfection remains untainted, guarded from the sin and fallenness of the human reality. All of God’s goodness and authority resides there, “reserved for [us] in heaven” (1:5). Just as quickly, though, Paul affirmed God’s intention to move heaven toward earth. Jesus taught us to pray precisely this: “May Your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).

But how does this migration happen? What sort of conduit could God possibly use to move the beauty and joy of heaven into the mire and sickness of our existence? Paul answered with imagination and conviction: the gospel that “is bearing fruit everywhere” (Colossians 1:6).

The gospel is not merely facts, but rather God’s alternative story. The gospel retells God’s intentions in Jesus. It reorients us to God’s action in His world. The gospel remakes the world it enters, implanting heaven’s fruit everywhere it lands. As one author says, “The gospel is . . . a power let loose in the world.”